Guy Aitchinson - The Ink Slinger

Published: 25 March, 2010 - Featured in Skin Deep 127, November, 2005

Whether he’s inking or oiling, Guy Aitchison fills a mean canvas. A co-founder of Art Fusion with Paul Booth from Last Rites Tattoo in New York, this artist is on a mission. Skin Deep gets down to basics and finds out what this talented artist is all about.

Why Tattooing? Was it something you grew up with? 

I never really thought about it at all until I was 16. I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Chicago, a real homogeneous middle class cultureless void, and just hadn’t encountered tattoos in any way that had impacted me. Then one day my sister Hannah suggested we go get tattooed at Sluggo’s in Aurora, the seedy old factory town next to our pristine white suburb. It sounded rebellious enough for my tastes, so I was immediately interested. I didn’t have any idea what to expect from a tattoo shop; I didn’t expect to see designs to choose from on the walls. I was always artistically inclined, and just assumed I should bring in my own design, which I did. It was a small thing, now long gone, but while having it done, I watched and realized that it seemed like something I could do; that any artist who was good with their tools and had a decent grasp on design could conceivably tattoo if they wanted to. I was immediately hooked.

 

So how long was it before you got your own machine. And just exactly how did you start tattooing? 

You need to learn on someone!  It was four years from that first piece before I actually had the opportunity to learn the art. I had friends in the punk scene who urged me to tattoo, some who even offered to pitch in for the equipment if I promised them a bunch of work. My art style was very tattooable back then and there was no one in the scene, no young hipsters, tattooing at the time. But I felt intimidated by the medium and uncertain how to proceed; in particular, I was afraid of the healing process and guessed (somewhat correctly) that there was more to the whole thing than meets the eye, and was afraid to do something that wouldn’t heal well. 

 

Plus, I was living an unstable lifestyle at the time, sleeping under a table in the back of a friend’s print shop- not the right moment to learn such a complex art form. I got my chance in October 1988 when I (miraculously) had a good hunk of cash in my pocket and was ready for my next piece. I went to Bob Oslon, who had a good reputation amongst the folks I ran with at the time, and brought some drawings along. He tattooed me, and by the end of the session I had been offered an apprenticeship. This is the right way to learn- to land some sort of mentorship situation in an established shop.

 

The more artistic and professional the owner, the better, but any decent shop can be adequate. You learn the basics by watching and asking questions, and doing all the peripheral stuff- making needles, cleaning, doing drawing assignments. The day comes where you sit down with your first victim - hopefully a fully informed one, and for a small piece on a not-so-visible part of the body such as below the knee. Hopefully your teacher will be watching this happen. Then you just go for it, and do your best. I had little struggle with it, once I got used to the unusual weight balance of the equipment, and was tattooing unsuspecting walk-ins within a few months. 

 

Friends of mine who are tattooists have sacrificed their own legs in order to learn the art. Then they seemed to ‘fill up’ the rest of their body pretty quick - it’s almost a race to get it done. Have you managed to keep areas free for s pecial pieces?

Sure, I doodled on myself a bit. It’s better than messing up someone else. But yeah, I filled up fast; it’s hard not to when you’ve always wanted a lot of work but couldn’t afford it, then suddenly it’s available. As soon as I got comfortable in the trade I began hanging around as many other artists as I could, and travelled extensively to visit artists like Greg Kulz, Marcus Pacheco, Eddy Deutsche, Aaron Cain and others. We tattooed each other, did all kinds of crazy experimental crap on each other.

 

All of us filled up fast. Since then, I’ve had a lot of tattoos removed with a laser- painful, time consuming and expensive, but worth it. I recently had a new sleeve done by Aaron and Grime, covering an area that used to be filled with my worst tattoos- stuff from my teenage days that had been covered, fixed up, fixed again... I’m also clearing off my right forearm and large parts of my legs. I’ve only got one body, so I’m trying to make the most of my collection and really polish what I do have. I have no regrets - regret is unhealthy - but I do have a strong desire to continue improving my collection in any way available, even if it involves going back a few steps before going forward. An increasing number of young tattooists are reaching this same stage now- under 30 and sleeved with crappy looking cover-up work. It’s the price we pay for haste and naïveté, but that’s all part of our artistic path, part of the learning process that makes us better as tattooists, qualifies us to help others make their collections look better. My back is still blank, but not for long.

 

How do you feel about tattooing hands and faces - which seems more popular these days (even Mike Tyson has a tribal tattoo on his face)? 

