INTERVIEW: Tattoo artist Jonathan Shaw, in his own words
Photo: Scab Vendor tells the story of famous tattoo artist Jonathan Shaw. Photo courtesy of Dark Star Pictures / Provided by Gold Dust PR with permission.
Jonathan Shaw believes words saved his soul.
The successful tattoo artist, whose client list included everyone from Johnny Depp to Iggy Pop, was living a life of cool celebrity and amazing artistry, all centered around his Fun City Tattoo studio in New York City. But at the same time he was also struggling with addiction and knew the path he was on was a destructive one. Like a supernatural encounter in the woods, where one path leads to danger and the other leads to survival, Shaw chose survival, and the means to get there were the words he employed as a writer.
One of his books is the deeply personal memoir Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist, which has now been adapted into a documentary, directed by Lucas de Barros and Mariana Thome. The film, which is now available to stream from Dark Star Pictures, features interviews with Depp, Pop, director Jim Jarmusch, musician Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, painter Joe Coleman and TV personality Kelly Cutrone, among others.
“To be honest, that was pretty much something that I aspired to ever since I was a very young teenager,” Shaw said in a recent phone interview about his writing career. “My whole life I always liked to read, and I took refuge in reading. I guess when I was in my early teens I started writing a lot. I always aspired to be a writer, but I fell into a life of drug addiction and wild adventure and traveling and the tattoo world, and just got swept away in this roller-coaster ride of adventure and misadventure and everything else. I always wrote during those times. All my life I sort of dabbled in writing and reading a lot, but I never really put anything of any real cohesive substance together until many years later, I guess, when I was in my late-40s.”
Shaw, who is quite open about the struggles he has faced, said he crashed and burned as a lifelong alcoholic and drug addict, eventually hitting rock bottom and finding himself in need of a recovery outlet. During the process of getting back on his feet, he endeavored to overturn some stones and dig deep into the roots of how he ended up going from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.
“I just started writing, writing, writing about all internal conflicts and going back over the history of my life,” he said. “And in that process, over the years, those studies, if you will, sort of evolved into stories and books, and eventually I perfected my craft as a writer and wound up writing and publishing these memoirs. Prior to that, I had written one novel, which was also a sort of purging experience, so I became something of an accomplished storyteller through writing. That was all born out of necessity. I was writing to save my soul, as it says in the movie.”
For the tattoo artist, who left the body art world when he went into recovery, but has since returned, writing is a cathartic, healing process. He likened the act of putting pen to paper as delving deep into old scars, even quoting Carl Jung’s oft-recited saying that God enters through the wounds.
“People are carrying traumatic burdens or ancestral curses or karmic retributions, all sorts of baggage that we have to work through if we want to evolve and recover from whatever it is that ails us,” Shaw said. “There’s a process by which you can’t really bypass the dark, dirty, painful work. It’s almost a spiritual, emotional surgery that an artist will subject himself to in order to uncover, discover and discard a lot of emotional and psychic baggage that really isn’t serving his highest purpose.”
Shaw, son of bandleader Artie Shaw and Hollywood starlet Doris Dowling, is a man who is never far away from a metaphor — imagery that lets him contextualize his life’s journey and his current outlook on the world. For example, he relayed a dream-like story in which he’s standing on the edge of a cliff, and at the bottom is a great unknown. Nearby is everything that he thought he cared deeply about. Conventional wisdom would say to back away from the cliff and head toward the familiar, but there’s also a tiger in his way.
“You’re sort of looking at all your stuff and all your cherished possessions behind the tiger, but you know that if you try to get back there you’re going to get mauled by this ravenous creature,” Shaw said. “And the other side there’s a cliff, and you know there may be a net down there. There might be a pot of gold. There might be another pack of tigers down there. You don’t know, but you know for sure that if you try to go back to where all your stuff is, you’re going to get eaten by this tiger that’s standing right in front of you.”
Shaw added: “Some of the recovery literature that I’ve studied over the decades says some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas, and the result was nil until we let go absolutely. I would have liked to hold on to my old ideas, but they were killing me. The only thing really available to me was to let go absolutely and sort of wander out into the wilderness and see what I could find — the wilderness being the depths of my own destiny, my own soul, my own past, present and future. The writing process for me offered an opportunity to heal a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t going to be a painless task. I had to go with a fine-toothed comb over a lot of the events of my life.”
Writing Scab Vendor let Shaw get his “hands dirty” in the business of introspection, turning him away from a path of self-annihilation. He called himself an “unconscious being just fleeing from the pain of his own existence.”
“Eventually the bill is going to come due with interest compounded daily over the years, and you’re going to have to face the music, at least that was the situation I was in,” he said. “So, you know, now I can look back over the past somewhat dispassionately. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the books in the third person, like I describe myself as, ‘He went here,’ and then, ‘He went there.’ I had to remove myself from the story to get a little bit of emotional distance and clarity so that I can try to tell the truth without trying to serve my own nefarious, egoic vision of things.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is now available from Dark Star Pictures. Click here for more information.
