Don Ed Hardy's Tattoos Are High Art And Big Business
A tattoo innovator and historian who expanded the palette and pictorial possibilities
of custom-made body art, Hardy, who will talk about his far-ranging work at a free slide-show lecture at Mills College on Wednesday, is also a prolific lithographer, painter and etcher. His blazing images of devils, dragons, bearded ladies and Buddhas -- informed by old master etchings, 12th century Japanese "hell" scrolls and 19th century woodblock prints, Southern California hot-rod striping and the funk and humor of Bay Area art -- are widely exhibited and collected. And for the past year or so, his early tattoo images, the "retro" skulls, sailor girls and derby-topped dragons now in vogue, have appeared on T-shirts, jackets, motorcycles and even energy drinks sold worldwide under the Ed Hardy brand.There are now Ed Hardy stores in New York, Los Angeles, Tucson and Dubai. That $20 million-a-year business, of which Hardy gets a small slice for licensing his name and art, is the handiwork of French-born marketing ace Christian Audigier, who pushed the Von Dutch brand and now has everybody from Madonna to Larry King draped in Hardy. It's a pleasing turn of events for an artist who made his bones tattooing daggered hearts and anchors on sailors in San Diego in the raffish old days before body art became respectable. Now it almost seems as if there's a Starbucks and a tattoo parlor on every corner.
"Why do people get tattoos? I don't know. I think it's a completely primal urge," says Hardy, 61. He's lost track of how many he's had put on his body since he got his first tattoo, a rose on the left shoulder, at Frisco Bob's in Oakland four decades ago. "It's one of those mysterious things. Based on the evidence, the frozen mummies, the oldest members of our species had tattoos. I think it predated cave painting."
An obsessive picturemaker since the age of 3, Hardy now divides his time between San Francisco, where his Tattoo City shop in North Beach is going strong, and Honolulu, where he paints and makes prints. He also spends time in Japan, where his images are being hand-painted on factory-produced porcelain and paper goods and where he's going to create a giant dragon -- king of the Asian mythical creatures -- on the ceiling of an old Buddhist temple in Kyoto.
"I got it all goin'," says Hardy, a modest, forthright and amusing man who in 1973 became the first Western tattooer to study under a traditional Japanese master, the prodigious Horihide, in Gifu City, where Hardy pierced and painted the skins of a number of the Japanese gangsters known as yakuza. Dressed in a green checked shirt, khakis and a pair of laceless mint-green sneakers bearing the Ed Hardy signature and his take on Tex Avery's 1940s slobbering wolf, Hardy recalled his colorful history the other day at Tattoo City.
"Aesthetically, it looks good. I'm not ashamed of the stuff," Hardy says. He originally partnered with the fashion firm KU USA. Audigier flipped when he saw Hardy's work and made a deal with KU to market it. Hardy knew nothing about Audigier until he looked him up on Google and read about a party he'd hosted "in some secret location with Puff Daddy and all these people." He called one of his partners and said, "This guy is at ground zero of everything that's wrong with contemporary civilization. However, if he wants to make a lot of money with my art, and it's not going to be overtly negative, then what the hell."
The cash flow has given Hardy more time to spend with his wife, Francesca Passalacqua, and their boxer, Ruby, and focus on his painting. He does the occasional small souvenir tattoo -- they usually cost $500 to $1,000 -- but "I don't have to tattoo much anymore," Hardy said. "I put in my 40 years tattooing."
He helped transform the medium, creating elaborately designed and colored customized tattoos that often took weeks. He inspired young tattooers from Australia to Europe, many of whom came to San Francisco to get a Hardy in their skin.
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