ed-hardy news：tatoo star
Forty years ago, Don Ed Hardy blew off a Yale fine-art fellowship to pursue the rogue art of tattoo, a timeless and often taboo tradition that captivated him as a boy in the Orange CountyEd Hardy Women Clothes beach town of Corona del Mar. By 10 he was drawing cars and eagles on kids’ backs and arms with wet colored pencils and Maybelline eyeliner.
At the San Francisco Art Institute in the early ’60s, Hardy mastered the demanding art of intaglio etching under the tutelage of the late Gordon Cook, a no-jive blue-collar guy who instilled in Hardy a love of craft, Asian art and the quiet power of Giorgio Morandi’s little still life pictures. Cook wasn’t pleased when his gifted protege jumped into the socially murky waters of tattoo. But it worked out well for the plucky Hardy boy, who blurred the supposed boundary between “high” and “low” art and carved a path through the worlds of art and commerce. He has drawn images on torsos, canvases and giant scrolls with equal conviction and aplomb.
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A tattoo innovator and historian who expanded the palette and pictorial possibilities of custom-made body art, Hardy, who will talk about his far-ranging work at a free slide-show lecture at Mills College on Wednesday, is also a prolific lithographer, painter and etcher. His blazing images of devils, dragonsEd Hardy online store, bearded ladies and Buddhas — informed by old master etchings, 12th century Japanese “hell” scrolls and 19th century woodblock prints, Southern California hot-rod striping and the funk and humor of Bay Area art — are widely exhibited and collected. And for the past year or so, his early tattoo images, the “retro” skulls, sailor girls and derby-topped dragons now in vogue, have appeared on T-shirts, jackets, motorcycles and even energy drinks sold worldwide under the Ed Hardy brand.
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