by | in: Events | by: Guy Aitchison

Visionary Tattooing

Announcing an exciting live webcast on July 21, 2012!
On July 21, 2012. the worlds of tattooing and visionary art will come together in a live event at Alex Grey’s historic Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York. At this event, veteran tattooists Guy Aitchison and Michele Wortman will be teaching a workshop on Visionary Tattooing- that is, tattoos that come from the imagination that are done with the intention of healing, empowerment or positive transformation. There is limited seating available- check out ›› this page for more information on tickets.

For those who can’t make it in person, though, we are trying something a little different- a live webcast of the evening’s events. Just by going to this page, you can watch and listen to everything that happens at the CoSM gallery that evening, including:
• Screening of the documentary Innerstate, nominated for Best Documentary at the 2010 Great Lakes Film Festival, about tattooists creating visionary paintings- you can see a trailer for it here:
• Live webcast of a dynamic panel talk on visionary, magical and ritual tattooing, featuring Alex and Allyson Grey, Guy Aitchison, Michele Wortman,James Kern and Natan Alexander;
• Webcast of a live painting event that will go from the end of the panel talk until the wee hours. Alex, Allyson, Guy and Michele will be creating visionary paintings while DJs keep the energy going. You can check out some previous live painting events here:
You can also see a short promotional video of the day’s events here: http://www.youtube.com/tattootelevision

The webcast is free to the public. Mark it in your calendars for July 21 at 5:00pm EST!

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Guy Aitchison

About Guy Aitchison

I have never considered either tattooing or painting to be more important to me, though they constantly battle for supremacy in my life. On the one hand, tattooing is a very critical type of commercial art, where success or failure of any given project has very deep implications for the client. This forces an extra degree of dedication and flexibility on the part of the artist, and the clients' participation helps maintain a flow of fresh ideas and images into the artist's bag of tricks. On the other hand, painting lacks all the traditional constraints of tattooing such as size, budget, pain tolerance, eraseability and of course the client's tastes. It allows for a type of wild experimentation not normally recommended in tattooing, plus a chance to chase after obscure and specific personal notions that may not have much commercial appeal. I am very fortunate in that my client base is very trusting of me and for the large part, quite willing to give me almost total free reign on their skin. Naturally, I've taken advantage of this and allowed the subject matter of my paintings to leak across into my tattooing. A beautiful symbiosis has evolved from this, where each medium teaches me about the other. A certain amount of openness to newness exists because of the client's input, which prevents me from obsessively orbiting the same idea for ever and ever. My work tends to focus on natural geometry and organic structure. I have keen interests in science, science fiction, religion and religious art & architecture, and all types of psychedelic & transcendental art, which all filter down into my personal vision. I tend to avoid recognizable icons in favor of trying to focus on the underlying flow of ideas. I believe that there exists a family of archetypal forms, non-iconographic images which nonetheless convey their meaning to the viewer simply & directly, at a level possibly deeper and more universal than that accessible through the use of cultural iconography. I feel that much of our art is an effort to access these archetypes, possibly by lining up those known icons which most closely emulate the intent of the underlying universal form. Whether or not these universal images can be captured in their naked form and rendered as art pieces remains the single largest question in my life.