EDITOR'S COMMENT — July 2002
Can you imagine? This is my fifth anniversary at Skin & Ink. The magazine has changed a lot since 1997, but one thing has not: There are still plenty of tattooists who think they're artists just because they own a piece of tracing paper.
Back when I was in grade school—the third and fourth grades, to be exact—I was the semi-official special-events artist at San Mateo Park Grammar School in San Mateo, California. When a holiday rolled around, the principal would appoint me to do butcher-paper murals along the top edge of the hallways and on the big cork board behind his desk. I'd do Easter bunnies, Abe Lincoln and Santa Claus with all the reindeer. The school even bought me those big, cigar-sized Crayolas that you couldn't get at the five and dime. There I was, up on a ladder in the hallway, while the rest of my classmates slaved away at their desks. They worked while I played. Sometimes, when my illustrations spilled over onto the walls of the classrooms, everyone stopped and watched me work. It was fun making them laugh. For example, instead of having George Washington chopping down a single cherry tree, I'd draw the entire forest, telephone poles, parking meters, everything, clear cut by the man who never told a lie. I especially remember a wall-sized depiction of the first Thanksgiving dinner with all the turkeys wearing propeller beanies. Even the teachers loved it. The kids loved it. I loved it.
Life was good. It felt terrific being an artist. It was a cush assignment, to be sure. But my balloon was soon to burst. One day, as I came into my fourth-grade classroom, I noticed a bunch of schoolmates gathered around Jimmy Alger, that kid with the blond buzz cut, at his desk toward the front. There were lots of ooohs and aaahs as I approached to see what was happening. It seems Alger has brought a comic book and a piece of tracing paper to school that day and was pawning himself off as an artist the easy way. He was duplicating the cartoon of a Canadian Mountie, I remember, and, when he was done, he held it up triumphantly. The kids—hey, they were only nine years old—didn't know the difference. They thought he was a genius.
So, many years later, when I see tattooists show off their work at a convention or send me photos for the Readers' Gallery that are tracings of someone else's art, I'm torn. Sure, tracing someone else's work is a fact of life in the world of tattooing, but is it art? Felix Leu says, "When I tattoo somebody else's art I see myself as a craftsman, as opposed to when I get to tattoo my own artwork, which then makes me an artist."
Leave it to Don Feliz to put it in proper perspective.
—Bob Baxter
Editor in Chief