Mobile art

Looking back, OTN has posted quite a bit of stuff on tattoos where the needle guys have reached for the fine arts. Not so usual, and in fact kind of strange, to see sculpture inked in, and more so with kinetic sculpture. And then we spotted these Alexander Calder inspired tats. What the hell do we know?

One day in the tattoo studio

Customer: Have you got time for me today?

Tattooist: Sure, take a seat. Whaddaya got in mind?

C: I was thinking Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

T: The whole thing?

C: Yeah, the touching hands, the Last Judgment.

T: I think you’re on the back wall now.

C: I don’t want walls.

T: So maybe you should think about something that’ll take a little less time, like less than ten years.

C: Fair enough. How about that one where eyes follow you round the room?

T: The Scream?

C: No, no. the older one. Lisa something.

T: You want the Mona Lisa?

C: Yeah. That one.

T: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa?

C: Yeah.

T:: The painting by the Renaissance genius who was the greatest artist who has ever lived?

C: Yeah.

T: OK.

And he did.

Skin in the game

OTN, as you probably have guessed, is never as happy as when it can cobble together two ideas. This time it’s artist tattoos and a quiz. The tattoo is on the arm of Julian Dashper’s son Leo and from the photo looks like it's copied from one of Dashper’s paintings rather than a drumhead work. And that takes us seamlessly to the quiz that was prompted by a reader sending in roundels used by air forces throughout the world as Dashper lookalikes. You can pop out for a tattoo, link each insignia with its country and then check your answers here. Done.
Images: top the Dashper tattoo and bottom quiz targets

Homage to Picasso's Guernica

The inside and the outside stories.
Images: top, random tattoo site, bottom The Satorialist

The Gordon Walters tattoo

How could it not happen and how could we not share it with you this Saturday.  
via instagram (Thanks C)

Giving an arm and a leg...

...about Duchamp.

Mr Art and Mr GST

This starts off as an art tattoo story and ends up all over the place. The tattoo belongs to Ken Fehily. He's an art collector and now chair of the Melbourne Art Foundation which runs the biennial Melbourne Art Fair. He was also a tax guy at PricewaterhouseCoopers and helped bring GST to Australia. All this is why he has a ‘Mr GST’ tat on one arm and ‘Mr Art’ on the other.

Fehily comes to the Melbourne Art Fair at a tough time. Fourteen offshore galleries exhibited in 2008 but only 11 fronted up this year with 70 percent of them from NZ, and that thanks to a baby-brother-discount from the Art Fair and Creative NZ grants.

Anyway, Fehily has now arranged for Tim Etchells (who started the popular Hong Kong Art Fair) to manage the MelbourneArt Fair for the next eight years. Etchells has also recently launched a SydneyArt Fair (…getting the picture?). Our own very successful Auckland Art Fair is no doubt keeping a nervous eye on all of this manoeuvring.

Mr Art was also involved in a big auction last week in which he and his wife (she runs the dealer gallery FehilyContemporary in Melbourne which includes a handful of NZ artists) put up 72 works from their own collection. It was a disappointment. Just 25 lots sold at an average price of $11,000 apparently putting the skids under their hopes for funding a charitable foundation and putting some money back into the gallery. You can read all this and other stuff about Mr Art in a more coherent form in the Financial Review.

Image: Top, Mr GST with his Mr Art tat on the right arm. Bottom Mr Art with his Mr GST tat on the left arm. (photo of Ken Fehily by Arsineh Houspian for the Financial Review). And thanks to tipster H for the tip off.

Skinny dipping

Continuing on the David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest jag here's a DFW line that rang a bell given OTN's interest in tats. 

 "'Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure' would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos."

Images: Warhol tats (various)

The Chairman

OTN is not going to let a good art tat pass it by and that’s why you're seeing this guy who went into a parlour looked straight into the needle man’s eyes and said, “What I’m after is a line of modernist furniture going down my right leg." And got it.

Saturday's fun page

For your Saturday entertainment a mash up of three OTN interests art, tattooing and polka dots. More here.

More needle work

Andy Warhol imagery soups up an arm

Close call

Here’s another question. Assuming you did think to get a tattoo of your favourite artwork on your arm or your leg, what decision-making process would get you to choose a close-up of Chuck Close’s face hovering over a depressed bird?

You can see the original Close self portrait here at the Walker Art Center.