Post-Tattoo: Works by Kandi Everett, Don Ed Hardy
and Michael Malone
Kandi Everett
Kandi Everett has been tattooing for customers with wildly diverse desires since 1977. In July 2002, she began focusing her artistic energies on paper and joined the Honolulu printmakers. Though she remains a student of tattooing, she enjoys working with different media such as drawing and printmaking.
Included in this exhibition are two series of works, The Fence and White Chicks on Speed. About her series The Fence she states: “As a young child I was a junior member of a fundamentalist sect and often heard my elders use the phrase ‘Satan, get behind me.’ . . . a mantra that ripened in my imagination with each repetition.” White Chicks on speed is a phrase Everett overheard from a passing conversation outside China Sea Tattoo 25 years ago. These individual drawings are made with graphite and colored pencil on gesso-bound paperboard.
Kandi Everett received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1969. She has exhibited her works locally, nationally and internationally, most recently at the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and Windward Community College.
Don Ed Hardy
Don Ed Hardy, born in 1945 in Southern California, pursued his childhood determination to become a tattoo artist. In 1967 he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute where he learned classic intaglio techniques. During that same year he began tattooing as an apprentice.
From early on, Asian art and culture have been Hardy’s primary guiding light. In 1973 he lived in Japan, becoming the first non-Asian to study with a traditional tattoo master. More recently he has focused on the history of Chinese and Japanese brush painting. His paintings and prints are informed by a wide range of world art history; iconic, amuletic, and decorative forms developed through years of tattooing; and surf and hotrod culture from his youth in Southern California.
Since 1982 Hardy and his wife, Francesca Passalacqua, have published twenty books on alternative art under their “Hardy Marks” imprint. Hardy has had extensive solo and group shows in galleries and museums and in 2001 was the sole U.S. representative at the 7th Biennial of Painting in Cuenca, Ecuador. Additionally, he has curated a number of exhibitions for both private and public spaces and often lectures at museums and universities. Although currently living in Honolulu, he continues to operate Tattoo City in San Francisco’s North Beach.
Michael Malone
Michael Malone was born in 1942 in San Rafael California and in the early 60's, moved to New York. He became interested in tattooing when he saw a man with an extensive collection of “the first really beautiful tattoos I’ve ever seen.” He began tattooing out of his apartment on west 15th Street. He later moved to Honolulu and in 1973 took over Sailor Jerry Collins’, shop “China Sea Tattoo” in Chinatown. Hundreds of Malone’s original tattoo designs are still being used today. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.
Malone, now retired, spends his time painting in watercolor. He describes his painting style as an offshoot of the tattoo display designs, called “flash”. Emblems, especially bike gangs, car clubs, and the military, have always been of great interest to Malone. Two of the works included in this exhibition are designed in the shape of a kite. As a child, Malone purchased paper kites that had emblems printed on them. His father would make kites at home from heavy brown paper and let him paint on them. Malone states: “We would fly them, letting out spool after spool of string until the kite was just a spot in the sky. In the end the kites would break free and fly away carrying a few hundred yards of string and a kid's painting of a cool rocket ship, or a jolly roger, away to god knows where. I love kites.”
