Art Growing Up

Okay, so I am Cabron, and I have just started tattooing since August of 2008.

I live in South Jakarta, and I do most of my tattooing out of my home studio. I also do house calls by request.

I have been an artist all my life. It is the one thing that I have always wanted to do. The only thing I am good at. The only thing that I will definitely get praises for. I could draw before I could write a complete sentence. I immersed myself in all sorts of art media when I was a kid. Be it watercolors, acrylics, oil pastels, soft pastels, charcoals, pencils, crayons, you name it.

But I was a bit classical in my approach as an artist, and I idolized most of the renaissance artists like Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and other realists and naturalists of that period.

I studied nature and trained my eyes to be very observant of details. I tried to see everything and draw everything as it should be in real life. 

This went on until high school, when I researched expressionism, surrealism, and abstract. I studied the works of M.C. Escher, Dali, Van Gogh, and I especially loved Picasso.

I was raised mostly by my grandparents, who were extremely devout Christians and made it their life mission to raise me extremely Christian as well. I was taught to steer clear and not indulge in any of the worldly matters like the internet, MTV, going out to the movies, and all the other fun stuff kids like to do. I was to go to church every Sunday, go home right after school, study, and have no more than 2 hours of TV. This only pumped up my interest in drawing. That's all I did. Every day. Good thing they kind of supported me doing art. Or so I thought.

Since I was not allowed to access the internet or go out much, I had very little resources to help me develop my art skills. I didn't even know who Warhol was until the 10th grade. It was a good thing that my grandparents had a gazillion or more interesting books. Those books kept me alive. There were tons of pictures that I tried to replicate, and it gave me good practice.

Also, since they were so narrow minded on all worldly subjects, of course they would not approve of me getting a tattoo. They would probably get a heart attack if I told them, then, that I wanted to learn to tattoo.

They would use verses from the Bible such as, 

"Don't you know that your body is the temple of God, and that His spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple" 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 

Or, for a more in-your-face-without-any-metaphors verse:

"Do not  cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am your Lord."

Leviticus 19:28

I was kept the hell away from that kind of culture. But the more I was hauled away from it, the more I found myself interested and drawn to it. I kept thinking about getting a tattoo. And I wanted more and more to learn to tattoo also. Maybe I felt that by getting a tattoo I could finally break out of the life that seemed set up for me, and truly enjoy freedom. Yes, actually, come to think about it, the tattoo culture became the very symbol of freedom for me. It became an obsession. A dream. But because of school and other obligations, I didn't have the opportunity to touch the tattoo world.

After high school, one of the first things I did was get a tattoo. It is an eye, that I put on my upper left arm. The picture was from one of my old sketchbooks. Tattoos are addictive! They're not bullshitting! Not long after my first tattoo, I got my second and third: a cross on my left neck, and a heartagram on my right wrist. Not long afterwards, I got a half sleeve on my right forearm.

To make this short, I then went to an Art University in West Java. I took up fine arts (to no surprise). Studied painting, sculpting, photography, everything that I already knew. Formal education was pretty boring. I wanted to do something more challenging.

I couldn't keep up with the tight deadlines and busy schedules of college, and by mid 2008, I had decided to quit all this college bullcrap. I should to go back to Jakarta and learn to tattoo!