THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Tattoo artist Capobianco fleshes out the pin-up

Hank Hoffman

Joe Capobianco. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

Even if long sleeves covered his brightly tattooed arms, Joe Capobianco would still make an impression. Over six feet tall and topping 300 pounds, Capobianco sports a soul patch under his bottom lip and a modified pompadour held in place by his own pomade recipe. But it isn’t his striking appearance that Capobianco is known for. A tattoo artist for 17 years and an airbrush artist for 10 years longer than that, the gregarious Capobianco has made a worldwide name for himself in tattoo circles as the creator of the signature “Capo Gal.”

The “Capo Gal” is Capobianco’s twist on the classic – or infamous, depending on how you look at it – cheesecake pin-up. Insouciant and outlandish, the “Capo Gal” makes her appearance in paintings, books, collectible toys, and, most notably, on the skin of Capobianco’s tattoo clients.

Capobianco works out of Hope Gallery Tattoo, which he co-founded seven years ago with Eric Merrill and Julio Rodriguez. The shop, which moved to its present location on the New Haven border near East Haven a year ago, now has six full-time artists.

Defying stereotypes of dingy, hole-in-the-wall tattoo dens, the spacious shop feels more like a hip contemporary art venue. Each artist has his own room. The wide hallway doubles as gallery space, its walls hung with macabre and provocative paintings by Hope Gallery artists as well as friends who have shown in previous exhibitions. Capobianco says the art they show has more of a “lowbrow, underground feel. Hopefully you’re never going to see a landscape or a lighthouse in the shop unless there is a tentacle creeping up the lighthouse to pull it down.”

While Capobianco paints primarily with an airbrush, most of the other Hope Gallery artists create their non-tattoo works on canvas with oils or acrylics. A studio built specifically for that purpose abuts the high-ceilinged lobby.

Sitting at the coffee bar in the Hope Gallery lobby, Capobianco tells me he considers himself more an illustrator than a fine artist. He has been drawing as long as he can remember. In high school, he saw an artist using an airbrush to paint a mural. Smitten with what the airbrush was capable of, Capobianco took courses in using one.

“A lot of the artists I was into, the majority of their work was done by airbrush. George Petty, someone I’m hugely influenced by, was a watercolor and airbrush guy. Contemporary pin-up artists – Olivia (de Berardinis, published in Playboy) and (Hajime) Soryama (a Japanese artist known for his fetish pin-ups),” Capobianco recalls. “I discovered this stuff just out of high school when it was all still new to me. It concreted the road I was traveling on already with the pin-ups, girly art, and cheesecake.”

Besides the aforementioned trio, pin-up artists Gil Elvgren, Alberto Vargas, Earl Moran, and many others – inhabiting a world parallel to Norman Rockwell’s – influenced Capobianco. “They helped shape me in creating what I call the ‘Capo Gal,’” Capobianco says. “Certain things in the way a girl purses her lips, how big her eyes are, how shapely her figure is. That had a lot to do with how I approached my own particular style.”

But there is another – and perhaps surprising – strand to the “Capo Gal’s” DNA: Looney Tunes. Capobianco grew up watching old Warner Brothers cartoons drawn by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. His pin-up girls are “animated,” by which he means “that much more outrageous.”

“Nothing is proper, nothing is correct. The girls are too short, too wide, their heads are too big, or eyes too big, lips too wide. She’s not going to walk off the page,” Capobianco says. He likens them to the character Jessica Rabbit in the hybrid animation/live action film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

“You know she’s an illustrated character yet everybody looks at her like ‘Oh my god, how gorgeous that is!’” explains Capobianco. “It’s fantasy. To be honest, that’s how I’ve always looked at the pin-up world: It’s strictly for fantasy, it’s not real. These are women, even in realistic photo shoots, that you shouldn’t have the opportunity to meet or share a drink with them. They are there to set your mind on fire.”

Starting in high school, Capobianco made a living wielding his airbrush to paint denim jackets and T-shirts. Out of high school, he skipped college and art school to continue painting jackets and T-shirts. His acquaintance with the tattoo demimonde developed gradually. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-20s that he accepted an offer to apprentice with a tattoo artist who admired his airbrush work. The switchover took some adjusting.

“I thought of myself as a great artist. I was really cocky. I thought I was going to come into the industry with all the bikers and low-class art and really rock it,” recalls Capobianco. “Unfortunately, at the time my eyes weren’t open to how much talent was in this industry. The first hurdle to get over was realizing I wasn’t as good as I thought I was.”

The second hurdle was rather fundamental: Skin is not canvas, denim, or cotton.

“You have to think how the artwork will be affected by time and age. A person ages, their skin changes, there’s sunburns, people gain weight, people lose weight. Everything can affect the artwork you put on people,” Capobianco says. “One of the biggest hurdles was to reel myself in. ‘This will look better longer if I do it this way.’ You have to sacrifice certain things to get longevity for the person who’s going to be wearing the piece.”