My hands are tattooed, and I’ve never had any issues with them. I have always enjoyed looking down and seeing them; but I believe I chose the right tattoos for my hands. For starters, they are black and grey and fairly low profile; so they grab less attention than something large and bright; they are really for me far more than they are for the public. I can’t easily hide the fact that I am tattooed, nor do I need to or want to; but I do find eye contact to be very important on a day-to-day basis with ordinary folks, and the hand tattoos don’t seem to detract from that. On the other hand, when you get up to the neck and face, eye contact becomes a thing of the past, regardless of whether you are talking to a tattoo fan or someone who hates tattoos. So I’ll probably never tattoo my neck, even though it would look cool if I did.

 

Face tattoos are a different story completely- once you go this far; you have separated yourself from the rest of the human race in a strong and permanent manner. I have seen some facial tattoos that were designed very well and seemed to compliment the wearer’s personality, rather than masking it, but those are rare. There was a time when no professional tattooist would tattoo a face, so all the face work you’d see was crude; but these days are past, and there are more and more well done facial tattoos. I think everyone should have the right to do whatever they want, but the sad fact is that most folks who get their faces tattooed are so young that they really can’t comprehend the long-term effects of their decision. It is rare for someone over 25 to want this done. But for those who do, best of luck to them.

 

As far as the Tyson thing goes - why the hell not. High profile tattoos have a special place in our culture. My only concern is that this could lead to a whole slew of inner city kids getting their faces drilled, and this would stigmatize them forever as violent troublemakers - obviously, since they are emulating Tyson - and seriously limit their prospects. It’s safe to guess that most of those kids will end up in jail.


So do you think that tattoos are socially acceptable now because of the MTV generation who see the likes of Marilyn Manson with sleeves? I’ve been to rock festivals and seen some really young looking kids with dodgy sleeves and weird forearm tats.  Do you try to guide them if they come your way, or is it sit down, shut up and stay the fuck still? (Most people know what they want, right?)

Tattoos are like anything else in life - the older and more experienced you are, the more time you’ve thought about the subject, the more experience you’ve had, both good and bad, relating to it the better prepared you are for the next big decision. Nobody really starts out knowing exactly what they want, although they may believe that they do. But even with a good idea in mind, very few really are aware of what is possible, and I’ve found that many clients who thought they had a rock solid idea end up throwing the whole thing in the trash and starting over after having a short consultation and seeing some of the latest work.

 

A tattooist’s job goes beyond simply applying tattoos - to some extent, we are guidance counsellors, and we do have to at least acknowledge this responsibility, since the tattoos we do affect people for life. I give as much guidance as possible to my younger clients, and would rather turn a big project away than do something that someone might later regret. In this respect, I think that there are many young tattooists who are very gung-ho about hard core tattooing who want to cover as much skin as they can, especially on cute young girls... this is the wrong attitude, and I believe we have a responsibility to the public and to the art form to try to make sure that as many of our clients as possible are happy in the long term. This, in return, helps all of our business to grow. 

 

On the flip side of this is the basic tattooist’s credo that there is a kind of karma to tattooing, and that the client will get the piece that they need for that moment of their lives... a young person getting a large ugly tattoo that they immediately dislike may not agree with this, but in the long term that piece might teach them something that might not have been as easy to learn otherwise, and makes them more fit for living in the world. I always try to do beautiful tattoos, but just by the law of averages not every client is going to be happy, for whatever reason. I just have to believe that every one of them will ultimately be guided along their path better as a result of having that piece. If I didn’t believe this, I would have to put down my machines once and for all, and find another way of paying the bills. 

 

You’re a conventional(?) artist as well as a tattooist. Your work is very textured. How well do they go together?

In many ways they are one and the same. I discover things in tattoos I’ve done that I like enough to explore further on canvas, and have done plenty of paintings that later inspired tattoos. I seem to naturally follow a few basic themes, regardless of what medium I am using, so they have a strong influence on each other.

 

There are even similarities in the techniques involved. For instance, the way I use paint on a palette, where I will dip the brush between different blobs of paint and mix them on the palette before applying the brush to the canvas, that has worked its way into my tattoo technique, where I dip freely between ink caps the same way that I work with paint. I think this has given my work a lot more freedom and dimension, as well as a wider range of colours. I’m sure I would never have thought to tattoo this way if not for working with paint first.

