OT - famous tattoo artist dead
khan
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/obituaries/30malone.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin
Michael Malone, a tattoo artist renowned among his peers for helping to
popularize and standardize tattooing through the vivid images of
dragons, daggers, cartoon characters and crests that he distributed to
tattoo parlors around the world, died on April 17 at his home in
Chicago. He was 64.
Michael Malone
Mr. Malone committed suicide after a long illness, his business partner,
Keith Underwood, said.
Mr. Malone, who assumed the pen name Rollo Banks early in his career,
was noted for standardizing “the flash,” the 11-by-17-inch posters on
tattoo parlor walls that show up to a dozen images from which clients
make their choices.
“What Rollo did was produce clean yet powerful tattoo designs and
circulate them across the globe,” said Chris Midkiff, editor of Tattoo
Artist magazine. Before Mr. Malone, Mr. Midkiff said, “most tattoo shops
hand-drew their own flash. Mostly it was bad drawing by people who
weren’t really artists.”
Mr. Malone was also known for intricately blending iconic Asian and
Western images, sometimes with a dash of iconoclastic humor. In one
design he combined a fiercely protective Buddhist deity, Fudo, with
Bluto, the menacing thug from Popeye cartoons.
In an interview on Tuesday, Don Ed Hardy, a noted tattooist and the
author of a 2002 book about Mr. Malone, “Bull’s-Eyes & Black Eyes”
(Hardy Marks), described a nearly-full-body tattoo that Mr. Malone
created for one client.
“He did a shortened kimono, open down the middle of the torso, down the
back to the thighs, and just past the elbows,” Mr. Hardy said. “He drew
a huge multicolor Godzilla on the guy’s back, and on the front and arms
were other figures from Japanese monster movies.” The price: “More than
$5,000.”
Mr. Hardy said Mr. Malone was the first tattoo artist to distribute
flash sheets featuring Hawaiian designs from the time before
missionaries arrived in the 1800s — arm, leg and wrist bands of
interlocked triangles, diamonds and arrows.
Last October he was one of six artists featured in an exhibition,
“Marked Men: Fine Art from 6 Influential Tattooists,” at the Old
Dominion University Gallery in Virginia.
Michael Alfred Malone was born on April 25, 1942, in San Rafael, Calif.,
a son of Francis and Evelyn Malone. His father was a house painter who
made kites from brown paper and encouraged his son to paint images on
them. Mr. Malone is survived by his brother, Steven, of Santa Rosa, Calif.
Steeping himself in California’s 1960s counterculture, Mr. Malone worked
in San Francisco on rock shows that had psychedelic lighting while
studying ceramics and carpentry. He moved to Manhattan in the late ’60s
and, under the tutelage of a local tattooist, began decorating clients
at his downtown apartment. In 1971 he helped organize an exhibition
called “Tattoo!” at the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan.
A year later Mr. Malone moved to Hawaii and became a protégé of the
artist known as Sailor Jerry Collins, who was famous in the industry for
introducing a sophisticated style and vivid new colors to the skulls,
roses, hearts, tigers and sailing ships of classic tattooing. When Mr.
Collins died in 1973, Mr. Malone bought Mr. Collins’s company, China Sea
Tattoo, in the Chinatown district of Honolulu, and with it his mentor’s
designs.
With those images and his own designs, Mr. Malone started several
mail-order businesses, including one called Mr. Flash. Mr. Midkiff of
Tattoo Artist magazine said that under the Mr. Flash logo Mr. Malone
produced approximately 300 sheets with more than 3,000 designs.
“Rollo educated the bulk of the tattooers everywhere,” he said.
Mr. Malone, a 300-pound six-footer with a close-cropped beard, never
made a fortune from his business and never took himself too seriously.
In an interview with Mr. Midkiff last year he criticized tattooers who
think they are “building a monument to themselves.”
Tattooers are “outlaws,” he said. “Like this tattoo I did yesterday — it
said ‘Scalawag.’ And I like that. It’s part of who we are: scalawags.”
Rabbit
"khan" <critt...@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:UjvZh.4460$uJ6...@newssvr17.news.prodigy.net...
>I know several of you have tattoos:
> =====================================================
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/obituaries/30malone.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin
>
> Michael Malone, a tattoo artist renowned among his peers for helping to
> popularize and standardize tattooing through the vivid images of dragons,
> daggers, cartoon characters and crests that he distributed to tattoo
> parlors around the world, died on April 17 at his home in Chicago. He was
> 64.
>
We're losing the old guys -- what a shame. And the problem is that so many
of these scratchers who see the TV shows and think they're going to become
tattoo rock stars don't realize their importance.
Rabbit