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Ed Hardy's High Art Tattoos and his Business

Ed Hardy's High Art Tattoos and his Business
By : Ed Hardy Clothing

40 years back, Don Ed Hardy blew off a Yale fine-art fellowship to chase the rogue art of tattoo, a undying and regularly taboo convention that captivated him as a boy in the Orange County beach town of Corona del Mar. By ten 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 happy when his gifted protege jumped into the socially murky waters of tattoo. But it worked out well for the brave Hardy boy, who blurred the supposed boundary between'high'' and'low'' art and carved a trail thru the worlds of art and commerce. He has drawn photographs on torsos, canvases and giant scrolls with equal conviction and coolness.

A tattoo trailblazer 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 Wed., is also a fertile lithographer, painter and etcher. His blazing pictures of devils, dragons, whiskered women 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 thereabouts, his early tattoo photographs, the'retro'' skulls, sailor girls and derby-topped dragons now in style, have shown up on T-shirts, jackets, motorcycles and even energy drinks sold worldwide under the Ed Hardy brand.

There are now Ed Hardy stores in NY, Los Angeles, Tucson and Dubai. That $20 million-a-year business, of which Hardy gets a small slice for licensing his name and art, is the efforts of French-born marketing ace Christian Audigier, who pushed the Von Dutch brand and now has everybody from Madonna to Larry King draped in Hardy. It's a pleasing turn of events for an artist who made his bones tattooing daggered hearts and anchors on sailors in San Diego in the raffish old days before body art became respectable. Now it virtually seems like there's a Starbucks and a tattoo parlor on every corner.

'Why do people get tattoos? I'm not sure. I believe it's a utterly primal urge,'' says Hardy, 61. He is's lost track of how many he is's had put on his body since he got his first tattoo, a rose on the left shoulder, at Frisco Bob's in Oakland four decades gone. 'It's one of those mysterious things. Based totally on the evidence, the frozen mummies, the oldest members of our species had tattoos. I think it predated cave painting.''

An obsessive picturemaker since the age of three, Hardy now divides his time between San Francisco, where his Tattoo city shop in North Beach is going strong, and Honolulu, where he paints and makes prints. He also spends time in Japan, where his photographs are being hand-painted on factory-produced porcelain and paper goods and where he's going to create a giant dragon -- king of the Asian legendary creatures -- on the ceiling of an old Buddhist church in Kyoto.

'I got it all goin','' announces Hardy, a modest, forthright and amusing man who in 1973 became the first Western tattooer to study under a traditional japanese master, the unusual Horihide, in Gifu town, where Hardy pierced and painted the skins of a number of the Japanese gangsters known as yakuza. Dressed in a green checked shirt, khakis and a pair of laceless mint-green sneakers carrying the Ed Hardy signature and his view on Tex Avery's 1940s slobbering wolf, Hardy recalled his colorful history yesterday at Tattoo city.

He helped transform the medium, creating elaborately designed and coloured customised tattoos that frequently took weeks. He inspired young tattooers from Australia to Europe, lots of whom came to San Francisco to get a Hardy in their skin.

'That liberated me up,'' Hardy says,'because the majority of my art had been either etching or tattooing -- extremely tight, picky kind of stuff. I was always inquisitive about a freer kind of painting.'' He recommends young artists to free themselves from'some careerist agenda, and do art that truly means something to you personally.''

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