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INKEDblog takes you beneath the skin of today's tattoo culture. Our mission is to celebrate tattooing as a modern art form which incorporates art, fashion, style, and pop culture. While paying homage and respect to the past, we look to present a contemporary take on the present and future of skin art.
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Wednesday Jan 18, 2006
Every BODY Has A Story - The Lotus Blossom
The stylized lotus blossom tattooed to my right arm is an exact reproduction of the lotus blossom which Art Nouveau artist Aubrey Beardsley employed in many of the pen-and-ink illustrations he drew during his short lifetime.
Beardsley, who moved in the same artistic circles as Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Lord Alfred Douglas, James McNeil Whistler, and numerous other Fin de Siecle writers and artists, was, in essence, a Victorian pornographer. Though many of the drawings he did for the Victorian magazine Yellow Book and the illustrations he did for several novelists of the time were extremely popular and critically acclaimed, Beardsley frequently pushed the artistic envelope by producing many tawdry and sexually charged pieces. Little men with giant phalluses and buxom women in compromising positions with smaller, almost boyish men were favorite subjects for Beardsley.
Though I am certainly attracted to Beardsley more ‘scandalous’ pieces, like many of his contemporaries, what draws me to Beardsley’s art is actually his amazing attention to detail and his ability to take organic images and turn them into intricately stylized designs. Anyone familiar with Beardsley’s art is well aware that his work is not limited to a central focus (or subject), but that much of what is interesting and important about his pieces are the incredible borders and margins, as well as the designs within designs that occur in something as minute as a butterfly’s wing.
Interestingly, Beardsley’s attention to margins in his work was reflected in his tragic life, as he was a marginalized person himself. As a tubercular alcoholic, Beardsley spent much his life in hospitals and sanitariums battling the two severe and contradictory diseases. In their memoirs, many of Beardsley’s friends note how he was misrepresented and misunderstood by society. He succumbed to disease at the age 29.
As an artist, Beardsley used very little color in his work. His favorite medium was black pen on white paper. Perhaps this was symbolic of his view of life…and death. Furthermore, symbols of death, such as the lotus blossom, often appear in his work. However, their presence is not so much ominous as it is a reflection of his understanding of his own mortality.
When I chose Beardsley’s lotus blossom for my tattoo design, I did so because I view the lotus blossom as a symbol of the ephemeral nature of mortality, but also as a symbol the eternal and circular nature of life and death…and their dependency upon each other.
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