A tattoo artist, Capobianco says, is an artist for hire. “Everyone in here has created a style,” Capobianco tells me, referring to his fellow Hope Gallery artists. “Between our website and word of mouth, people know the kind of work they’re looking for. We want individuals to come to us with ideas and we make the ideas happen. That’s why I consider us more illustrators than fine artists because we’re taking someone’s idea and just running with it.”

Capobianco usually prepares several sketches for a client. From the agreed-upon sketch, he makes a hectograph stencil, similar to what a doctor might draw on a patient’s skin before surgery. The tattoo artist preps the skin using alcohol and green soap and shaves the area where the tattoo will be. The stencil is applied using a soap solution. From there, Capobianco says, each artist has his or her own unique way of working. While he paints from light to dark when using an airbrush, Capobianco works from dark colors to light when creating a tattoo.

Tattoo needles come in liners and shaders and can vary in width. Different types of needles create different effects, from smooth color washes to solid line work. The pigments are usually vegetable-based powder dyes that are broken down with glycerin, alcohol, and water.

And does it hurt? Capobianco chuckles.

“It’s painful, certain areas more than others,” he acknowledges. A good way to judge how much it will hurt is, “if you are standing straight up and down, anything that doesn’t see a lot of daylight is going to hurt.”

“Everybody has a different threshold of pain. Some people come in here expecting it be a god-awful experience. They psych themselves up so much that the second they get hit with the needle they’re like, ‘Oh, this is nothing,’” says Capobianco. “Others think it’s going to be a cakewalk. They sit down and they’re in shock when the needle hits them.” He says he can count on one hand the clients who have been a “horror show” to tattoo.

During the time Capobianco has been in the industry, tattoos have gone mainstream, or so it seems. But while body art is far more ubiquitous in the culture these days, Capobianco notes that there are limits. “There’s still a good chance you won’t get hired if you have tattoos on your face, hands, or forearms,” he says.

His reputation has enabled him to travel the world as a tattoo artist. He’s been to Japan twice, Australia, Europe, and is entertaining offers from China and Russia.

“There’s no better way to get to know somebody,” says Capobianco, “than sitting down and talking to them for four hours while hurting them.”

Joe Capobianco can be found online at www.joecapobianco.com and www.hopegallerytattoo.com.



Doonesbury spends birthday in its birthplace

David A. Brensilver

	Doonesbury © G.B. Trudeau

Doonesbury, a comic strip that Yale University Press editor Michelle Komie said is “part of American visual culture,” is celebrating its 40th birthday where its characters were conceived.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is home to the Garry Trudeau Papers, a collection of “42 notebooks, dating from 1969 to 2007,” according to Louise Bernard, the library’s Curator of Poetry and Drama, Collection of American Literature.

“The collection,” Bernard said in an e-mail, “contains notes and sketches documenting the creation of Doonesbury and related work. The notebooks therefore document the transition between Bull Tales – the strip that Trudeau produced for the Yale Daily News – and the earliest days of the syndicated Doonesbury strip …”

“Related Trudeau material,” Bernard said, “is currently on deposit at the library (the Beinecke does not physically own the material and therefore it cannot be serviced by the library or accessed by researchers without Garry Trudeau’s permission). The deposit material consists of original artwork for the Doonesbury strips, arranged as ‘Daily Originals’ and ‘Sunday Originals’ with relatively complete runs from 1970-2001.”

The Beinecke will be presenting an exhibition called Doonesbury in a Time of War, which will showcase in large part the “original strips from the collection of deposited material,” Bernard said. The exhibition will be on view October 4 through December 17. At press time, Trudeau was scheduled to present a lecture on Wednesday, November 3 at the Yale University Art Gallery, with a reception at the Beinecke scheduled to follow.

The exhibition will coincide with the release of Brian Walker’s forthcoming book Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau, which is being published by the Yale University Press and is slated for November release.

As Bernard pointed out, Doonesbury began as Bull Tales in the Yale Daily News when Trudeau was an undergraduate student at Yale University. He earned an MFA in graphic design in 1973.

Walker, along with his brother, Greg, and Robert “Chance” Browne, creates the legendary comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, the latter having been created in the 1950s by their fathers Mort Walker and Dik Browne.

(Brian) Walker, a resident of Wilton, Connecticut, first met Trudeau in the early 1970s. A founder and past-director of the International Museum of Cartoon Art and the author of several books related to comics, he was a contributing author to Masters of American Comics, the catalog published in 2005 by the Yale University Press for an exhibition of the same name organized by the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Komie described Walker as “a real historian of syndicated comics” and said “he’s just kind of syndicated comic royalty.” When Walker approached her about Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau, she appreciated the connection the strip and its creator have to Yale and saw the project as a good match for the Yale University Press.

