Updated: Feb 6, 2024
First of all, the blog is back! And the more you get to know me, you will realize I say first of all far too many times, even when there isn’t a second point.
Good morning Speakeasy readers, my name is Peter Hernandez, and I am the new apprentice, hell yeah!
This new venture is truly a dream come true for me, and I’m still pinching myself to make sure I’m awake.
This was my first official week in the new position and so far it’s been full of learning. Very exciting stuff! In all seriousness, though, I can see the road ahead of me and I couldn't be more stoked for the journey that awaits me at Speakeasy Tattoo Los Angeles.
I hope you enjoy reading of my apprentice adventures that are to come, but for now here’s one or two things about me. I come from Tucson, Arizona, which if you have never been, has a huge, vibrant art scene. Museums, galleries, street art, and even the traffic medians. Yes, that’s right, even the roads are artsy diamondbacks. I have a huge passion for skateboarding and as a young adult I went to film school thinking I would make skate films the rest of my life, while that is not my focus anymore it is still a huge passion for me that I will always love and hold close to my heart. And over the next year ill fill you in little by little. Now let's get to the article.
AI FILTERS & TATTOOS
“Can I confess something? I tell you this because as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline”- a scene from “Annie hall” 1977
the things we’re being shown on social media are feeling more and more true every day. In the last five years we’ve had our lives inundated with fascinating filters for your photos and videos on your tic tacs and instagrams, and yes i said it how I said it. tic tacs. These things are cool, fun, and shouldn’t illicit any extracurricular feelings other than the escapism we all regrettably seek.. I personally find the cat ear filter to be worth dying over. Sadly, this isn’t the point of my article. I don’t want to come off hyperbolic, or deranged for what I’m about to say, but my disillusionment with our current AI craze in the tattoo realm has reached a fever pitch. Flat out, I find it insanely cruel to lure a person into your tattoo studio under false pretenses of skill you do not possess. What do I mean by that? I have a story stick with me, recently submerging myself into the deep lore trap of tattoo culture on Reddit, I came across an innocuous thread r/instagramreality while losing hours of my life i stumbled upon this picture of an artist from the UK who used an Ai filter on his piece after the fact and was being lambasted for it on all the socials. ya know, I didn’t really think twice about the implications of it at first glance. I thought it was insane and super messed up for this weirdo to do it, but it was topical, super surface level stuff. Right at that moment, I didn’t get it. A couple of weeks go by, and it's bugging me more and more. Almost like when you see a Volkswagen driving around and then all of a sudden you seem them everywhere. This was especially prevalent with nonsensical chores or errands. Or…it happens when I’m sitting for dinner at a not so great establishment eating food that looked better/more vibrant/cleaner/ etc. on their Instagram. Was it my fault my gullet was decaying into absolute death for days afterward? Was it my responsibility as a patron to check the pH levels in their dishwashers. Is it my responsibility as a customer to hold the owners and profiteers of this place to the food and safety standards of their own industry? IS IT THE CUSTOMERS RESPONSIBILITY to check an artists' skill before they entrust their skin to you? If they’re being lied to and led astray by artists using filters, the answer is increasingly becoming more gray,.. How is it their fault? You lied. You misrepresented your work. In our brains, things that are true elicit cognitive ease. Cognitive ease is the level of ease that is associated with the understanding and processing of a piece of information. It dictates how a person perceives the info in front of them. 1 +1=2, the sun is hot, cats meow. From early on, we were indoctrinated to believe these things. They feel super familiar, and you don’t think twice about accepting it as common knowledge. Let me first tell you it can be mimicked artificially by repetition. If a person repeatedly sees the same contrast filter on photos of tattoos even if it's complete bullshit, it can become familiar. That person sees it, processes it, and it's those feelings of familiarity that sparks ease and trust and feelings of goodness. Which can be preyed upon by our lurking artists. Listen, this blog entry isn’t for the artists that don’t put filters on their photos. I’m not talking to you. I'm talking to that person staring off into the headlights while that car is coming towards you fast. I can see you're wanting your career to smash into this oncoming car and I'm Anticipating the crash. Shattering glass and the smell of gasoline. Take a deep breath. And do not post. That brain orgasm you get from those cheap likes aren't worth your credibility. Keep it to yourself until it's ready. Save it. That instant gratification will hit different if you master it.
