We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adrienne Lysette a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Adrienne, appreciate you joining us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
I’m pretty content to work as a creative but, I have thoughts of working a regular job almost every day. I’m in my early 20s, and I’m still navigating life. I sometimes feel like I’m missing out whenever my friends talk about their summer internships, the benefits their new 9-5 gives them, or the fact that they’re moving somewhere new for work. What attracts me to that is the stability they’re guaranteed and the fact that an HR department typically regulates these jobs to ensure I am being treated fairly. It’s no secret that Tattoo shops will haze and harass their apprentices. Apart from tattooing, I’m always on the lookout for what I can do on the side to build a safety net. I’m honestly friends with the brightest, most hardworking people in the world. There was a moment over the summer when I was at a friend’s birthday party, and everyone was talking about their capstone project, their internship or who they could connect each other to. During that time, I had taken a break from tattooing. The summer is the slow season, so I took the time to transition to different work environments. It was a well-needed break, but I didn’t have a steady flow of income for two months, and I kept thinking about how badly I wanted to relate to them and be an average 20-year-old. Everybody wants financial stability, but nobody wants to “sell their soul to corporate.” With the recession and the oversaturation in Dallas, it’s nearly impossible for new graduates to find a job nowadays. I’ve heard stories of people being rejected despite stellar credentials and many connections. Technology is evolving rapidly, and after dozens of old classmates and friends told me how lucky I was to be self-employed and work a job AI could never replace, I accepted tattooing as a viable path.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Sometimes I feel like tattooing fell into my lap. When I was a teenager, I thought it would be cool to be a tattoo artist, but I had never considered it since I knew what the industry was like and how it ran. I took a gap year because I had just changed my major, and I didn’t know what I wanted to study. I was getting a tattoo from Oz (@oz.inkz), and he suggested I apply for an apprenticeship. Around the time I graduated high school, the Fineline style blew up in Dallas. Before, I felt like I had only ever been exposed to thick, bold traditional tattoos, and when I saw fine-line tattoos online, the artists were always primarily based out of South Korea or China. Although I always thought it was cool, I was apprehensive about it. Whenever you went on any tattooing subreddit, traditional artists would insistently bash it, saying that it’s not real tattoo art and that it would heal horribly.
I apprenticed at an Asian-owned, non-traditional studio focused on fine-line tattoos. I had initially started my apprenticeship wanting to do ornamental, neo-traditional Filipino/Polynesian style tattoos. I thought it would help me stand out and would help me reconnect with my heritage. However, the studio wanted to generate artists who were solely well-rounded Fineline artists who could do illustrative designs, florals, and script—the trendy stuff. I was stumped because I couldn’t practice the style I initially wanted to do. My art at that time was a very personal and emotional thing to me, and it started feeling like a 9-5 rather than a trade, so I started looking at other possible career paths for me to fall back on. Once I left that first studio, I fell in love with Fineline and realized how important my first workplace was to me. I started realizing I wasn’t just Filipino but also part of the Asian-American diaspora. My old coworkers were other fellow Asian-Americans with similar interests and similar upbringings. The clientele I generated were mainly Asian Americans. We all shared the same sentiment of growing up in the West and never feeling Asian enough or American enough. Things I’ve spoken to clients about include how it wasn’t cool to be Asian in the 2000s, putting up with casual racism from teachers and our peers, never feeling represented adequately by the media, being underhandedly labeled as the white-adjacent model minority, and the generational trauma passed down to us from our parents immigrating to the US to escape war, poverty or communism. People outside the DFW metroplex don’t know how diverse and tight-knit the Asian community is here. We all grew up with our parents shopping at 99 Ranch, hanging out at K-Town, and eating at hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurants in Garland and Arlington. What sets me apart from other artists in the area isn’t necessarily the fact I do fine-line, but the fact that I solely do Fineline to a specific audience. Still, anyone who’s come to me knows I create for my community, and my designs pull from Asian paraphernalia. I started tattooing to reconnect with my culture. In turn, my clients will get tattoos that help them connect with theirs.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I understand the differentiation of creatives and non-creatives in an industry sense, but everyone can develop their own process. What I believe many people don’t understand when they separate, for example, a writer and an accountant, is that when it comes to creation, all humans have a creative sense, and creativity is a valuable asset to any career path. Children have this innate attraction to creating, whether through drawing pictures or playing make-believe. I think of it as two beings operating in your body: your drive and your craftsman. They both live in the landscape of your inner world, soaking up new experiences and interesting information. One stays behind and processes that inspiration into abstract thought in disorganized imagery or feeling; the other tries to materialize it into something tangible for the outside world. The drive has always conflicted with the craftsman because no direct bridge connects them. I believe that when you grow up, the ego appears to remodel the bridge, making the transmission between the two littered with detours and slowdowns. Art has always been a commodity and people tend to view art as only the output. The drive longs to transcend ideas of the inner world. When creation becomes production, the drive is fatigued, and the craftsman becomes stationary. I think this journey of finding harmony between your drive and your craftsman is universal for everyone; It’s seldom a one-time fix. What I find helps me is remembering a time before I became a tattoo artist, before my ego had jaded the bridge.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
The book that touched me the most in the past year is a memoir by Professor Hua Hsu called “Stay True.” It takes place in Southern California in the mid-to-late 90s and is a detailed retelling of the author’s college life and brief, unlikely friendship with his classmate Ken. In its short 193 pages, it’s a compound of a coming-of-age, an allegory of immigration and assimilation. On the surface, the book is a slow burn that reckons with the author’s grief of losing his friend in a carjacking; its a philosophical reflection on how each individual should practice human connection. Ken unknowingly follows the words of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, “choose knowing rather than being known.”
When I think about tattooing as a whole, it isn’t just a service you perform but an exchange of insight between the artist and the client. This is a philosophy I’ve recently implemented in my day-to-day. In an entrepreneurial sense, the book taught me to care more about the person in the chair rather than how much money I will make from them and how this piece will benefit my portfolio. I believe that what attracts people is genuine curiosity and showing them that you truly care about their comfort and that they’re in control of their body. From what I’ve observed in my two years in the tattoo industry, the more successful an artist becomes, the more they begin to care solely about money; yes, money is important, but when you lose a sense of humility, it subconsciously becomes a part of your brand. It’s going to affect the way that your audience will perceive you negatively.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @lys.ttto
Image Credits
Portrait: Soma Fukuta