“We’re an art book publisher,” Komie said, and “this is a book of the art of this strip.” Not only that: It is the first time that a selection of Trudeau’s original drawings will be presented to the public.

Because Doonesbury has been and remains topical, Trudeau hasn’t received due credit for the strip’s artistic innovation, Komie said. Walker agrees.

“I still don’t think that Garry gets enough (credit) for his artistic talents and abilities,” Walker said. “I’m hoping, when people see this book it’s going to be an eye-opener.”

“Brian looks at the development of the strip, the development of Garry Trudeau’s … style,” Komie said of the book.

Trudeau, Walker said, “is a cartoonist that I admire and feel a kinship with.”

While doing research in Trudeau’s New York studio, Walker said he found himself looking through books of clippings, articles in which Trudeau’s work was framed as controversial or as having offended one politician or another. In other words, the clippings were not about Trudeau’s art and design.

“A little of that,” Walker said, “is because when he started he really didn’t have much experience” beyond the strip getting its start in the pages of the Yale Daily News.

The significant evolution of Doonesbury came after Trudeau took a nearly two-year sabbatical in the early 1980s, after which he made some decisions about artistic direction, Walker said.

“By the mid-1980s,” Walker said, “(Doonesbury) was a totally different strip.”

In his book, Walker wants people to see Trudeau’s artistic journey and the strip’s evolution. He also wants people to appreciate some of the Doonesbury-related materials the book showcases, including merchandise Trudeau and designer George Corsillo have produced for charitable causes over the years.

Corsillo, who recently relocated to the Westville section of New Haven from Darien, has been working with Trudeau since the mid-1980s. He designed Walker’s forthcoming Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau and many elements of 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, a book being published by Andrews McMeel Publishing that’s due out in October.

Having worked with Trudeau for as many years as he has, designing Doonesbury-related materials and coloring the strip itself, Corsillo said that he and Trudeau “sort of think with the same brain at this point.”

While he’s proud of the coloring he’s contributed to the strip, Corsillo said, “When you see Garry do the original drawings … they have so much energy.”

Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau, Corsillo said, “is a great book. … It’s really eye candy, besides the fact that Brian (Walker) did some really good research.”

In recent times, Walker said, Trudeau has reinvented Doonesbury yet again, this time through his writing. Justifiably, he said, much emphasis has been put on Trudeau’s political commentary, but “people tend to overlook the characters … which, to me, are sort of the core” of the strip. Trudeau, Walker said, sort of demands the involvement of his readers in the lives of his characters.

“This book is not a chronology of the strip,” Walker said, it is a showcase of Trudeau’s artistic development through outstanding examples of his artistry.

The process of putting together Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau has been unique in its relative ease.

“It rarely works out this way,” Komie said, talking about Corsillo being local and Walker being just down the road in Wilton.

In addition to geographical serendipity, Walker and Corsillo started on the same page.

“I have never … been more in-sync with the designer” on a book project, Walker said. “I’m really pleased with the way the book looks.”

Beyond his obvious talents, Corsillo “knows Doonesbury inside and out,” Walker said.

Certainly, Walker and Corsillo share an appreciation for Doonesbury as an ongoing documentation of and commentary on American culture.

“I think Doonesbury was the first sort of major, syndicated comic strip to be done by a baby boomer,” Walker said, which brought a very different life experience to the comics pages that had not previously existed. All the sudden, Walker said, an artist was doing something innovative in an old, stodgy environment.

Walker hopes Doonesbury’s 40th birthday “will be a time for people to see this chronicle of American history,” through characters who’ve experienced quite a bit in the past four decades.

Visit library.yale.edu/beinecke for more information about Doonesbury in a Time of War and yalebooks.org for more information about Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau.



Former director Helen Kauder returns to the helm

Hank Hoffman

Helen Kauder. Photo by Gabrielle Revere.

t is “back to the future” in more ways than one for Artspace. Longtime executive director Helen Kauder returned to head the organization at the beginning of July. (Leslie Shaffer, who replaced Kauder in 2007, resigned earlier this year to care for her young twins.) And in returning, Kauder has immediately put her stamp on this year’s City-Wide Open Studios (CWOS). After a couple of years in which the marquee visual arts event had been scaled back to one weekend, CWOS will again span three weekends this fall. Kauder is also resuscitating the use of an “alternative space” – a vacant building available for site-specific installations and ad hoc gallery space – and the mounting of a “festival exhibit” that showcases the work of all the CWOS participants.

“There’s something about the visibility of an event that spans three weekends,” Kauder tells me in an interview at Artspace. “It is a festival. As such, it deserves the kind of visibility an extended time period can give. The buzz builds.”

