California native Don Ed Hardy has been called the “godfather of modern tattoo” for his sophistication, technical brilliance, and mastermizing imagery. It is no surprise that in January 2005, the “king of jeans” Christian Audigier broke ties with Von Dutch on French national TV in order to promote the launch of a new vintage-inspired fashion line. Ed Hardy’s vintage tattoo graphics were the most sought after body art of his time. Now Ed Hardy has lent his name to this awesome line of Belts, this line of Ed Hardy Belts has already been spotted on the bods of the hottest celebrates.
Tatoo is really an art.
Archive for the ‘Don ED Hardy’ Category
Godfather of modern tatoo
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009history again
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009Don Ed Hardy is an American tattoo artist born in Iowa in 1945. Hardy was the first Western tattoo artist to incorporate Japanese tattoo aesthetic and technique into his work and is an accomplished fine artist, as well. In 1982 Hardy and his wife formed Hardy Marks Publications which published his five book series Tattootime, known for the high quality of both the articles and the full color images inside. In 2002 Hardy was joined wiht Ku USA, Inc. to produce a line of clothing based on Hardy’s tatoo art and shortly thereafter formed Hardy Life LLC, which holds the trademark ownership as well as the copyrights. There are currently approximately twelve Ed Hardy stores, located in Dubai, Los Angeles, Tucson, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Noosa on The Sunshine Coast, Melbourne, Sydney and Gold Coast. Additional stores are planned for Johannesburg in 2008 .
ed hardy growing
Sunday, October 11th, 2009In 1974, Hardy, whose 40-year-old son, Douglas, tattoos in Minneapolis, returned to San Francisco from Japan to open the first tattoo place focusing on one-of-a-kind commissions, a collaboration with the client. A surgeon got a giant squid whose tentacles curl around his shoulders, buns and legs. The tattoo stops above his elbows because the doc didn’t want to jar colleagues when he rolled up his sleeves to scrub for surgery.
Before Hardy came along, people usually wandered into a shop and pointed to one of the “flash” drawings on the wall and within an hour or so would have it etched in their flesh. That’s how Lyle Tuttle, the other famous San Francisco tattooer, worked .
Hardy got back into painting and printmaking seriously in the mid-’80s after moving to Hawaii, where he also returned to the long-board surfing of his sunny youth. In 2000, the Year of the Dragon, he painted a marvelous 500-foot-long scroll featuring 2000 dragons of varying size, shape and character in a stylistically diverse work that summoned the 19th century Japanese master Hokusai and American action painter Franz Kline.
“That freed me up,” Hardy says, “because most of my art had been either etching or tattooing — extremely tight, finicky kind of stuff. I was always interested in a freer kind of painting.” He advises young artists to free themselves from “some careerist agenda, and do art that really means something to you personally.”
Who was ed hardy,may be you know ,and you would know him detail.
ed hardy was a kid
Sunday, October 11th, 2009As a kid, Hardy sent away for tattoo supply catalogs advertised on the back of Popular Mechanics and was enchanted by Bert Grimm’s gaudy tattoo parlor at Long Beach’s Nu-Pike amusement park. He was also inspired by the tattoos he saw on men in wanted posters on post office walls.
Hardy found his metier a decade later at the Oakland tattoo shop of Phil Sparrow, a former Loyola English professor and friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Sparrow had bailed out of academia for the adventure and freedom of tattooing. He showed Hardy a book of full-body classical Japanese tattoos, and the young art student was never the same.
Handy pestered Sparrow to teach him the trade. Sparrow had learned it from a tattooer named Amund Dietzel, a Danish sailor who’d been to Asia, worked in Chicago and set up shop in Milwaukee. “The oral history of tattoos is fantastic,” says Hardy, who has published many books and magazines on the subject. “These old guys were like a bunch of pirates, and that’s what attracted me to it.” Hardy did some tattoos at Sparrow’s place. In the tradition, he did the first on himself — a Victorian rose with a woman’s face, on his left ankle — to know how it feels on both ends when the needle goes in.
Conceptual and minimalist art were becoming the rage, and Hardy didn’t go for either. He admired craft, which became a dirty word in the art world. “I love the fact that tattooing is a craft, that there is a working-class aesthetic to it. I came out of a blue-collar thing, and so did my wife. The craft aspect is what I also liked about etching: There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.
That’s who he was when he was a kid.
ed words
Sunday, October 11th, 2009An obsessive picturemaker since the age of 3, Hardy now divides his time between San Francisco, where his Tattoo City shop in North Beach is going strong, and Honolulu, where he paints and makes prints. He also spends time in Japan, where his images are being hand-painted on factory-produced porcelain and paper goods and where he’s going to create a giant dragon — king of the Asian mythical creatures — on the ceiling of an old Buddhist temple in Kyoto.
