Jeff Gogue Seminar Avignon — Graphicaderme

Hello everyone!

In 2014, I was fifteen years old and Jeff Gogue was mostly, in my mind, a friend of my parents who came to give a seminar in Avignon. It’s quite funny to write this today, because I realized much later the place he had in the tattoo and especially everything I was lucky enough to see without really measuring it at the time.

Growing up in that milieu often looked like this. My father organized seminars with tattoo artists like Nikko Hurtado, Shane O’Neill, Joe Capobianco or Jeff Gogue, and I mostly saw them as people I would find at conventions or who would pass through our neighborhood. I only understood global fame after that.

Three days watching him work

The seminar was held at Graphicaderme as part of Tatouage & Partage. Jeff spoke about his process, painting, references, and how he constructed his images. His universe mixes a huge amount of things: Japanese influences, neo-traditionalism, female figures, references to Mucha… but without ever giving the impression of having put several styles together.

At fifteen, I obviously didn’t remember all the technical explanations. But there is one phrase that stuck with me: the idea that we paint with love, before technique or ambition. At the time, I found it beautiful. Years later, it makes much more sense.

What I understood much later

When I started tattooing myself and looking for what really appealed to me, some things I had seen during those years came naturally enough. Notably, the idea that you can mix several references provided the composition was strong enough to hold them together.

I think my taste for color, Mucha, highly constructed imagery, and universes that don’t fit neatly into a box also come from there, although I obviously couldn’t reduce it all to just one seminar.

See the process rather than just the result

That’s probably the common point with Shane O’Neill’s seminar that I attended afterwards: what’s interesting isn’t just looking at a very beautiful finished tattoo. It’s seeing all that happens before that.

The chosen references, the hesitations, the changes, the way of simplifying an image and thinking about the body. When one only sees the final photo, one easily forgets all this invisible work.

This is also what I find today in my own way of working. I talk more specifically about this in my article on the construction of my Art Nouveau compositions.