DAVE WAUGH: TWISTING THE NIGHT AWAY

By Chris Pfouts

Twisted traditional: This is the psycho tattooscape, Here the sentimental heart becomes drippingly, where the old standard black panther comes out in anatomically correct, and lady luck looks like some royal royal blue with flowing crimson hot-rod flames. One you might want to get lucky with.
In this strange and colorful land, Dave Waugh is the Duke of Earl.

"I used to draw naked women all the time when I was a little kid," Dave said. "Now I do it for a living. It's weird how things come around. All the sick and twisted bizarre stuff you used to draw when you were a little kid, you end up doing for a living."

Chemistry and geography played a major role in forming and nurturing the art that has earned both Dave Waugh and Little Vinnie their well-deserved international reputations. "Around where we live, people just want to go for that basic, traditional-styled stuff," Dave said. "Nothing too fancy. As we got more well-known, people started getting the more wacky stuff. It just grew from traditional to twisted traditional." That's chemistry at work.

Geography plays its part through the relative isolation of their Westminster, Maryland location. The closest tattoo studios is in Baltimore, a 45 minute drive away. "We didn't have anybody around us to subliminally rip off," Dave said. "If you're in California, you've got ten tattoo shops within walking distance. It's real easy to see something that the guy is doing down the street and work it into your style. We have nobody around here that we could work from, so we pretty much created it all ourselves. I guess that's why our flash looks original, because we've just had each other to work from."

When Waugh hired on at the studio, drawing was at the top of his list. "We started filling up the shop with our own flash, and it just kept going," he said.

Dave and Vinnie usually split the flash sets, each drawing five sheets. They have a solid working philosophy about what flash should be, which reflects their blue-collar, street shop situation. "Some people will draw up a flash set with real big designs that are unusable," Waugh said. "We try to keep everything medium-sized and affordable." And they use their customers' input to choose subjects that will sell. Popular demand for smaller versions of Henry Rollins' back piece sun a few years ago led them to draw up their own sheet of sun faces. The same thing occurred with the popular dolphin. "We did millions of dolphins," Waugh said, "and drew a dolphin sheet. We drew a tiger sheet. Just basic stuff like eagles, tigers, dolphins-we had other flash that looked like crap. We knew we could do a much better job." And then, in the pressure cooker, the images began to twist.

Dave Waugh especially enjoys automotive and gearhead images, which has made his flash a worldwide favorite with rockabilly cats and kittens and visionary greasers of all kinds. "I didn't think people would get it that much, but they do." He said. The gearhead stuff is a big hit with Japanese rockabilly cats. "Traditional American stuff on Japanese cats, it looks great," Dave said.

He lists his artistic influences as Robert Williams, Big Daddy Roth, and cartoonist Tex Avery-three guys who've devoted their lives to twisting reality. And Dave Waugh of Westminster, Maryland, goes on, twisting the night away.