“I got it all goin’,” says Hardy, a modest, forthright and amusing man who in 1973 became the first Western tattooer to study under a traditional Japanese master, the prodigious Horihide, in Gifu City, where Hardy pierced and painted the skins of a number of the Japanese gangsters known as yakuza. Dressed in a green checked shirt, khakis and a pair of laceless mint-green sneakers bearing the Ed Hardy signature and his take on Tex Avery’s 1940s slobbering wolf, Hardy recalled his colorful history the other day at Tattoo City.
“Aesthetically, it looks good. I’m not ashamed of the stuff,” Hardy says. He originally partnered with the fashion firm KU USA. Audigier flipped when he saw Hardy’s work and made a deal with KU to market it. Hardy knew nothing about Audigier until he looked him up on Google and read about a party he’d hosted “in some secret location with Puff Daddy and all these people.” He called one of his partners and said, “This guy is at ground zero of everything that’s wrong with contemporary civilization. However, if he wants to make a lot of money with my art, and it’s not going to be overtly negative, then what the hell.”
The cash flow has given Hardy more time to spend with his wife, Francesca Passalacqua, and their boxer, Ruby, and focus on his painting. He does the occasional small souvenir tattoo — they usually cost $500 to $1,000 — but “I don’t have to tattoo much anymore,” Hardy said. “I put in my 40 years tattooing.”
He helped transform the medium, creating elaborately designed and colored customized tattoos that often took weeks. He inspired young tattooers from Australia to Europe, many of whom came to San Francisco to get a Hardy in their skin.
“He applied an arts mentality to tattooing,” said Ron Nagle, the noted ceramic sculptor and Mills art department chair. Nagle taught at the Art Institute in the early ’60s when Hardy, ceramist Richard Shaw and other art-mad Orange County kids came north to study. They brought a Southern California sense of light and color to the iconoclastic Bay Area sensibility. Pete Voulkos, the wild-man sculptor from Montana, was at Berkeley, fomenting artists up and down the coast who looked West to the Pacific and Asia, not East to New York.
“When you used to see tattoos, they were mostly black and blue, with a little red,” says Nagle, who shares Hardy’s passion for Morandi, craftsmanship and the merging of so-called high and low culture. “Don brought more colors, gradations and an almost airbrush quality that didn’t exist before.”
Yeah,that’s what ed hardy said.
tatoo star
Sunday, October 11th, 2009Forty years ago, Don Ed Hardy blew off a Yale fine-art fellowship to pursue the rogue art of tattoo, a timeless and often taboo tradition that captivated him as a boy in the Orange County beach town of Corona del Mar. By 10 he was drawing cars and eagles on kids’ backs and arms with wet colored pencils and Maybelline eyeliner.
At the San Francisco Art Institute in the early ’60s, Hardy mastered the demanding art of intaglio etching under the tutelage of the late Gordon Cook, a no-jive blue-collar guy who instilled in Hardy a love of craft, Asian art and the quiet power of Giorgio Morandi’s little still life pictures. Cook wasn’t pleased when his gifted protege jumped into the socially murky waters of tattoo. But it worked out well for the plucky Hardy boy, who blurred the supposed boundary between “high” and “low” art and carved a path through the worlds of art and commerce. He has drawn images on torsos, canvases and giant scrolls with equal conviction and aplomb.
A tattoo innovator and historian who expanded the palette and pictorial possibilities of custom-made body art, Hardy, who will talk about his far-ranging work at a free slide-show lecture at Mills College on Wednesday, is also a prolific lithographer, painter and etcher. His blazing images of devils, dragons, bearded ladies and Buddhas — informed by old master etchings, 12th century Japanese “hell” scrolls and 19th century woodblock prints, Southern California hot-rod striping and the funk and humor of Bay Area art — are widely exhibited and collected. And for the past year or so, his early tattoo images, the “retro” skulls, sailor girls and derby-topped dragons now in vogue, have appeared on T-shirts, jackets, motorcycles and even energy drinks sold worldwide under the Ed Hardy brand.
There are now Ed Hardy stores in New York, Los Angeles, Tucson and Dubai. That $20 million-a-year business, of which Hardy gets a small slice for licensing his name and art, is the handiwork of French-born marketing ace Christian Audigier, who pushed the Von Dutch brand and now has everybody from Madonna to Larry King draped in Hardy. It’s a pleasing turn of events for an artist who made his bones tattooing daggered hearts and anchors on sailors in San Diego in the raffish old days before body art became respectable. Now it almost seems as if there’s a Starbucks and a tattoo parlor on every corner.
“Why do people get tattoos? I don’t know. I think it’s a completely primal urge,” says Hardy, 61. He’s lost track of how many he’s had put on his body since he got his first tattoo, a rose on the left shoulder, at Frisco Bob’s in Oakland four decades ago. “It’s one of those mysterious things. Based on the evidence, the frozen mummies, the oldest members of our species had tattoos. I think it predated cave painting.”