According to Kauder, there was general agreement that one weekend had proven insufficient for the interested audience – including artists who want to see other artists’ work – to take everything in. “There are a handful of people I know who try and hit every single studio to the best of their ability and we certainly want to celebrate and make room and time for these devoted followers,” Kauder says.

CWOS will take place the last weekend of September and the first two weekends of October. The weekend of September 25-26 will be devoted to prowling the maze-like halls of Erector Square in Fair Haven. Various studio locations throughout the New Haven area will be open the following weekend. The festival culminates the weekend of October 9-10 with a revived alternative space. This year’s alternative space will be housed in a building at the intersection of Crown and College streets, across the street from the new Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. The vacant building of street-level storefronts and upstairs offices is capable of showcasing some 60 artists and includes eight contiguous storefronts suitable for site-specific installations. The final weekend also features the opening of studios at 39 Church St., two blocks away from the alternative space.

The virtues of City-Wide Open Studios are virtues of discovery. After having been away for several years from direct involvement in the local visual arts scene, Kauder – like CWOS visitors new to New Haven – is looking forward to the chance to discover new artists. Along with that goes a celebration “of the neighborhoods and places where the work happens.” It’s an opportunity, says Kauder, “to think about and be able to appreciate in an urban context what makes New Haven so wonderful.” As an example she cites the Fair Haven neighborhood around the Erector Square complex, “the fact that that factory could reinvent itself as an important place for artistic production.”

CWOS, in many ways, is axiomatic of the dual role Kauder envisions Artspace playing in New Haven. CWOS exists both to showcase cutting-edge accomplished work as well as to encourage a democratic outlook on the arts. When Kauder initially took over Artspace in 1997, the organization had given up its Audubon Street home and was without staff, searching for direction. With artists Marianne Bernstein and Linn Meyers, Kauder initiated CWOS. It “gave Artspace new energy, new fuel,” Kauder says.

“It was a chance to operate without a fixed space, which for years Artspace did not have,” recalls Kauder. CWOS was a sprawling, open event. But Artspace also began presenting small exhibitions in pop-up storefront galleries under the aegis “untitled space.”

“This created a kind of balance between something curated and small and something large and very democratic. Some people have said the two approaches are very different and not obvious bedfellows,” says Kauder. “But I disagree. I think they feed each other. The democratic piece opens eyes to things we might not see otherwise. And the highly curated shows inspire and provoke in other ways.”

As is true of nonprofit organizations generally and arts organizations particularly, Artspace has been battered financially by the recession. Not only is corporate giving in general down, but some local companies that were formerly generous sponsors have been gobbled up by out of town corporations without a vested interest in supporting local culture. It is a problem that was already on the horizon when Kauder left Artspace in 2007 and it has only gotten worse.

“It’s a very challenging environment. Part of what Artspace is trying to figure out is a way to operate as nimbly as possible, and, frankly, within our means,” says Kauder. “In this environment, operating on the ‘if we build it, they will come’ model is too risky.”

Kauder says that, on the revenue side, she will be “aggressively looking at opportunities to seek grants and financial support.” Artspace will also be reviving its annual art auction in April; Christie’s auction house is donating the services of a contemporary art specialist as auctioneer.

On the cost side, Artspace will be shifting more staff to a freelance basis including those doing curatorial work. Kauder says that the organization’s Visual Arts Committee will be reinvigorated and invested with more responsibility for developing exhibitions. During CWOS, for example, committee members are “committed to go out and pound the pavement and see what’s out there, take the pulse of the artistic scene,” says Kauder. Over the course of the year, Artspace will have a mix of guest curators, independent curators, and arts committee members working as curators.

It prompts the question as to why she returned. In part, she says, being away from the organization enabled her to more fully appreciate its virtues.

“It’s the chance to operate a fantastic space right in the middle of the city, so close to downtown, so close to the train station – to New York, Bridgeport, Boston. It’s an organization that can make a difference in the art field. Maybe I didn’t fully appreciate that before,” says Kauder.

An additional lure back is the opportunity to work with young people attracted to the area by the colleges and universities. Kauder says working with Artspace’s interns and other young volunteers “allows for the possibility of experimentation and freedom and the chance to find people with a lot of energy and the willingness to work hard.”

Besides mixing curatorial approaches in its exhibitions and changing CWOS, Artspace plans to continue its series of “Underground” events. The “Underground” series, which presents music and performance acts in the gallery, “brings in people interested in experimentation but not necessarily within the visual arts world,” says Kauder.

“The beauty of a place like Artspace is that it’s small enough that it can be invented and reinvented and made to address the issues of the moment. It has a good enough reputation that it is able to work with major institutions in town and also in the field regionally and nationally,” says Kauder. “But it’s also malleable and that’s appealing.”

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