So "tomorrow" came a week lady, but at long last, here's part 2 of my interview with Erica Flannes, the Tattooed (and tatooing!) Lady...

When did you get your first tat?

I was 21 and in Italy. The man didn’t speak any English, and I had to learn the word for shoulder-blade. I got the Egyptian hieroglyph for wings, I took the design in with me.

How many do you have now?

I don’t know, forty-something…my first 5 or so years getting them, it was like one a year, but now it’s like, whenever. For a little while, it was like one a month.

Is that the maximum a body can take?

Nope!

Why so many so fast?

With tattooing, you do an apprenticeship and you learn from your master artist and your co-workers, and also part of it is traveling and getting tattooed. You can watch other people, how they set up, how they arrange their inks, what pigment they use. Getting a tattoo by someone is like a mini-seminar. If they’re open to you, they’ll answer questions. It’s a great way to learn, getting tattooed by someone you respect.

How has the way that you think about your own tattoos changed?

I used to mull over my tattoo designs forever—do I really want this, what does it mean? Now it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a picture and that’s fine. People come in and they’re like ‘oh, this is for this, and this is for this and I want all of this to have different meanings, and I want 27 people represented in this little tattoo an inch big.’ I remember when I was doing that…Now I just get images I like. I'm an image collector!

Do you consider your tattooing to be fine art? Do you distinguish it from your gallery art?

I guess I think of it differently, but I don’t know how to classify why or how. I think most tattoo-ers don’t want it to be considered fine art, it’s like oh, no…I still paint, and I consider that…well I don’t really consider it fine art, its hard to consider it that, but I do put different meaning or emotional weight to paintings versus tattoos.

(photo: tom waits painting)

How has tattooing changed your personal art?

Even though it’s a blessing to make my living as an artist, because I spend all my day at work making images for people and drawing, it takes a lot out of me creatively. So when I get home, I find that I do far less work in my free time than when I worked in an office. I would do easily three or four more paintings for every one that I do now.

Does anybody ever come in with absolutely no idea and just tell you to do what you want?

Yeah, and I don’t like that at all. If I can have one small shred of just whatever to go off, but if they come and are like, ‘just whatever, I got this right here,’ I’m lost. I’m trained to be an illustrator, so I need a direction. It can be a color, or one bit of subject matter, a phrase or emotion. But I have had people do that.

What did you end up tattooing?

I can’t remember, but I think I end up pulling teeth till I got something out of them.

Your art is stylistically diverse and you’re so prolific. Not counting the hours that you spend at the shop, how many hours a day do you spend making things?

It completely varies. I’m in a dry spell right now, where I haven’t had any fire to make art, but I’ll go weeks where I’ll sleep three hours a night for five nights, and any moment I’m not at work, I’ll be painting.

How do you handle the dry spells? They’re pretty frustrating. I guess I just get tired. I’ll go through phases where I just make and do, and then I crash. And I still want to make, but there’s something missing, an inspiration or an idea. So I sleep a lot and I watch movies.

You seem to work a lot with series?

I’ve found that I will get driven to do something, and then I’ll make a whole series. My last one was painting on patterned paper. In the scrapbook section, they have all that patterned paper. So I made a million little paintings on paper that had ornate patterns all over it and then I quit. I don’t know what’s next.

What about the Saint series?

That’s kind on ongoing, every once in awhile I’ll do a saint.

You’ll just decide someone should be canonized and then you do a painting?

Yeah. Or sometimes the person is already canonized…

 Even though you’re uninspired at the moment, are you currently working on anything?

I have a couple of commissions to do. One I’m really excited about is George Michael and Prince. I think she wants them interacting in one picture, I don’t really know how I’m going to do it yet.

Do you try to self-market for commissions and gallery shows?

I used to have some shows at The Inkspot, and I showed one time at The Attic Gallery in Vicksburg. But I haven’t really tried to get shows. I do a lot of my own business, people contact me directly through Myspace or Facebook. A lot of time its people I know or somebody that knows somebody that knows me.

Do you have any motivation to push yourself commercially?

Maybe so with painting. I wouldn’t mind having a show in a gallery. The last one that I had was at The Inkspot before I worked there. I tried to produce as many paintings as I could in a month. I think there were about ten or fifteen, and they were big.

You work in so many different mediums. Besides painting and tattoos, you have sculpture and jewelry, even your photography...

The photography, that’s just what I do when I’m, not bored, but when I need a quick fix. It’s an instant gratification thing.

 Where do you get your ideas to work in all these different mediums?

I have lists on scraps of paper. Sometimes they get made, sometimes they don’t. Things just come to me, and if I happen to be in a place where I can actually do it or start it, I do. And sometimes it doesn’t work, how I see it in my head is completely different from how it ends up, so I’m like, trash that….

