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Joe Capobianco, Hope Gallery Tattoo

New school pin-up color

Hope Gallery Tattoo, 835 Woodward Ave, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Joe Capobianco is an American new-school pin-up tattooer based in New Haven, Connecticut, known internationally as the creator of the saturated "Capo Girl" pin-up style. He co-founded Hope Gallery Tattoo and served as head judge on Oxygen's Best Ink.

Archive Note

Capobianco is from Long Island, New York, and began tattooing in 1993 after losing freelance illustration work and being approached to apprentice; his first tattoo was a scorpion. He is most closely identified with the Capo Girl, a bold, color-saturated pin-up descended from the cheesecake pin-up art of the late 1950s, drawn with a heavy decorative outline and exaggerated proportions, and his shop work runs maximalist, with pin-ups alongside photorealistic eagles and snakes; his pin-up reputation crystallized after a Bettie Page chest piece was published in a tattoo magazine. In 2003 he co-founded Hope Gallery Tattoo at 835 Woodward Avenue in New Haven with Eric Merrill and Julio Rodriguez and is its owner and operator, and he served as head judge on Oxygen's Best Ink. His product and publishing record includes flash sketchbooks, instructional DVDs, the Brickhouse signature tattoo machine, and the Easy Glow pigment line, which have helped spread the Capo Girl style well beyond his own client base.

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