Listen, who am I to tell you anything. If doing some shitty tattoo filtering it and making a quick buck is all you want, the world is yours, baby.
But damn in my humble opinion you as a tattooer should be held to a higher standard. As an artist. As a Shinobi. You have to find your ninja way. People are conditioned to trust the images they see on their phones, as an artist its your responsibility to not take advantage of that.
til next week FAREWELL MY FELLOW APES
Peter Hernandez
Speakeasy Tattoo Los Angeles
Apprentice
Updated: Dec 8, 2022
Welcome back good little boys and girls of Los Angeles. It is once again Astor, the patron saint of blogging and webbing at Speakeasy Tattoo, wishing you all a happy holiday. This will be the final blog of the year and as we prepare to round the sun once more, I am here to give you each and every one a little history on everyone’s favorite Yuletide character. Krampus. Obviously.
The moniker “Krampus” traces its origins to the Alpine and Slavic regions of Europe, where originally Krampus was a phrase used to refer to a category of creature, as opposed to an individual monster. Typically, the Krampus would be described as a bipedal beast, with cloven hooves, horns, a shaggy black coat, and fangs bracketing a long lolling tongue. In more Catholic regions, he would be wielding a pitchfork, however he is usually depicted brandishing a bushel of birch branches, lashed together to make the perfect switch for beating wayward children in need of holly-jolly corporal punishment. The yearly appearance of Krampus coincided with the winter celebration of Saint Nicholas, the patron Sant of Children who, on his feast day, was said to bring gifts of nuts, fruit, and small toys.
In his earliest incarnations, Krampus’s function was to act as a type of amorphous threat, a boogeyman invoked by parents warning children against misbehaving during the harsh alpine winters. Given his appearance and propensity for punishment, Krampus was meant to act as a satanic counterpart to Saint Nicholas’s Divinity. Come December, good children would receive gifts from Saint Nicholas, while bad children would receive a healthy serving of Texas Justice from the Krampus. Worse still, particularly disobedient children would be stolen by the beast, forced into his wicker basket, and then absconded with back to hell. Or eaten— sometimes the Krampus would just eat them. He’s not the biggest fan of gingerbread cookies. This, like so many other Christmas folk beliefs, instilled in children a strict sense of obedience during the time of scarcity surrounding the winter months, when food was scarce and nights were long.
By the mid 19th century Krampus began to be associated with the more secular Santa Claus. It was also during this time that the trope of the Krampus became a proper noun, referring to the creature as a singular entity as opposed to a hypothetical danger. In so doing, he became linked to the Christian holiday of Christmas as opposed to the whole winter season, or to the Saint’s feast day of December 5th.
Now there are claims that Krampus has some ancient pagan roots and is a hold-over figure from a pre-Christian solstice ritual meant to drive away the spirits of winter. This it would be awesome if true, but unfortunately according to most folklorists, it is unfounded. There is no evidence to support this narrative. Rather the belief that Krampus is some sort of pagan or Norse figure can trace its origins back to the early 20th century, when a cadre of socialist folklorists spread this false history in an attempt to cast aspersions on the church. According to them, the casting of Krampus as the villainous equivalent of Saint Nicholas was a conscious ploy by the church to sully ancient Nordic and German folk customs and in so doing consolidate power in those regions. Now, I have no love lost for the church, personally, but this seems a little unfair, especially since the church does a pretty good job sullying themselves and doesn’t need your help, comrades.
