My tattoos look as good as they did 15 years ago. They have not degraded and my forearm and lower leg aren’t wrinkly and gross. I guess when I’m 80 it might be a different story, but I doubt that I will give a …
One thing that a person who is thinking about getting tattooed should consider is that a tattoo can mask malignant melanoma. If someone chooses to get a tattoo, the tattoo should not go over or right up to any mole. Also, the person should avoid sun exposure on any tattooed skin and get frequent skin exams.
Unless you have a large percentage of your skin tattooed the odds of the melanoma occurring in that location are pretty small, since tattoos do not make melanoma either more or less likely. Still, not a bad idea, especially if there is any family history.
Isn’t that true of everybody?
I think some would argue that Mozart, Renoir, and other titans in their field of art created work about as close to perfection as humans can get.
But really, I’m not telling you not to get a tattoo. I am sharing my opinion as an artist that it’s an inherently poor form of art because of the canvas itself, not because of the human inhabiting that skin canvas or the artist using the gun.
True, but because I know several people who have a large percentage of their skin tattooed, I think about that possibility more than most. And yes, we should all avoid sun exposure and have skin exams, but it’s especially important for people with a family history of melanoma, those on certain drugs that make them more prone to sunburn, and people with tattoos. Obviously, a small tattoo on an area usually covered by clothes does not require the same amount of vigilance as, say, an arm sleeve.
While they may be “as close to perfection as humans can get” in their type of art, that was not my point. You cannot strap a Renoir to your arm nor to the nose of a WWII bomber, and while Mozart is great for a full orchestra a soloist would generally be better off playing music actually written for a solo instrument. I always thought that the whole idea for having so many different varieties of art is that each variety, large or small, offers its own unique characteristics to the artist and the audience.
One of the more publicly acclaimed artists of this generation became famous working with spray paint on the side of buildings. I am sure that there are plenty of reasons why this could be considered a “poor form of art” but the reality is that those reasons serve no other purpose than to illustrate the limitations and merits of each medium.
Only if the spray paint washed off when it rained, or the walls were made of pudding. Keith Haring worked with good materials to express his vision.
It comes down to personal choice and aesthetic vision, like any art form or personal choices in anything you do. There is a lot of visual and musical arts for example I find interesting, and a lot that quite personally I don’t want to be anywhere near it, yet others would be the opposite of what I feel. There are a lot of tattoos that I find personally unsettling (the skulls , blood and gore, goth images), but I also have seen some stuff recently that was stunning, saw some that recreates the look of watercolor paintings and so forth I thought were gorgeous.
To be honest, I also don’t find very appealing when I see the tattoos that obviously were some drunken idiot getting a tattoo, whether it is the generic tribal bands on some muscle bound idiot (the tattoo artist I used in Maine when I was visiting had a sign up "If you ask for a tribal band, I’ll kick your down the stairs), or the young girls with the tramp stamps and such, obviously not thought out much (I never have been one for the madding crowd approach to things anyway:).
As far as the canvas changing, so do paintings and other artwork, a status outside changes over time, and paintings certainly do, and require restoration from time to time. Thing with tatoos is that they can always be refreshed or updated, the way paintings can be restored:).
I also heard a lot of “how will that look when you get old, when the skin is no longer young”, and my comment was that besides trying to keep as good looking as I can, whatever changes happen were a part of me, as the tattoo now is, and I chose something that would have as much meaning when I was 80 as when I was 39 (when I got it), so I don’t think it will be an embarassment. If I let it fade and go its natural course, then it will be a roadmark of time passing and like many things in my life, part of my memories, along with the scars I have from various things I have done, the aches and pains that probably were caused by actually living a bit in the past; if I choose to have it renewed from time to time, a sign that not everything has to fade and wear away:).
“I think some would argue that Mozart, Renoir, and other titans in their field of art created work about as close to perfection as humans can get.”
Depends on who you talk to, there were critics in Mozart’s day who thought he was an idiot writing light, trivial stuff, Beethoven routinely had his works panned and if it hadn’t of been for Mendelsohn Bach might have faded into obscuritity,and we have modern critics and composers, usually those who love the trends in modern classical music, that all of that is ‘not music’ or ‘boring’, yet both are considered ‘geniuses’. Renoir was an amazingly successsful artist in his time, he was quite financially well off, yet there are critics who consider his works to be that of a pleasing hack, as compared to the ‘revolutionary’ artists like Picasso (and I am no art critic, and I love Renoir as much as I like Picasso (who I fell in love with as a child, parents had a cheap print of ‘the three musicians’), but not everyone does. I have seen some elaborate tattoo work that I would consider darn near perfect in terms of expression, for example, and I find works of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart I would consider near perfection that the modernists would consider to be on the same plane as movie music (which I also think has some that is darn near perfect). There is a lot of modern art, on the other hand, music or otherwise, that I personally find an affront to my eyes and ears, others think it is genius shrug
I guess not everyone likes Renoir.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/why-everyone-hates-renoir/410335/
Well, since Renoir is my favorite artist (other than D and friends) I’ll leave each to his own.