Chris Garver

บันทึกคลังข้อมูล

Chris Garver was born on September 11, 1970, in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His mother painted and, by the 2014 Pittsburgh Magazine profile, worked at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and she put a pencil in his hand early. He went to the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. He first saw tattooing through friends getting work from Craig Helmich at Island Avenue Tattoo in McKees Rocks, and was drawing their designs as a teenager. At seventeen he sold his bass guitar to buy his first tattoo equipment. He began tattooing in 1988 and studied art at the School of Visual Arts in New York, with Pittsburgh Magazine adding the Art Institute of Chicago. By one account his break came in 1990, when a dragon sleeve he drew for a New York artist named Chris Henry drew attention at the Meeting of the Marked expo and led to a job offer. In 1991 he started working for Jonathan Shaw at Fun City Tattoo, 94 St. Mark's Place. Fun City was one of the New York shops that ran straight through the city's 1961 to 1997 tattooing ban, and Garver's time there was a high-volume working apprenticeship, sharpened on walk-in clients and widened when New York legalized tattooing in 1997. He has named Shaw as a foundational mentor. For a stretch whose exact dates the English sources do not pin down, Garver co-owned a Hollywood shop, True Tattoo, with the tattooer Clay Decker. The Bob Roberts and Spotlight Tattoo connection that circulates around his name is documented only as artistic influence. No reviewed source places him as a resident or apprentice there, so it stays unverified. In 2005 his friend Ami James brought him into Miami Ink, the South Beach studio James opened with Chris Nunez at 1344 Washington Avenue. The shop became the set for TLC's Miami Ink, which ran from July 19, 2005, to October 23, 2008. The cast of James, Nunez, Garver, Darren Brass, Yoji Harada, and later Kat Von D became the most televised tattooers of the early-2000s reality wave, and Garver's large-format Japanese pieces were among the most aired examples of the form on American cable. Garver's deepest craft tie runs through Japan. He has been tattooed by masters of the Horiyoshi, Horitomo, and Horitoshi lines, though the specific generations are reported by a single source and stay tentative. His most documented Japanese relationship is with Three Tides Tattoo in Osaka. The 2012 Vice documentary Tattoo Age: Mutsuo features him on camera, and Three Tides' senior artist Mutsuo describes his own formation as a guest-spot education delivered by international tattooers who came through the shop around 1998 to the early 2000s, with Garver named among the principal contributors. His visual vocabulary, the Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and Kawanabe Kyosai ukiyo-e canon, grew out of that exchange. After Miami Ink he returned to New York and worked at Invisible NYC on Orchard Street alongside Troy Denning. On April 10, 2017, he and Ami James opened Five Points Tattoo NYC at 127 Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan, a name pointing back to the nineteenth-century Five Points neighborhood. He remains an owner and resident artist there, with his stated specialties listed as large-format traditional Japanese and large-format traditional Americana. Garver's hand is most identified with big Japanese subjects, dragons, koi, tigers, fudo myoo, and hannya, pulled from ukiyo-e source prints, set against parallel work in American traditional. He keeps painting alongside tattooing, and Kintaro Publishing carries his prints and a limited sketchbook collection. His career is one of the cleaner documented bridges from the ban-era New York underground to the street shop, and from American practice into the post-1998 Japanese open-shop generation.

สายสืบทอด