Issue 07
Ed Hardy
By Caleb NeelonIllustration By Don Ed Hardy
“I don’t know why people like tattoos, I honestly don’t ,” says Don Ed Hardy. After inking hundreds of thousands of them, he’s still happily mystified. “But some people like them and want to get them, and they should have the opportunity to get the best tattoo they can get.”
With 40 years of tattooing and legendary status among the tattoo community, Hardy’s renown—like that of Von Dutch a few years before him—is exploding in a demographic that has no idea how he became a legendary figure to begin with.
Fifty years ago, Hardy was a little Southern California boy with a tattoo parlor in his family den. He used water-soluble colored pencils for the colorful fills, and would scrounge for change to buy Maybelline eyeliner to use for the hard black outlines.
He tattooed his friends and himself in his den, and his parents took pictures of the newly-inky boys shirtless in the yard.
The studio looked legit: tattoo licenses, warning signs(“you must have the permission of your parents”; “if under 9,stay out”; and “no credit”) and posters of tattoo flash, the dozens of stock tattoo designs that wallpaper most tattoo parlors.
Tattoo flash was an immediate fascination for little Ed, and he has returned to its imagery for 5 0 years. The power of these images rests in their being, as Hardy explains, “heavily loaded basic symbols of human emotion, all done with varying degrees of kitsch and varying degrees of reference to other things in contemporary culture.” The history of these motifs is essentially the history of tattooing. “Flash dates to the late 1800s,” Hardy continues, “and the wave of tattooing’s popularity began when Japan was opened to the West in the late 1 8 5 0s. People who had enough wealth and power and were in a position to travel to Japan began getting souvenir tattoos while they were there in Japanese port cities. And the Japanese government was trying so hard to look ‘civilized’ that they banned tattooing on any Japanese natives, though the tattooists could work on the foreigners. They were small versions of the full-body tattoos that had become a huge thing in Japan in the early 180 0s. So, by the end of the century, they were tattooing Westerners, who would come home with dragons and butterflies, decorative elements from Asian art. And it took off. Winston Churchill’s mother had a tattoo; all of these titled and wealthy people had tattoos. One of the famous tattoo artists from Yokohama was brought to New York to tattoo people – it was an elitist, collector kind of thing.
But then by World War I , it had filtered down and become much more of a populist thing. The electric tattoo machine was invented around 1880 or 1890. Tattooing began to combine Asian motifs, which are still big—Geisha girls, dragons, that whole aesthetic of nature-based image s—with all kinds of American popular tattoo designs lifted from greeting cards, wallpaper, all kinds of religious material, love motifs, and of course cartoons.”
Every generation, of course, would add their respective motifs to tattoo flash. Asa teenager, Hardy noticed that there was something of an art movement growing around him. Von Dutch (born Kenny Howard) was reviving the car and motorcycle pinstriping that auto manufacturers had phased out in the 1930s. Car and motorcycle custom jobs were exploding in popularity, and people like Big Daddy Roth and Kid Jeff would become large figures, along with Dutch. “I came out of that Southern California beach culture and car culture,” Hardy remembers, “and Von Dutch was a very big influence on me from 1956 to 1958 when I was drawing a lot of weirdo car-culture art.” Hardy knew that art was what he wanted, and he headed north to school at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Still smitten with tattoos, and now old enough to get a real one, he took three trips across the Bay to Oakland, each time getting a tattoo. On his third trip, he met the guy he was looking for.
“ It was so hard to find out anything about tattooing at that time – it was very much a closed shop. I went over to Oakland looking for a tattoo artist named Phil Sparrow, who I had known about as a kid because I had sent away for a catalog of his from some ad in the back of Popular Mechanics. It took three tries, but when I walked into hiss hop I realized that he was completely unlike the other tattooists. He was the first renegade intellectual that I had met in the business . He had been a college profess or, he was a writer, a part of Gertrude Stein’s circle, and was close with Alice B. Toklasup until she died. He had had this great and varied career, and he wasn’t just street smart.”
Hardy had an offer in hand from Yale’s MFA program: a full scholarship, with a studio assistantship on top of that to provide him with a bit of income. As far as art education goes, there’s no surer ticket into top New York galleries. But he was infatuated with tattooing, and had seen that it could make money enough to support a family. “I had a wife and infant son, and was working at the post office on a night shift, trying to finish art school during the day,” he remembers, “I basically bugged Phil Sparrow to teach me, but Phil really felt that tattooing was a dying American folk art and told me not to get into it. I wore him down and he reluctantly agreed to help me out.” But what a thing to have to report to your parents and teachers: you don’t turn down an MFA at Yale to become a tattooist now, let alone 40 years ago. Hardy knew it, too. “It’s a great ego deflater to get into tattooing if you’re some hot-spit young art student. I was in a very good gallery in Los Angeles when I was17 and I got some attention for my work then. I continued showing through art school, and then when I said I would start tattooing, everyone was just horrified. One of the things that I liked about tattooing when I started in 1966 was that it was so completely counter cultural. It rocked everybody. Nobody was neutral about it: they loved it or hated it. It was much more outlaw than it is now. And I liked that it couldn’t be commodified.”
What had sealed the deal for Hardy was the realization that tattooing had far greater creative possibilities than the old tattoo flash he had drawn on his buddies as a 10-year-old. The Japanese tradition of tattooing emphasized work that covered far more of the body, with each design unique and created by the tattooist with considerable input from the customer. “Phil had shown me a book of Japanese tattoos on the first day that I met him, and I thought that the work was so visually complex and interesting.” In the 1960s,such work was rare, with only a very few tattooists working in that tradition outside of Japan.