Where did the Nokees come from?

I had a dream about them. I was at a big outdoor market. I was looking at stuff and there was a whole table of Nokees and other little creatures made out of found objects and all kinds of different stuff, but they weren’t mine. I woke up and I sketched out really fast some of what I had seen, and I started making Nokees the next day. Some people absolutely hated them and some people love them. It was pretty weird, the responses that  a little lump of clay can get.

Did the name “Nokee” also come from the dream?

I couldn’t figure out what to call them, but from the back they looked like potatoes, so its kind of a play on gnocci, the Italian food.

You just bake them in the oven?

It’s funny when I’m doing a big assembly line. I just put them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven.

In general, what inspires you to make?

I like stories and myths, and saints are interesting to me because they come jam-packed with their own symbolism. I like different religions and all of the stories that come with religions, and I like animals and all the meaning that can be placed on animals. That’s pretty much where I pull from.

Does any of your work have emotional themes or stem from emotional triggers?

I’ve done a couple of series that come from things that have happened in my life. Maybe the pieces that make up the group of work look nothing like each other, but they all come out of my emotions from a single experience.

What emotions are you most likely to explore in your art?

A lot of times its sadness. Or when I get angry, I frantically clean my house, and then whatever’s left, I go make stuff. But typically its something that’s got me sad or upset, and it can be any number of things…sometimes it’s something small that annoyed me or hurt my feelings.

Do you draw from photographs or illustrations?

I always draw from my head.

Entirely?

Yeah. I did one painting once, from a photograph of a woman. It was an old photograph and I just used her expression. It ended up coming out so different from what I normally paint.

Do you think you have an overriding aesthetic?

I have a couple of different, not styles I guess, but looks. When I do figures, I can definitely put them in one of four categories. I don’t mean to do that, I just do. Some figures have a simpler aesthetic than others. 

Do you trace a certain aesthetic to a certain mood while you’re creating? Yeah, I guess it does relate to mood, and why I’m making the art, if I’m making it to work through a certain emotion or just to make an image. My illustrations are different than my emotional work.

Do you consider the Saints illustrative?

Yeah. I first started making saints because I identified or really liked aspects of some of them, but then I found I enjoyed making the saints. So I just began to do them with no reason.

It’s funny that you’re a hermit but you have such a bold internet presence.

Yeah, somebody else said something like that to me the other day. I think I made some statement about how I don’t like people knowing what I’m doing all the time and he was like, why do you put it all over the internet? I was like, I know. I don’t know…I find it interesting. Facebook is different than Myspace, and people have stopped using both of them the way they used to use Myspace…at least to me. People used to take pretty creative and interesting photos for Myspace, and I used to really like looking at what everybody was doing….

The freshness of social networking is long gone. I think some of it’s moved on to personal blogs.

But I get a lot of business through Facebook and Myspace, both tattoos and paintings. It’s kind of like having a website without having a website.

Do you consider Facebook and Myspace interchangeable?

Facebook has replaced Myspace for me and a lot of people, I guess. There are more tattoo-ers that I’ve found on Myspace, so I keep it for networking with tattoo-ers.

Do you analyze yourself via art?

When I make stuff, I don’t think through it beforehand. One of my college classes drove me crazy because we’d have to start with thumbnails for composition ideas, and I don’t work like that at all. I go with my instinct.

 You don’t sketch drafts first?

I do with tattoos, but not with paintings. I guess with tattoos you have to, because you have a certain area that something has to fit into, and sometimes you have to move things around. With paintings I’ve always just jumped in.

After you’ve exorcised an emotion, do you look at what you’ve made and feel like you understand yourself better?

Not necessarily. It’s more like relief.

What about in your photography—you often seem to be role-playing?

Sometimes I am, especially if it’s a shoot with another person.

Are you usually the art-director for the shoots? Do you design the sets?

It depends on who I’m, working with, but usually it’s me that puts it all together.

Do you actually pose your models?

Sometimes I’ll give suggestions. The first 20 pictures or so are usually stiff and they’ll get tossed, but ultimately you start loosening up and moving around.

How do you think your day-to-day experience as a creative person sets you apart from mainstream society?

It’s definitely different from some people’s day to day. I find it fascinating and foreign, the whole, go to work at nine, get off at five, go have drinks with your buddies or whatever. Not that my experience of life is better or worse, its just something that’s not what that is. I’m always looking at colors or feathers on the ground or shapes of buildings. My brain is wired differently. I don’t know what it would be like to live any other way.

Do you feel over-stimulated?

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just enough. 

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