I've been fascinated by skin illustrations since I was a kid. I read Ray Bradbury's, “The Illustrated Man”, a collection of short stories strung together by the premise that a boy at a lake stares into the images of a stranger in a full-body suit of tattoos-each one spins the reader into its story. The mesmerizing Rod Steiger plays the colourful stranger in the movie version. My teenage posse, "The Hacks", had embraced the great Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher as the soundtrack of our youth. We would don our plaid shirts and work boots and press to the front of the stage, flapping our arms to the music like emperor penguins as only teenage boys can.
Songs like A Million Miles Away, Cradle Rock. Bullfrog Blues and the straight-ahead rocker Tattoo'd Lady:
"Tattooed Lady, bearded baby, they're my family.
When I was lonely, something told me where I could always be,
Where I could wish for pennies if we had any.
You'd meet me down at the shooting gallery."
I knew I wanted to meet a tattooed lady when I grew up.
In 1981, I was in Las Vegas and went for a haircut on a Monday, unaware that barbershops across the town closed that day of the week. Las Vegas Tattooing, however, was open-the Doctor was in, and within an hour, Dr. Dog had applied my one and only tattoo.
The good Doctor was an illustrated man with a dangling cigarette. He emblazoned a postage-stamp-sized representation of the cosmos above my heart in painful, pinching, buzzing strokes. I kept it lathered in Vaseline for the next few days and covered from the blistering desert sun-sneaking a peak now and then at the vibrant rendering.
I came very close to the second tattoo many times. Very close: on the waterfront of Antwerp in the middle of the night after a raucous party at the Voll Moon Club…in New York, Leningrad and Miami. It was to be an image of paradise, perhaps with palm trees, so a tropical one. The project was thwarted many times because I truly didn't have a clear vision of what paradise looks like, although I'm leaning toward Laurie Anderson" s version: Paradise is exactly where you are right now, only much better.
Banana Joe
The summer of 1986 found us settled into our round shack on the beach at Fulford Harbour. On a message board at Luigi's, I saw a poster advertising "An Evening with a Tattooed Lady" at Off Centre Stage. Micki T. was going to show her bodysuit, and I was to see my first tattooed Lady in my new home town. You have to love SaltSpring Island! Sid and Micki opened with a skit that has her preparing to leave her skin to the Smithsonian. A slide show of Micki in exotic costumes was followed by exhibiting the suit on a gorgeous body, six months pregnant. Young kids ran around as she ended her performance with a Q and A. We learned she would save up money and then travel to seedy motels deep in the southern US to catch up with the itinerant tattoo artist, always loyal to the same one. On her long solo journey north, she would leave faint impressions of the newest section of the tattoo on motel sheets.
The artist in me appreciated the negative space and how it defined the colourful areas around it. There was the loveliest patch of pale white unadorned skin under her right armpit, a tabula rasa amidst the mayhem of dragons battling for pearls (her nipples), spouting phallus and so on. An audience member next to me asked the question on my lips. No, she had committed to a full-body suit, so yes, she would be filling in this blank shape.
What is the story, the hook, the attraction that propels our contemporaries to ink their skin? Much academic ink has been spilt on the history of human self-marking. Yet more ink describes the psychological-fetishistic imperatives and semiotic signals in play. My purpose is to avoid such wonderings studiously. These photographic images rendered in the printer's ink are not statements or manifestos, although they have germinated from a single, simple question:
What lies beneath the decision to immortalize SaltSpring Island on one's flesh…its outline, its initials, its name, its topographical features, its nicknames?
After all, people are not walking around with "West Saanich" or "Metchosin" tattooed on their breast.
Over the years, I learned others had also taken this deeply personal step. I wanted to know more about their stories. I wanted to photograph them. Photography was a pursuit that I learned at my father's knee. As a child, he and I would take photographs together and then develop and print them in our darkroom next to the furnace in our home. I returned to photography when our sons were born.
Ingrid and Leanne
My tattoo is lower left with Mt. Maxwell and the harbour light
Clayton at the piano
With my camera, I wanted to tell the story of people who Ink the Rock (SaltSpring Island) on their skin. I wanted to meet these remarkable individual's and take their portraits. I hope each portrait tells at least part of the story. Each participant, however, was willing to go deeper and offered poignant and vulnerable accounts of how the island came to be embedded in the cells of their skin. Seeing their tattoos has called forth my own nascent desire to ink the island on my body. I got my own version of a Salt Spring tattoo with the island's preeminent tattoo artist Noah Mott. This explains my self-portrait being included on the gallery walls.
I wish to share my deep gratitude to the participants in this project for their brave willingness to share something so profoundly personal.
Over the course of this project, I have seen how close to the heart this act of tattooing Salt Spring on the body is. One may get a tattoo on a whim, on a lost weekend or in the throes of a travel adventure, but this is different. I hope this difference is aptly illustrated in the portraits that form this exhibition.
PETER ALLAN
Fulford Harbour, SaltSpring Island
NO PUBLIC HOUSE: Artists Statement
I was born in a dark room - not a Skinner Box but a develop/print photographic darkroom set up first in the upstairs bathroom and later more permanently in the furnace room of our family home in suburban Montreal.