Sparrow told Hardy that if he wanted to learn more about the Japanese style of tattooing, the person to find was a legend named Sailor Jerry, who worked in Honolulu. Not that this was easy to do. “As things plodded along,” Hardy recalls, “I managed to get an address for Sailor Jerry. I wrote him, and he didn’t respond,since the reference I used was someone he had a vendetta against – that’s the funny thing, tattooing was totally Machiavellian in those days. Eventually I was able to convince Jerry of my sincerity, and we began to keep a correspondence. About eight or ten months after that, in 1969, Jerry begrudgingly allowed me to come visit hiss hop in Honolulu.”
Sailor Jerry was essentially the first American to work in the Japanese style and to master it, and he and Hardy maintained a correspondence for many years. But Hardy didn’t leap right into working in the Japanese style; rather, he worked up to it with years of classic Western-style flash work. “I worked in San Diego for four years, where I really got my chops, tattooing Marines all the time,” Hardy remembers. “Putting on repetitive images, I really learned how to tattoo quickly, efficiently, and concentrate on how to use the machines without concentrating on some great art thing, because it was just another eagle or roadrunner cartoon or little red devil or anchor. It was an image bank that I had learned to draw when I was1 0 year sold.”
Through Sailor Jerry, Hardy was invited in 1973 to study in Japan with the Japanese classical tattoo master Horihide.
Hardy came back to California after six months and began doing tattoos solely by appointment, always working collaboratively with his customers to develop large-scale and unique designs.
“I set up my shop,” Hardy explains, “with an emphasis on only doing one-of-a-kind tattoos that required considerable input from customers, with my drawing up an original piece for each tattoo that I did. It was great – I expanded my horizons in a lot of ways.” Later, in San Francisco’s North Beach, he opened Tattoo City, a shop soon famous among tattoo fans and artists alike.
Ed Hardy had taken a leading role in tattooing in America, but it took many years before he was able to return to making his own studio work. “For the first 2 0 years that I was tattooing, I made virtually no art except things that I was drawing for tattoo commissions. And then we made this crazy move to Hawaii in 1986 and I started long board surfing again. Since I wouldn’t be tattooing in Hawaii, only going back to San Francisco every three weeks and tattooing like crazy for two or three weeks, I started making art for myself in Hawaii. It was a very challenging experience because I had become naive to how dependent I was on the customer’s input in creating a tattoo.” For the past 10 years, however, Hardy has returned to studio painting, including a 500- foot-long millennium scroll that featured 2,000 dragons. Then, while happily painting in his studio and occasionally tattooing, his phone rang. Christian Audigier, who had taken the Von Dutch clothing line into ubiquity, wanted to make Hardy his next project.
“ This crazy fashion deal going – it’s completely new to me,” Hardy says. “It just dropped on my head. It was nothing I’d ever intended to do or pursue or anything. Christian Audigier saw it and got really excited,since he had just quit the Von Dutch thing. And he wanted to take it over and make it into a big thing, which he is doing. And I know nothing about the fashion world.
But Christian, who is a triple-type- A personality type guy,said that we had to do this. Now he has opened an Ed Hardy store on Melrose, and I’ve been branded! My life has been very strange and very fortunate, but this is the weirdest thing by far.” The Ed Hardy line now includes motorcycles, energy drinks, and housewares, with millions of dollars in sales to date.
“Christian is a marketing genius,” Hardy explains, “and is unabashedly, admittedly finding his own identity via other people’s artwork, and finding it and transforming it into something else. All Christian wanted to use was the vintage tattoo art that I painted to put on Marines35 or 40 years ago.” Of course, the tattooing community has been awash with discuss ion about what to make of the Ed Hardy line and its success . On the one hand, Hardy is the most important figure in American tattooing to a great many tattoo artists and enthusiasts.
On the other hand, he’s putting tattoo flash on $50 trucker hats.
Ed Hardy understands the bind. “ I know how many people were outraged when the Von Dutch thing happened as a fashion ploy, but a lot of this stuff has become so mainstream, and is so instantaneous these days with communication technology, that anything that is radically counter cultural or subversive in asocial sense becomes absorbed so quickly. And I was amazed that Christian made such a big deal out of what was very little to work with. He had the Von Dutch signature and some pin striping images.
It wasn’t like Von Dutch created tons of images– he didn’t make a whole lot of art. He had that one little flying eyeball that became everywhere in the 1950s. The fashion industry is enormously fickle.
I’m completely aware that it could all evaporate tomorrow. I stay distant from it. It’s completely surreal for me to walk into the Ed Hardy store. If it can buy me time to do my own painting—what I call my therapy art, the work I show in galleries—then that’s great. I’m 61, I’ve been self-employed my entire life since coming out of art school, and frankly it’s pretty great to get royalties for stuff. I don’t have to grind out every dollar by tattooing.”
It’s certainly easy to wince at expensive t-shirts based on a subculture’s assumed communal property. But at the same time, a tough fact of life is that pioneers of art forms also have to pioneer their respective exit strategies and retirement plans.
And Ed Hardy, after hundreds of thousands of tattoos, has passed the torch. “I hardly tattoo at all anymore,” he says, contentedly.
“I’m happy to let the youngsters do all the epic stuff that I kind of got my name for doing. I ’d rather be home painting, really.”