While Krampus has been tied to the celebration of St. Nicholas for some time, there is not definitive start that I have been able to find that points to the beginning of this relationship –though it appears to go back as far as at least the 1600’s when the first Krampusnacht, a celebration wherein a bunch of lads dress up as Krampus and go running around their home towns startling people, was held in Bavaria in 1582. So, Krampus is old, just not ancient. However that didn’t stop the Nazis from lapping up the idea and consequently publishing a well-circulated photo essay about the Krampus’s supposed Norse origins. According to them, Krampus was an ancient Germanic custom that was appropriated and demonized for its pagan roots. Ironically, the Third Reich would later ban Krampusnacht celebrations, as the rural frivolities were labeled inappropriate for a modern, industrialized nation like Germany to engage in. Because of course they did.
Prior to the ban under the Reich, it was popular to send red postcards depicting the creature during the holidays in parts of Germany and Austria-Hungry. The postcards typically depicted Krampus terrorizing children or otherwise accompanied by saint Nicholas or, interestingly, in the presence of semi-nude women. According to folklorists this is possibly a reference to the Austrian folk belief that being hit with Krampus’s switch brings fertility.
Although Krampus’s popularity waned during the 20th century, the beast has made something of a comeback in recent years, with more and more Krampusnacht celebrations being recorded every year. Perhaps the 21st century’s embracing of Krampus is tied into an attempt to push back against the hyper sanitized, over-commercialization of Christmas. Or, as an active move to preserve local folkloric and ritual customs in the wake of an ever increasingly globalized culture. Either way I doubt Krampus is going to fade back into relative obscurity any time soon. My own girlfriend, whose family is German and weird, was told stories of Krampus in her youth—only as long ago as the early 90s. That may seem like an eternity ago to some, but she would prefer to believe it’s not that distant a time. Her grandmother claimed that Krampus would lope around hither and thither, and stuff the ungrateful children into his wicker basket, beating them all the way… and year after year, he’d never empty out the basket, only cram more children in on top of the previous years’ harvests, down and down and down, generations of naughty children, pressed in on top of one another, squeezed tighter and tighter, for all eternity, each successive year more horrible than the last.
So, be good Los Angeles. Merry Christmas to all, and to all… guten nacht.
Buongiorno Los Angeles, Astor here from Speakeasy Tattoo with another glance into the candlelit annals of history. To begin with, let’s talk about light— specifically, the relationship that light has with the dark. What, you thought a goth nerd like me was going to let this thing get away without a little darkness? It’s like we don’t even know each other.
Art historians have a few words for the relationship of dark to light, when the contrast is particularly high and dramatic: chiaroscuro (literally “light-dark”), or, when even that isn’t extra enough, tenebrism (from Italian ‘tenebroso’ meaning “dark and mysterious”), which takes the principles of chiaroscuro and amplifies them to the point where the subject of the work seems lit by a spotlight, and all else melts away into gloomy, ponderous shadows. These techniques are especially prevalent in baroque paintings, and I could name a handful of artists who employed them to great effect… but there is one artist who, to me, truly typifies the style, and we call him Caravaggio.
