We were approached by Eric Georgeson, a close friend of Jamison Stagaard in regards to viewing and supporting his Youtube video: TATTOO ARTIST – Jamison Stagaard – Handcrafted. Now, normally these emails go straight into the delete folder, you won’t believe how many requests for supporting this random guy, this random shop, this random thingamajig we get on a daily basis. I don’t know what caused me to bother clicking the link to the video this time, maybe it was because it was not the actual person touting his own horn, it was simply a good friend reaching out to get some support for his buddies work and I respected that.
Anyway, I checked out the video and it was 5 minutes of my life that I did not waste. It was well put together and I felt that a lot of the things it talked about really resonated with the heart and spirit of the tattoo industry.
Jamison Stagaard is a Neo-Traditional Tattoo Artist out of Costa Mesa, CA. He comes from a long line of of artists, his father before him and his father’s father before him. So he always knew he was going to be doing some kinds of hands on crafts at a young age. Tattoo was a natural fit, its hands on and its right in front of you. He is passionate about portraying art artistically. He has his own unique style and likes to experiment. He likes heavy blacks to build contrast and antique looks to build an obscure look. A colleague in the video describes that his style is very specific and while it is not always going to please everybody, it does please most and he is okay with that. Another colleague describes his work as “Best to do is just let him go with it and do what he does and you won’t be dissapointed.” He also does prints and t-shirts.
Jamison did his apprenticeship at Lucky Hearts, now known as Only Glory. He describes his time there as exciting and crazy. He figured the more time he was there, the more time he invested, the sooner he would be a tattoo artist. He says the environment was conducive to helping him grow as an artist. It is important that an artist is surrounded by other good tattoo artists to be inspired towards being good. There was no competition there, everyone just helped each other out. He reiterated the importance of the environment and the positive energy it generated to help all of the members of the shop grow.
Jamison believes that him and other tattoo artists like him are always changing, evolving and are never actually content with their work. To be content is to have nothing motivating to continue. I really liked this.
