Permanent Curios

Book excerpt: Don Ed Hardy's weirdly beautiful pictorial narratives are drawn from a rich heritage of graphic traditions. Illustrated in this catalogue are a stunning array of paintings, drawings, and watercolors that mine sources as diverse as classical Japanese tattooing, eccentric Chinese and Tibetan pictorial traditions, and the paintings of Renaissance Siena. Tapping into and twisting the iconography and themes distilled from his twenty-year career as one of the founding fathers of modern tattooing, Hardy's paintings revel in the enigmatic allegories that surround the essential life experiences so often commemorated in tattoos--sex, love, death. Above all, it is his love of drawing--everywhere evident in this topsy-turvy mixing of old and new in subject and technique--from traditional religious iconography and modern cartoon characters to Japanese ukiyo-e painting and classic tattoo motifs from World War I--that gives Hardy's paintings their raw power, sense of humor, and alluring beauty. Essay by David Levi Strauss. OUT OF PRINT.