Then a star is rising.
man for ed
Friday, September 11th, 2009Don Ed Hardy is one of the widely recognized person in the US renowned for his unique tattoo artwork. As a pupil of Sailor Jerry, Hardy is popularly recognized for incorporating Japanese tattoo aesthetic and technique into his work in which have led him to establish a strong name in the tattoo industry.
After years and years of perfecting his style and techniques, enjoying the limelight and recognitions from his tattoo artistry, Don Ed Hardy now chose a more quieter life in retirement. He now spends his time overseeing and mentoring artists at his San Francisco studio, Tattoo City. Since the 1980s, he has concentrated heavily on non-tattoo based art forms, especially printmaking, drawing, and painting.
Other than printmaking, drawing, and painting, have also become a designer of clothing lines known now as Ed Hardy Clothes. In 2002 Hardy was approached by Ku USA, Inc. to produce a line of clothing based on Hardy’s art and a licence agreement was signed. Within two years, the collection had drawn the interest of Saks companies. Hardy and Ku USA formed Hardy Life LLC, which holds the trademark ownership as well as the copyrights to all his images. Buy discounted wholesale ed hardy clothing lines by visiting an online wholesale clothing shop.
And then he made his success.
Ed empire
Monday, August 31st, 2009This is a collection this vast and fugly begs for all the attention it can get. Those of us who think Ed Hardy Vintage Tattoo Wear is simply relegated to tees and trucker hats are in for a rude awakening. Since debuting in 2004, the company, owned by Christian Audigier, has expanded from apparel to home furnishings, candles, hookahs, vodka, and even a smart car. Here’s how things have truly gotten out of hand.
We wish with all our hearts that we were done listing products offered by Ed Hardy, but there are more, many more, including but not limited to tanning lotion, helmets and lounge chairs. You get the point. Instead of experiencing a backlash, the way any overgrown brand would, Ed Hardy seems to growing by leaps and bounds. It even attracted the attention of Michael Jackson, who commissioned the “rocker chic” clothing line to design all his costumes for his “This Is It” tour before he passed.
Ultimately, the real victim here is Ed Hardy himself. Don Ed Hardy is a Southern California tattoo artist whose books and tattoo-inspired clothing line caught the eye of investors. Before Audigier purchased rights to his name and art work, Hardy was known and respected as a legendary tattoo artist. I don’t know how much respect he’s commanding these days with his work and name plastered on nasal strips and diapers.
However ,I give my honor to ed hardy.
how to be today’s ED Hardy
Sunday, July 19th, 2009From the beginning, Christian Audigier was drawn to the rock and roll style of fashion. In fact, he wanted to be a famous rock star, but lacked the singing voice. Christian then moved into fashion, building the impressive portfolio you see today. Christian has left his indelible style on various brands over the past 20 years, but now brings you his latest creations: Ed Hardy clothing, Ed Hardy shoes, Ed Hardy fragrances, Ed Hardy belts, Ed Hardy fragrance, Ed Hardy eyewear, Ed Hardy hats and Ed Hardy Kids’ shoes.
Christian Audigier and legendary tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy have combined their unconventional approaches and formed a vintage tattoo-inspired shoe line to complement the well-established Ed Hardy clothing line. Any comparable designer would rest on their laurels after having made such a distinct impression on the fashion world. However, Christian Audigier is not resting. His charismatic and colorful approach to fashion, fueled by Christian’s ebullient promotional strategy, allowed him to elevate the tattoo art of Don Hardy and create Ed Hardy clothing, Ed Hardy shoes, Ed Hardy fragrance, Ed Hardy belts, Ed Hardy eyewear, Ed Hardy hats and Ed Hardy Kids’ shoes by Christian Audigier. Ed Hardy is one of the hottest new brands and worn by style-conscious celebrities and non-celebrities alike.
Mirroring the brand’s bold and trend-setting ways, Ed Hardy’s line of fragrances and body products evokes the young, deliciously rebellious, and rock-star glam that has made Ed Hardy a household name.
With stores and scores of fans all over the world, Ed Hardy has become synonymous with edgy, rock n’roll-inspired style. Known for their use of dazzling rhinestones, vivid colors, and awesome images, Ed Hardy has truly created a one-of-a-kind look and lifestyle that’s truly unmistakable.
lovely shoe
Saturday, July 18th, 2009Recently I like one pair of shoes,as follows,it not only looks nice ,but also feels comfortable.
And now I’d like to introduce you some details.
Product Information:
1 Lively colors mix with spunky shapes to create the perfect look for your special style.
2 Classic canvas upper is updated with fun feminine graphics.
3 All Star logo patch at tongue for a bold statement of modern-retro style.
4 Iconic rubber shell toe.
5 Lace-up closure for a snug fit.
6 Soft textile lining feels fantastic on her little footsies.
7 Vulcanized rubber midsole and rubber outsole.
8 Rubber logo tag at back heel.
With all those advantages the shoe has,when you take it ,you’ll feel more than comfortable.
I wish I could have one .