 

Paintings are different from tattoos in many ways; you can make them any size, work with any size brush, and try anything you want, no matter how unlikely it might be to succeed as a composition. If you don’t like it, you can paint over it or trash it. This gives you a lot of freedom, and is a good opportunity to try things that would be too damn experimental for skin. You can also lighten dark areas of a painting by applying more paint, which isn’t so much an option in a tattoo. So a painting is a good place to try new things and really push the envelope.

 

A tattoo, on the other hand, has a certain realness that a painting does not - it is on a living person, for starters, so the option to give up and start again isn’t there; the whole thing matters a lot more, and must be made to work no matter what. The client also will have a certain amount of input in a tattoo, where a painting doesn’t have to take anyone’s needs into account except for the artist. The tattooist’s task of meeting in the middle with the client is an important part of the synthesis of tattoo design; this is not a factor in painting, except for commercial illustration.

 

You have produced two tattoo/art books, the second of which is due for release soon. Can you explain a little about both titles?

There is the educational book, Reinventing The Tattoo, which I have been selling since 1999. This is a 250-page book for tattooists only, and focuses on both design and execution. The book is a desktop published edition in a loose-leaf binder, with 10 pages in colour. The rest of the illustrations, which are in B&W in the book, can be accessed from our website in colour. Each book comes with a unique serial number, which gives the owner access to private parts of our site where they can see the colour illustrations or take part in the book related artist-only forums. I am working on a new edition of this book, which will be hardcover and much slicker, but it will be more expensive and won’t be available for a year or more. I will be offering a 50% discount on the new edition to anyone who has purchased the first edition.

 

This book has been an enormous success, with thousands of copies sold. All copies of ‘Reinventing’ are sold through our website only, to keep them in the right hands. I have had scads of positive feedback from artists who have bought it, and have been involved in many very interesting dialogues with some of these artists as they push through the learning process. I have personally learned an enormous amount from participating in this process.

 

The second book, ‘Organica’, is at the printers right now (Sept. ‘05) and should be available before the holiday season. It is a 160-page, large format hardcover, glossy art book, featuring both tattoos and paintings, presented together as complimentary media. It covers 18 years of my art career, and focuses in particular on the abstract imagery that I am known for. If anyone wants to check out some sample pages, go to the 

 

Photo Album page of our website and click on the June/July 2005 edition of our newsletter, which contains excerpts from the introduction and four sample pages.

 

Have you any plans to work any European tattoo conventions?

As of this writing I am finished with conventions. Point of diminishing returns, and all that. This may change in the future but not soon. Without travelling at all, my plate is already very, very full.

 

So what plans do you have for yourself in the near future?

We are focusing on getting the publishing company off the ground, and establishing its website. I have been burning the midnight oil with these book and publishing projects, so I’m still trying to imagine what life is like without sitting in front of a computer! I have large painting projects to attend to, some of them on the back burner for years. I’d like to get outdoors more. Really, my ambitions are very personal and selfish: I’d like to do these paintings because it will fulfil me. I’d like to be in my kayak more for the same reason. Books and things are part of how I interface with the rest of the world, which helps to pay for the whole thing, but ultimately for me it is the immediate experience that I am after. So, I’m crossing my fingers: more time at the easel. Longer term, keep an eye out for additional book projects, possibly a periodical.

 

Are you influenced in your work by the music you listen to? What is on your stereo at the moment?

I actually have been spending much of this summer just listening to nature... I am painting in our screened in porch, and we’re in the sticks, so the sounds here are rich and beautiful and multilayered. This should give you an idea of my musical tastes. I like music that rewards attention without demanding it, especially while tattooing, something mid-tempo, usually without vocals. This could mean a lot of different things, and I like to consider myself open minded, but I have tired of the yelling dude and am having a much easier time working with music without lyrics.

 

Some of it is electronic, such as The Orb, Boards of Canada, Plastikman, Steve Roach, Loop Guru and System 7; some of it is instrumental rock, such as Tortoise or the Dennison-Kimball Trio; some of it is classical, like Philip Glass and Shostakovich; I also appreciate some World Music- in particular we have a large collection of Ravi Shankar’s sitar music. A lot of this depends on who or what I am working on.

 

We recently subscribed to XM satellite radio, hoping to hear some new alternatives, but so far it’s been disappointingly dull - the most generic music in every genre. So far we’ve had the most luck discovering new music from personal recommendations... since our taste is kind of at the fringe to begin with, finding great new music is a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, but when something new turns up that’s worth hearing, it’s cause for celebration…

 

You can check out Guy’s superb artwork and tattoos on his web site: http://www.hyperspacestudios.com

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Skin Deep 127 1 November 2005 127
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