It’s important to know that ‘Caravaggio’ wasn’t even his name. Modern historians largely refer to him as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, but even that isn’t quite right. His contemporaries called him by a variety of names (when they were being polite, and weren’t referring to him by an epithet) including Amerigi, Merigi, Merisio, Morigi, Michelagnolo, Michele, Morisius, Narigi, and more. The artist himself signed his name Marisi. Furthermore he likely wasn’t even from Caravaggio, a town east of Milan, but his parents might have been from there. Maybe. So we don’t know the artist’s name, really, but despite that we do know a staggering amount about him as a man. Why is this? Because besides his paintings he also left behind the echoes of a tempestuous life, and among them, a fair number of court and police documents. He is somewhat famous even to this day for his short temper, and was sued a number of times, for offenses ranging from beating a man with a club, to unpaid rent, to breaking a window, to writing libelous poems, to possessing illegal weapons, to throwing a plate of artichokes in a waiter’s face. The list goes on. Biographers in the late 17th century said of him that he “wasn’t well built and he had an ugly face”, and that while he would buy fine clothing, he’d wear them until they were “falling off him in rags”. He was jailed at least once, and at least twice fled a city to escape justice. The second of these flights was the most serious. The details are unclear, but the gist of the problem was that he’d gotten into an argument with a local gangster, with whom he’d had confrontations before. This time, the altercation devolved into a sword fight, and Caravaggio stabbed the other man, reportedly in the groin (whether or not this was intentional is also a matter of debate), inflicting a wound which would prove fatal. The popular version of the story says that the fight was over a pallacorda game (similar to tennis), but that might not be true, either. Regardless, Caravaggio was sentenced to death by beheading for the killing, and so, he pulled up his tent poles and easel, and fled south.
Interestingly, some of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings depict beheadings. Judith Beheading Holofernes (1607), Medusa (1597), Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (1609) and of course, his self portrait as the head of Goliath, held aloft by the victorious, though sympathetic, David (1610). Could the artist have foreseen that his life was to end with the threat of the blade hanging over his head? Did he perhaps realize that, at the rate he was going, he was sure to find himself in such a situation, sooner or later?
Caravaggio did not acquiesce to this fate. He went on the run, plying his artistic trade in Naples, Sicily, and Malta, but the flight, and his tumultuous life, took its toll on him. At the end of his life, he was sick with a fever. What really caused his death has been a subject of debate for centuries, and theories have ranged from syphilis to murder. An early study of what researchers believe to be his remains suggested that he may have succumbed to lead poisoning after a lifetime of using paints heavy in lead salts. Later studies posited that his death was actually due to a staph infection of a wound he sustained in a fight in Naples. Recently released Vatican documents seem to imply that in fact he was hunted down and slain by the family of the gangster he’d killed in Rome, out of revenge. We also don’t know where he died. A friend of his, at the time, said he died en route from Naples to Rome, but one biographer claims to have found the artist’s death notice, which puts his place of death significantly north, in Tuscany. All we can really say is that he was sick, and he died at the age of 38 in July of 1610, not long after the completion of that enigmatic David and Goliath.
Mystery and gloom, the elements of a tenebrist painting, made flesh in the artist who defined the style. Once the most famous painter in Rome, he died of unknown causes on an unknown date in an unknown place, his bones moved and lost for nearly six decades until an extensive DNA study of multiple crypts in 2010 determined what are probably the remains of the painter. So we don’t know his name, nor where he was born, nor where he died, and yet, his influence is still with us. A generation of artists followed in his footsteps— the so-called “Caravaggisti”. But beyond them, his particular treatment, the drama, the intense, rich blacks and the stark whites and yellows, still inform us. Like his bones, his style was lost for some time, covered over by those who came after him. In my last blog entry I mentioned Nicholas Poussin, the French classical painter. It was Poussin’s view that Caravaggio set out to destroy painting, and that he was the worst thing ever to happen to the medium. Still, is there not something of the caravaggisti in Poussin’s Plague of Ashdod? In those bright whites and impenetrable blacks? In the 20th century, interest in the works of Caravaggio was resurrected, prompting one art historian to proclaim, “what begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”
Now that’s very grandiose, and I’m sure the artist himself would be quite chuffed to hear it said, but what bearing does the work have on you and me? Well, imagine you are interested in getting a relatively small, highly-detailed tattoo. People will tell you that the image will age badly, due to its size and the inevitable dispersal of ink under the epidermis, and there is some truth to that. Certain colors are more transient than others. But, chiaroscuro can save your design, if you are not content to surrender to the ephemeral forces of aging. A balance of light against black will stand the test of time, even as some colors fade— just as Caravaggio’s work has done, even as the details of his life have been lost to the ages.