Ink to Canvas: A Tattoo Artist Visits His Happy Place | Dylan Braccia

On a recent November afternoon in downtown Hartford, tattoo artist Calvin Von Crush strolls through the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, appraising the artwork. “I don’t like artsy-fartsy art,” Crush says. “That’s making art just to do it.” He bends over, exposing the giant bat on the left side of his head, to examine, Red Azaleas Jubilee, by African American artist Alma Thomas, a medium canvas of small red rectangles. “That’s too much for me, too hectic. I’d be uncomfortable with that in my house.” He breaks down the spacing on the right side of the piece. “That’s something called visual tension. They’re trying to create movement through the piece. It looks like everything was up here, tight knit, and it’s starting to fall apart as it comes down this way. It creates a sense of movement even though there’s no movement at all. So they knew what they were doing.”

The museum was quiet on a Friday afternoon. Crush walks slowly through the empty hallways. Crush is a walking canvas, with ink needled into his skin from head to toe. Wearing a black shirt over camo shorts, his slicked back black hair covered the tattoos over his skull. With all this ink, he could be framed on the wall at the museum. 

He stops beside “Skowhegan I” in the contemporary gallery by American artist William T. Williams. The painting has streaks of different colors, but these colors were not identical. “It’s connected to another reason why artists do that. Because we’re saying that visual tension is where you have tight spaces and open spaces. When you do colors that don’t match together, it creates tension,” he says. As a tattoo artist at Phoenix Ink in Southington, he practices the same illusion in his artwork. “With tattoos, it’s different because if I use a color in one spot, I try to use it in three spots. I want to carry that color through the whole piece. And there’s this big trend right now with a lot of people who want to do black and gray portraits, but then they want the animal’s eyes to be blue. I think it ruins the whole thing. It’s like I said, it’s that magic trick. And people are like, ‘oh wow! The eyes are blue!’ Like, shut up,” he laughs. 

“I like all kinds of different art, I really do. I tend to like subject matter and history of the individual piece more than anything,” Crush says. His excitement about the Spanish master is contagious. Upon seeing “The Woman of Algiers (After Delacroix)” by Picasso, he stepped closer to the painting. “He started a form of art called Cubism. One of the things that’s important to note about Cubism is that the way figures are distorted in space. You can see multiple levels of their party that you wouldn’t be able to see. Here, you will be able to see ass-cheeks and boobs at the same time. When he first started doing that, nobody had. That’s why he’s a pioneer. Sometimes it’s really, really hard to reinvent the wheel when beginning art. You’re influenced by so much art that’s out in the world as your own, you know? Everybody’s ripping each other off.”

Crush grew up drawing. As his mom worked flea markets on the weekend, he filled his time drawing for entertainment. He didn’t push himself to learn more art forms until he studied graphic design in college, where his interest was transformed. While studying at Tunxis Community College, he was offered a job at a piercing and tattoo shop. He took it under the condition that they teach him how to tattoo.

“Okay, [here is] one of my favorite pieces. Notice that this person’s clearly dead right? Look at the color difference of skin tones,” Crush says, using his inked fingers to point to the skin. He steps back from the painting and relates it to Théodore Géricault’s painting, “The Raft of the Medusa,” which is about a ship that got shipwrecked. “There’s living people and dead people on the raft. And the artist who painted it actually purchased cadavers and put them in his studio and let them rot so he could see what color the skin turned. He painted them in the painting. There was no Photoshop. I mean, that’s next level thinking too, and we take a lot of that for granted nowadays.” Crush finds this super interesting, as with his love for the horror genre, and his unique collection of mutant creatures, including two headed birds and conjoined turtles.

Next to Claude-Joseph Vernet’s painting, “The Storm,” Crush compares his work to other artists and tattooists. “It works two ways. I’ll see somebody who is at a higher skill level, and just make me feel like I’m inadequate. And then also, there’s somebody who’s not as skilled as me, gets a cool idea for a tattoo, and if they came to me I think, ‘I could have done a much better job,’” he says. “Sometimes I look at people’s body of art, and I’m just like, ‘I’m lazy. Should I not go out, get dinner and drinks with my friends and go home and paint at night? Am I wasting my ability? Should I be a better artist than I am, because I need to spend more time doing art?’ It’s a weird balance. Art is very anxiety-inducing for me. People are like ‘it makes me relax.’ No it doesn’t. Because if something doesn’t come out the way I want it to come out, I beat myself up.” 

Crush continues down the hallway of the museum, his love for the art plainly displayed on his face. The walls of inspiration expand what an artist’s mind is capable of. Crush takes it all in, slowly turning to walk deeper into the Wadsworth.

Dylan Braccia is a Staff Writer for Blue Muse Magazine.

Header image: tattoo artist Calvin Von Crush standing in front of Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1777 by Benjamin West.

Header image courtesy of Dylan Braccia.