Skin Works Tattoos always fascinated him, and after incorporating them into his art, he felt the need to go into the subject more deeply by becoming a tattooist himself which led, in the mid 1970s, to an apprenticeship with Buddy McFall and Dale Grande at Cliff Raven's old shop on Belmont Avenue in Chicago. He says of his years of tattooing, "My aesthetics overshadowed my technical ability, but I held my own. By the 1980s, tattooing had become a dead end for me, and I returned to fine art, which moved me on a deeper and more personal level. In retrospect, I could consider myself a 'George Plimpton of tattooing."
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Photographs by Saverio Truglia
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