Shawn Barber
Just before moving back to Portland in 2005, I had the pleasure of posing for Shawn Barber.
Shawn stopped by Mom’s on Haight Street to take some photos of me while I was tattooing for a project he was working on at the time.
The young lady in my chair that day was Monica Painter.
She had started getting tattooed by me earlier that year and had expressed interest in becoming a tattooer herself.
Years later, thanks to Instagram, I found her thriving in Chico, California, running her own shop called Golden Hour Tattoo.
She has become an outstanding tattooer. It’s really an incredible thing to witness someone's passion blossom into reality and kick ass at it.
The same goes for Shawn. I greatly admired his painting skills and had wished I could have taken classes with him
while he was teaching at the Art Institute in SF. His own ever-evolving passion in art led him to become a tattooer himself
and later a co-owner of Memoir Tattoo in Los Angeles—a fine establishment that has hosted many grand tattooers, myself included.
Shawn has now become a legend in the tattoo community.
His effort spent encapsulating on canvas the tattooers of our time has been a service of great love and devotion to our craft.
You can feel it in his works.
Many of those who posed for him over the years have passed on now, making these works
more than just intensely labored paint on canvas.
Shawn has brought into being a body of magical time capsules, capturing the very essence of these eccentric characters from within our tattoo community.
He has had the most auspicious opportunities to spend time getting to know many of his subjects intimately
and has very skillfully immortalized their personalities for decades to come.
All that befalls Shawn, from what I have seen, has been very well earned and humbly nurtured.
I thought I would share this lovely example of folks making the world a better place through hard work and the existential desire to reach their higher potential.
Check out The Art of Shawn Barber
And the lovely tattoo works by Monica Painter
'Ms. Mikki at Work', oil on canvas, 20” x 16”, 2006, Collection of Mercedes Helnwein