In the sixties, photography was our exclusive father and son activity. My Dad, a career engineer, is a brilliant amateur photographer still snapping at 84. I treasured my time with him on photo jaunts without my three sisters. Together we would catch images of steam locomotives, Vieux Montreal, Mosport Racetrack, photos of the moon landing off the black and white TV in the rec room. I especially enjoyed the silent moments in the darkroom, just he and I. In retrospect, it seems these times were too rare, and I have changed this in relationship to my two sons.
The red light, the flash as the 2 ¼ square film was ripped from its backing and spooled into the developing canister, test strips, dodging, Kodak, Ilford, Zeiss, Rolleicord. The contact printer, enlarger, the vinegar smell of chemicals, and counting one-one-thousand in the silence, washing prints in the bathtub upstairs. As a teenager, I taught the skills learned at my father's knee to others. The first single-lens reflex camera was taken on the proverbial backpack trip to Europe at nineteen but left on a park bench in Luxembourg after sharing a bottle of Napoléon Brandy and chocolate milk with my buddy Yackle. Another 35-millimetre camera was stolen two years later while hitchhiking from Amsterdam to Crete. For a time, photography was supplanted by acting, university and work.
I have always admired the handmade, artistic originality, a craft person's skill. It was this fascination that compelled me to become a student at McGill University, where I learned of the century and a half of evolution of the photographic image from Fox Talbot to Warhol. Later a graduate course on Man Ray at the University of Victoria rekindled an interest in the mystery of a dark room. However, by then, picture taking for me had become a medium for documenting youthful antics rather than an aesthetic pursuit.
With these images, I am reclaiming a creative intent. Digital photography ascended so rapidly there is still a film trapped inside my F3 camera - the roll unfinished.
These photographs are singular and defiantly unique, one-of-one. Why? I have deleted the RAW and jpeg. Digital file. Poof, gone…
NO PUBLIC HOUSE: A personal journey
Mr Bloom ate his sandwich strips, fresh, clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that.
It tastes fuller this weather with the chill off. "Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there." Ulysses - James Joyce 1922
Perhaps, this is a story of my coming to Saltspring Island. Perhaps it will echo your arrival history. I've long believed that a Public House is a window into its neighbourhood, its community. A mere three hours in the Vesuvius Pub, and my cosmology started to shift: an unexpected, unbidden change was about to happen- a Saturn Return moment, decades before I ever heard of one. Dear friends, Bill and Kerri, were married in Comox in the summer of 1985. Guests at the wedding suggested I had to see Pacific Rim National Park while I was out from Montreal. At the local Canadian Tire, I purchased a tent and sleeping bag, rolled a bottle of scotch in it, bungeed it all to my garment bag and put out my thumb.
An Italian baker insisted we stop at Cathedral Grove and we walked together to the big trees-the West Coast began leaking into my cells. On the boardwalk at Schooner Cove, hardcore hikers stopped dead in their boots to let the man in the suit and dress shoes by. Propped against an enormous log, I read Joyce loudly to the surf, sipping a wee dram from time to time. A professor from King's College, Dublin had demonstrated in a wood-panelled seminar room in the old Art's Building that it was by reading Joyce aloud he could begin to be understood, all that alliteration:
“Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsoever. I am, astride at a time. A very short space of time through a very short time of space….”
It took me twenty years to finish the novel Ulysses — the book of choice when travelling.
Last Pizza Night FOR SALE
A week later, I arrived in Vesuvius Bay by foot on the last ferry. On the hillside, a raucous party was underway. There was a lineup to enter the pub for the live entertainment: Club Mongo was heating up with Sue Bowler and Kate Roland upfront. The Vesuvius Inn was swaying on its foundations. Rum Ribs. Uniquely beautiful women asked me if I was the new Doctor on the island. Keith McHattie bent my ear on the abstraction of money [and still will if you wish]. I thought, what a wondrous place this Saltspring Island.
It has recently occurred to me that Ulysses was in my bag stashed in the shrubs outside the pub that night. August 21st, 1985 was my Bloomsday, and I too, was in a pub. I moved to the island from Montreal eleven months later. I played shuffleboard in my Uzbeki robe at the Fulford Inn with Machinehead ll, onion rings, Barley Brothers, pizza night, walking home in the pitch black along Isabella Point Road. These images are a lament, not an indictment. They result from quiet contemplation within the exhausted shells of favoured places amidst the naked rafters and detritus. The pictures are intentionally apolitical, somewhat like myself. Enough said.
TOSSED & FOUND - 7th Annual Recycled Art Show Salt Spring Gallery
I have been participating in this show for all 7 years. It is organized by Shirley Command, one of the original co-creator's. Over the years, I have been proud to be hanging alongside some artists that really pushed the boundaries and the notion of reclaiming discarded materials to say something profound. (you know who you are… ) I am hoping that for the show next year, more is asked of the participants in terms of a curatorial theme that will transcend hobby craft into art that moves the viewer.
SIDNEY FINE ART SHOW
My sculpture "Vanitas" was exhibited at the Sidney Fine Art Show. In 2012 over 6,500 people came and admired the art and the town.
The 2012 Sidney Fine Art Show was held October 12th – 14th at the Bodine Family Hall at the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney. Presented by the Community Arts Council of the Saanich Peninsula, this Show is a world-class juried art show for serious artists and patrons of the arts. The first Show in 2003 was an outstanding success and each year the Show has attracted thousands of visitors to the town of Sidney, BC.
