Reknown for his impressive mandalas that he puts everywhere in any kind of sizes, Mayonaize is originally a tattooer from New-Zealand and shares his time now between the two disciplines.
Between graffiti and tattooing, which one came first?
No, I tattooed first. I’m from New-Zealand. I was originally painting houses before moving to Australia to work as a tattooer. It took me a couple of years to get an apprenticeship. Then I wanted to find some air and that’s when the graffiti came in. I was getting stressed, because tattooing is very personal, very important – you’re right here with this person and you can’t fuck it up. So I looked for something that was a little bit less personal and important, and I found graffiti. I’m self taught. I was looking for a hobby, something I could go outside and walk around and do something that was art related because I wanted to get better at tattooing. I watched a graffiti documentary –“Style Wars”, done in the 70’s, about the birth of graffiti in New York -and it inspired me. It was what I was looking for. I started in 2005. Then at some point I realized I needed a good tag and the tag was where the lettering came from. I started studying the tags, I discovered LA style gangster chicano writing and then that was sort of the birth of my interest in calligraphy.
Doing letters, was it something you felt already close to in tattooing ?
I started gravitating towards neo-traditional sort of stuff and japanese style and then I started at the studio to be the guy that did script. Everyone that came to the shop I had a knack for drawing cursive script so I was doing all of that. Everyday would be either roses, snakes, skulls, or birds and then script in between.
It seems today you’re mostly concentrating on lettering, is it from your own initiative ?
People asked for tattoos of what I was painting, more than what I was drawing so, I had to figure out a way of translating my brush technique to tattoos. The style of drawing was closely related to script, with a graffiti style to it. I just developed a technique where I could basically do the same thing that I did with a marker on someone’s skin. And I’m gone from there. Actually the first time I did was here in Japan (the interview took place at Three Tides Studio in Tokyo, ndlr) where I pretended to the client: “Yeah, yeah, sure I can do it, I’ve done that before ”. And then I had to do this dragging technique by basically drag the machine, the needles across the skin like would a marker, and shape the letters like this without outlining. That was the beginning of now.
How do you work to get these shapes with letters?
The client sometimes comes in with one word, like “patience” to get tattooed over and over again, and this creates a different dynamic and more of a geometric idea. Because wether you’ve got letters or something else, you repeat those, so the shapes and the strikes become almost like their own form of sacred geometry. But if you have a phrase that is like eight words long - like a bible verse that I recently had, you don’t get a repetition of letter shapes and strikes. This is a different aesthetic that you get inside these mandalas. So it’s always down to the client. I love it when they ask me to write this and this because the letters dictate the overall aesthetic of the piece. If there are a lot of “R”, and “K”, “J” it looks different to a one who has a lot of “O”, “L” and “I”.
Is it meant to be understandable?
It’s not about the phrase but about the overall aesthetic. It’s meant to be decorative, to make your eyes happy. People tend to get really strange phrases though because it’s very hard to read. And I think this is one of the reasons why people come to me, it’s because they want to get something a little bit out there, or something private. They know what it says and only them know. Not even me because now I can’t remember! (laughs). Sometimes when I do these ones I can’t fit the whole word at the end and I never rearrange the spacing to accommodate the phrase. Sometimes I have to cut the word, just to fit the circle, but what I say is that it’s not about what it says, it’s about the way it looks.
Do you consider yourself a typographic artist?
I have a bunch of different styles that I can do. From sort of cursive flowing scripts to, I guess, gangster looking beats or the crazy flowing style… You need to have different styles, you can’t just be on one thing. But it happens that one style is popular at one time. You try to stay inside the request of the client but then move your style further forward, always because otherwise you ended up getting stuck and still. Each day I’m doing a letter slightly different. Every time I tattoo or paint, the letters are changing, I’m refining the style and finding new ways to do certain letters. In my mind it’s always a different script but I think I’ve been concentrating on this specific style for maybe 2 years.
Which script do you use?
I like MY letters. That I create by myself. For a long time I had the whole alphabet except a few letters – “j”, “q”. I love letters, I love doing lettering, and even if it’s really tight super clean beautiful script for some memorial tattoo or whatever I just try to enjoy what I do. I do everything free hand. And I generally expect my clients to come in for whatever’s count as my style. Sometimes I have to adapt to that. I think it’s definitely the way the body moves, and where it is on the body that dictates the style to a certain extent. There are certain areas where you can’t do a circle, nor a straight line. But the bones of the style, the bones of the letter form is still the same.
Still, you’re work is very impressive for its precision.
When it comes to a tattoo that’s very important. The precision is something that people mention a lot because they’re always surprised that I can keep things so symmetrically straight. There’s no esthetic that I try to conform to and say: “Hey, this is the essence of it”. It’s all about getting loose, having fun and making sure that what you do feels good and you’re not thinking about it too much. As soon as you’re going think about it too much, it’s when you’re going to make a mistake. It becomes unnatural, contrived. And people don’t like things that are contrived.
How do you explain you got so much attention from your graffiti work?
Just from painting, from being consistent. I was obsessed with spray painting, with graffiti. I would go out 4 nights a week, and do sometimes throw ups which is the chromed filled in big pieces that just say “Mayo”. Then I would do rooftops, track sides, etc, and between spots I would do what we call bombing, tagging.
How did this calligraphy esthetic come into ?
Using a spray can on a wall I couldn’t really emulate the shape that I wanted to make, so I decided to evolve to the brush. The can has overspray and the brush behaves on its own, it got finer lines and textures that I enjoyed using, I could control it better. I used a round brush and that was my first sort of style that people started to recognize. I was doing a little bit of stuff with markers and this japanese artist Usugrow came to Australia and I watched him paint with a flat brush. I was like:” I can’t do this flat brush stuff, but I can do the round brush”. Because I guess I was pretty wild and I like to get really loose with my movements and the round brush really suited that. So I became sort of known for this really hieratic, almost rhythmic round brush style. Then I ended up getting sort of sick of doing this and I didn’t translate so well in tattooing, but I remembered the flat brush. I started to try the shapes I made and that was what made it easier for me to tattoo on people. I can just use a marker and pretend to brush on your skin and then just tattoo that shape straight on to you.
How do you split your time between graffiti and tattooing ?
That’s the hard part. I don’t go out at night and do illegal pieces anymore. It’s not that I don’t have time because I always made time for it, but I just don’t have that fire in me to go and break the law and run around at night doing shit like that when I can go to some beautiful studio, paint a mural for some people in a nice environment. I prefer to do that. Commissions, working in my studio on canvas… this is more enjoyable for me now. Recently I’ve become really busy with tattooing. Before I was busier with painting. I just take it as it comes. I’m not so much financially motivated but if something’s gonna pay me better, I’ll do it.
What about these tattoos “self made” that you have?
That was one you can tell by the style, that’s fucking old, 2005 I probably got that. The main aspect was that like, I felt that people were looking at me like: “It must have been a fucked up life to be all tattooed like that”. But I haven’t, I had a great life, I got a really good start and had a very generous family. Even though I was adopted, what the “Born lucky” tattoo around my neck refers to. The self made meaning was I chose to be like this. By the time I was 18, I had stomach, half back, wrist, half sleeve tattooed. So I was getting tattooed for 3 years before I was allowed to. It was not common in NZ or Australia but I wanted to commit to tattooing and not to have an option of getting out being a tattooist. I’m now 36 with a 16 years career as a tattooer. MORE: www.mayonaize.com IG: @mayonaize
