At the heart of this project is the fact that no matter how hard I try I can’t learn to play a musical instrument.
I’ve taken lessons, tried from books, even did the learn to play online stuff. I can learn simple songs systematically by following the directions, but that is the limit and that isn’t real music any more than painting by numbers is art.
I’ve been feeling blue though… I needed to express it and I simply can’t pull out my harmonica and play the blues. I’m a visual artist. I have been my whole life. It is what I do and what I am.
One day it clicked… If I can’t play blues music I will express it visually.
I dissected what makes me want to play those blues and realized everyone must get that type of stuff floating in their heads now and then.
Maybe it was love gone sour or mistakes you made in the past. Maybe it was addiction to booze or drugs. Maybe it was that no matter how hard you worked the price of living kept rising faster than your wages until you felt crushed by the weight of the world. It could have been watching a family member or close friend screw themselves up through bad life choices. Maybe you picked the wrong girl or guy… I don’t know, but you have been there. It all adds up too.
It is some heavy shit.

My original idea was to do a series of paintings focusing on the various reasons people feel so blue. Then I thought of doing it all in shades of blues.
I was thinking on those lines when I stumbled on an old coffee and nicotine stained sheet of tattoo flash I had drawn in 1987. It said “Screwed, Blued, & Tattooed” across the top and had a man’s ruin as a center piece. Ah… tattoos. Not much makes me want to sing the blues more than how the world of tattooing has changed over the years.

So it was to be tattoos. I wanted to play the blues and I now wanted to do it with tattoos.
First I decided it should be a 100% traditional American tattoo project. I thought that would represent the fall of American culture and the decline of the tattoo industry perfectly.
I then decided to go neotraditional with the project because I thought it would better represent the past and current age of tattooing in one swoop.

That in a nutshell (though a big one) is the why of this project.
So… I shall now be tattooing the blues.
I shall do it in my hometown. It is a small port town.
When I grew up in this small town it was a prosperous blue collar town. After the logging industry took a crash the mills took a crash. Bad management of our port hurt us. Fishing dried up and the small businesses that gave Port Angeles WA it’s flavor slowly faded away leaving just a few. The woods I played in as a kid have been mostly cleared away for the sake of failing progress. The ponds I floated around on with my friends after building rafts are all dried up. The salamanders, frogs, and turtles no longer call such places home. The streets I ran wild on are now home to the homeless. The kids who now run wild on those streets are often using meth, heroin, and prescription drugs at a very young age. I don’t like it one bit. I was considered a wild one as a kid. I would be considered an angel by the standards of today. What happened to pot and beer? These twacked out teens confuse me.
Then again I am living within a mile of beautiful mountains and the sea at the same time.
Where else could I have that? It is sad here and makes me blue, but is is still beautiful here when you really look.
Isn’t that what blues music is? Sad yet beautiful? The taste of bitterness mixed with joy?
That is what it is all about to me at least.

So here I go playing the blues in my own way.
I can’t play without skin though… these are tattoos after all.
So join me in making some art. Join me as I tattoo the blues.

This project has no particular end date. I will conclude it when I feel done with it.