DON ED HARDY

Born in Southern California in 1945, Don Ed Hardy is perhaps the biggest name in the tattooing world today, a status that was heightened by the 2004 launch of the international fashion label Ed Hardy which featured the artist’s iconic, Japanese-influenced tattoo illustration style.

Hardy combined his early tattoo learnings under Phil Sparrow with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967, and in 1974 opened the city’s first parlour at which you could get custom-designed work. Hardy tattooed professionally for more than 40 years before his retirement.

Hardy Marks Publications was formed by the artist and his wife Francesca Passalacqua in 1982, while he also continues to mentor and support artists at the studio Tattoo City in San Francisco. In 1986, upon moving to Honolulu, Hardy began to re-focus on his traditional fine arts practice which includes drawing, painting, ceramics and printmaking.

Hardy’s desire to become a tattoo artist began at the age of 10, and was driven in his young adulthood by “a combination of economic necessity and artistic curiosity. It was an option that would give me both a challenge and an opportunity to be an independent agent and develop its potential as an expressive medium.”

“At the same time, its ‘outsider’ status was hugely compelling. Tattooing in the 1960s was the most formally undeveloped and socially provocative medium I could think of, relegated in the public perception to the underworld of sailors, bikers and criminals.”1

Hardy’s views on the development and broad popularisation of the tattoo industry - having helped pioneer its development for so many years - are particularly interesting, stating;

“In some ways, the popularity of tattooing has backfired for me. My goal was to achieve some public recognition of its potential to be more than some stewbum’s antisocial flailings; now it’s become stereotyped in different ways. The tattoo world has expanded to include nearly every visual form imaginable, and is pervasive worldwide. Its fad status overwhelms or negates most of the assumptions on which I based my career; maybe it’s a search for authentic experience in an increasingly ‘visual’ world. Nevertheless, the whole thing for me was about erasing outmoded boundaries and celebrating or emphasising what we have in common as a species. To a degree, that’s worked.”2

Notes

1 Hardy, DE 1999, Tattooing the Invisible Man: bodies of work, 1955-1999, Hardy Marks Publications and Smart Art Press, California, USA

2 Hardy, DE 1999, Tattooing the Invisible Man: bodies of work, 1955-1999, Hardy Marks Publications and Smart Art Press, California, USA