Our Artists
Life is art; art is life. Skin is our canvas.
DAVID
The creative spark is what separates us from the animals. What we call art, is the use of that creativity in defining the struggle and beauty of the human experience. Tattoo and body modification are forms of a sacrifice we make to carry that art with us daily, upon our flesh, to express our individual experience. Because body modification comes with pain, it is a vehicle of metamorphosis that at American Gypsy results in fine art.
Art has been my refuge and my sanity for as long as I can remember. When I was incarcerated at 19, I turned to art and soon that evolved into tattooing and body modification. I spent 15 years creating art on skin and canvas as an escape from the concrete world I had been thrown into. After I was released in 2009, I began my professional career in the fine art and tattoo industry. In 2011 I opened American Gypsy Tattoo as a means of creating my own vision for a space where tattoos were no longer just markings on the skin: a place where fine art is our objective and skin is our canvas.
Early on in my professional career I saw there were a lot of clients who wanted fix-ups on old tattoos or coverups. A lot of artists in the industry won't touch old work. At American Gypsy Tattoo we feel everyone deserves a tattoo they love. Fine art has also taught me that art is a process of creation and destruction, often reworking and even erasing your canvas to develop something greater. Tattoos are no different.
I have trained countless others throughout my 23 plus years of dedicating myself to the arts. I am self-taught in various mediums:
Watercolor
Graphite/charcoal
Oils
Acrylics
Mixed Media
Sculpture
In body modification I specialize in multiple styles:
Japanese Traditional
Dragons
Biomechanical
Organica
Black and Grey
Photorealism
Watercolor
Coverups
Scar Coverup
Permanent Cosmetics
Nipple replacement/tinting
Scarification