Few acts are more intimate than tattooing an image on someone else’s skin, but it’s often an act that’s done in private — in a tattoo parlor.
A new exhibit at Easthampton’s Off the Map Tattoo aims to introduce the public to the artists behind the scenes, many of whom bring considerable training to their work. When they aren’t crafting designs on someone’s skin, they’re often working on paper or canvas with a paintbrush, pencil, or pen and ink.
“Thaw,” which is on display at Off The Map through early April, offers a range of paintings, prints, drawings and other work by the parlor’s resident artists and support staff. Thematically, it’s work that’s been inspired by winter, with a little hint of early spring thrown in for good measure.
It’s the kind of show Off the Map likes to stage on a periodic basis, shop owner Gabriel Ripley says, both to give staff a chance to display their “outside” art and to remind customers and the public that tattoo artists are just that: artists.
A fine arts background of some sort, says Ripley, “is pretty important in this kind of work.” If the shop isn’t necessarily looking for people with art degrees, he notes, “we like to see some kind of equivalency.”
Consider Nicole Laabs, who organized the new exhibit and has contributed work to it. The tattoo artist, who’s originally from Arizona, says she’s been drawing “ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil.”
She later took up oil painting and block printing, and though she didn’t earn a college degree in art, she’s continued over the years to take art workshops and to study on her own.
“My goal is to integrate more of the fine arts into my tattooing, to look at things like contrast, light, and perspective,” Laabs said. “We paint on skin — my needles are basically my brushes.”
One of her contributions to “Thaw” is the Goth-inspired oil painting “Star Stuff,” an image, in part, of a skull whose eye sockets are filled with glittering celestial colors and light. But Laabs’ portfolio also includes formal portraits, still lifes, and paintings of animals, insects and fantasy creatures.
Another shop artist, Gao Feng, is originally from China, where he attended Nanjing University of the Arts and later apprenticed with Shao Gang, a leading Chinese tattooist; he does pencil drawing and watercolor painting on his own.
Maximillian Rothbert, who specializes in gray and black tattoos, adds a more colorful oil painting to the show, though one with somber colors: “Untimely Beginning,” a look at two translucent looking chicks tied together with a piece of frayed rope.
And Natalie Kassirer, a member of Off the Map’s support staff as well as a freelance illustrator, has a degree from Rhode Island School of Design; she specializes in pen and ink illustrations.
Her drawing “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” based on the Emily Dickinson poem of the same name, is a sort of pastoral-mystical mashup, as a partly clothed woman, her head clutched in her hands, sits on a tree stump as several birds cluster around her head.
Meeting the challengeThe focus on art at the Easthampton shop, which opened in 2005, is not confined to periodic exhibits. Ripley said Off the Map hosts regular drop-in art workshops for the public, and for years it has also hosted visiting tattoo artists, who lead workshops for the resident ones and also work with customers.
Some of those guest artists — Ripley ticks off names such as such as Paul Booth, Guy Aitchison and Chet Zar — have also contributed paintings and other more conventional artworks to the Easthampton shop; they’re displayed in the spacious main tattoo room (the business is located in the old Majestic Theater).
In addition, Off the Map produces the weekly show “Off the Map LIVE” — featuring interviews with tattoo artists and other programs — on their Youtube channel, with additional links to past shows on the shop’s website.
That kind of visibility has led Laabs, for one, to the work she’s doing for a customer who has come all the way from West Virginia. “She said she wanted an art nouveau tiger,” said Laabs, who on her cell phone showed a picture of the work in progress.
It’s a rich, colorful design, one that Laabs says has gone well so far but that, like any tattoo, faces the challenge of being made not on a flat surface like paper, wood or canvas but the soft, pliable one of human skin.
“But that’s the kind of challenge I like,” said Laabs. “I like being able to bring my background in art to the work I do with customers.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
For more information on Off the Map Tattoo and the “Thaw” exhibit, visit offthemaptattoo.com. The company also has tattoo parlors in Oregon and Italy.