Hey this is Alex de Pase! I was born in the 1975, Italian tattoo artist, I’m a self-taught, and my interest and passion for tattoos come out more or less 20 years ago. Today I live and work in Grado, a small island in the north east of Italy, not so far from Venice. I never went to art school, but I studied arts and techniques by myself to use some artistic concepts that are proper of paintings in my tattoos.
My passion for drawing was indeed passed over to me by my mum, when I was a child. At the time she used to paint a lot and I, always on her side, would scribble over paper and smear all furniture….
Later on, however, I quitted drawing until I was 14, when I finally took up tattooing. My first clash with the tattoo world happened when I was 14 years old and I met a guy who had very many tattoos all over his body, which, 20 years ago, meant one thing only: prison! In fact this fellow learnt how to tattoo in jail, and since he told me that he was able to do tattoos I started begging him to teach me everything he knows about tattoos and tattooing, so he gave me the base skills for tattooing by hand with a bic pen melted with needles. For sure it was an hard impact, because since that i never quitted.
My way to see tattoos and tattooing changed a lot growing up!
When I was a kid I look at tattoos and at the tattoo artist work like a rebellion against “normality” and prejudices. At that time where I live, people knows more or less nothing about tattoos, so people thought bad things about tattoo artists and people with tattoos, this made me even more proud to show my tattoos. I remember that I was dreaming about opening a tattoo shop, but at that time it seemed impossible to me to earn enough money to live painting and doing what I love to do. I never thought that tattoo would have been slowly accepted by our culture, that, like today happens, more or less everyone likes tattoos and that today, after 20 years after my first approach, tattoo is considered a form of art like painting.
Today for me it’s a passion that allows me to travel a lot, a work for I’m happy to wake up in the morning, a way to relax and challenge myself.
After some years of doing more or less everything in every style I started focusing on what I like more, realism and portraits. This kind of style has the artistic expression that I like more, and it have no limits in technical improvement.
In my opinion, one of the most fascinating aspects of realism is that it is actually much more than what it is thought to be by simply being a mere reproducion of something already exhisting. I believe it is wrong to think that working on realism in arts means using techniques only.
To tell the truth, indeed it encompasses technique, and quite likely the most complex one, but also sensibility, personal interpretation, capacity to perceive the colours, the details, the atmosphere and so on. Each single artist has a personal experience background and feelings that convey in their ability to reproduce images, imprinting their own atmosphere in the tattoo itself. The more the interest in whatever surrounds us grows, the more we are able to go deeper into ourselves and catch their essence of things.
As a natural result, our achievements are greater and greater. And this is the reason why every realism artist feels greatly rewarded the very moment he/she brings the work of art to a completion , but at the same time that feeling of personal reward happens to be pretty momentary as, soon after, that same work of art will appear to his/her eyes as something already old and therefore to be improved further.
Whoever is not subject to this mechanism has quite likely stopped thinking. It doesn't mean they have reached their tops.
In my case, as well as in the case of many other artists in this field, it is a never-ending run towards perfection, as I am fully aware that, nothwistanding how beautiful and “perfect” a reproduction may look, it will always be less beautiful than reality, at least for the time being…
I'm organizing the 2nd World Wide Tattoo Conference in Chicago next april.