We recently connected with Lu Brewer and have shared our conversation below.
Lu, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had started sooner?
When I say that I went to the Maryland Institute College of Art and became a Tattoo apprentice directly after graduation, people usually don’t understand my decision making. Why go to an expensive art school for four years only to wind up in a field that does not call for any specific education requirements? Why not just start early right out of high school like most tattoo artists?
To be honest, I had no intentions on pursing a tattoo career when I decided to attend M.I.C.A., nor did I even think I would attend college at all the year prior. I usually don’t know exactly what I want to do until it comes down to the wire, however, I did know I needed to do art. If I could get away with it, that is. I would kid myself a lot my junior year of high school, thinking I could hustle as a free lance artist or an art tutor and skip out on a further education. I was very interested in tattooing at the time, but I was too intimidated by the industry. I was scared of being picked up at a shop filled with “old-head” tattooers unafraid of hazing apprentices with endless shop chores, cruel jokes, and never being able to progress. There is a million horror stories of tattoo apprenticeships gone wrong, and I didn’t want to be one of them.
However, when colleges started visiting my high school senior year, the one presentation that stuck with me most was from M.I.C.A.. I thought, maybe there was a chance I would go to college after all. After conducting more research, I decided M.I.C.A. was the only school I wanted to apply too. Thankfully, I got in. M.I.C.A. is where I really began to expand on my talents. Just as I was finding my muse my sophomore year, the pandemic happened. I took a year off from school to avoid online learning. Little did I know, the trajectory of my life’s work would change forever. During my year off, I finally began tattooing… somewhat.
When I arrived back in my home state, my boss who ran an art studio that I taught classes at offered to start teaching me how to tattoo out of his home studio. I took up this offer, not necessarily committing to tattooing as a career just yet, but as a new medium. Going from 24/7 working on paintings and prints and keeping up with deadlines to absolutely nothing called for a new kind of dedication, and in 2020 tattooing became that dedication. In hindsight, speaking as a professional tattoo artist now working out of a shop, it was really more of a hobby at the time since this “apprenticeship” was not standard, consistent, or gave me the knowledge to excel. Yet, it did give me the comfortable introduction I needed to start this journey.
After I went back to school for my Junior year at M.I.C.A., tattooing was put on the back burner. For the next two years, I was blinded by project after project, series after series. My head was burrowed so deep in my fine art, I couldn’t hear the outside world, or my impending graduation. By the time I got out of school, I still didn’t know where I wanted to land. I poked around on Indeed and other websites, but I kept circling back around to tattooing. I had only done a handful of tattoos since going back to school full time, but the more invested I got in tattoo culture, the more I knew it was something I had to do. I could feel the untapped potential in my blood and knew I could take tattooing so much farther in the right apprenticeship. That is when I found Studio 7.
Tom Chetelat, the owner of Studio 7 Tattoo, gave me the perfect conditions to hone my craft. It was grueling at first, practicing hand control and relearning basic muscle memory after years at art school, but extremely necessary! After all, you are prepping for permanently altering someones body! While it has had it’s challenges this past year, it has also been extremely rewarding. I would not have changed anything about it.
I think if I were to wish away my years at M.I.C.A and trade them for an apprenticeship right after high school in my little hometown back in Jersey, I would lose my mind. I wouldn’t have been a fraction as talented, trained, or successful. The high school portfolio I used to get into M.I.C.A. alone I loathe with a passion now. I learned an indescribable amount from my professors and peers over the years and truly unlocked a more advanced approach to my art. I was producing more challenging work at a rate faster than ever before. Even in the physical sense, I had a rock solid foundation in hand dexterity and tuned fine motor skills from the endless list of assignments. It really started off my apprenticeship 10 steps ahead of most other people. Not to mention the importance of leaving my hometown. As someone who suffers from C-PTSD, the town I grew up it never felt safe as a long term option. My mental health would have been strained trapped in that zip code. Going to Baltimore was exactly what I needed. Being exposed to more people, venues, galleries, protests, pride events, museums, and access to trains and public transportation to go even further to even newer cities made me remember I was alive and participating in the world around me. Without coming to Baltimore, I would have never met my partner and my beloved cats whom I rush home to everyday. I think without all these experiences, I would be lost.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My main focus at the moment is tattooing, but I do still specialize in acrylic painting and printmaking. Through my painting and printmaking practice, I explore the intricacies of human behavior and corporeal anxieties leading up to and after death. I conceal my exploration within the visual languages of medical phenomena, invasive surgeries, Judeo-Christian myth, archaeological findings, osteology, and the macabre. My work aims to present a raw experience exploring the philosophy and impact of death and injury through multiple lenses and perspectives. I try to sign up for as many shows and vending events as I can to sell prints and originals. I especially keep an eye out of the ones with macabre themes. Five of my works will be displayed at the Club Car for their Slayed Exhibition until mid November and I will be vending at the the Convention Center for World Oddities Expo on 26th. I will also be applying and hopefully vending at the Ottobar November 10th for their Punk Rock Flea Market and possibly at M.I.C.A.’s Holiday Art Market! Fingers crossed!
As for tattooing, I specialize in fine line alongside black and grey stipple-shading. However, I am open to tattooing any kind of style I can. At the moment, I am building up my clientele, but for a newer artist like me in a city I didn’t grow up in, I don’t have many connections yet! Regardless, It has been so awesome to see how many great people with the coolest ideas have become regular clients of mine. It is especially heartwarming when those regulars are queer and feel more comfortable with a queer nonbinary tattoo artist! I am constantly making designs and flash sheets I’d love to tattoo. The latest one I am working on is a collection of spooky drawings for a Halloween flash event at Studio 7 we will be having on “October 32st” (November 1st) Called Halloween: Part II! We are also planning a flash day for the upcoming Friday the 13th in December!
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
When it comes to my personal practice in fine art, the most rewarding aspect is the subconscious communication of creation itself. I know that sounds absurdly broad, but there is something about being a conscience in this world, feeling around in the dark, grasping at the emotions and experiences you can, absorbing it all into that isolated mind of yours and regurgitating it into something new and unrecognizable, yet irrevocably beautiful. At the end of the day, my subconscious is making me create the things I do for reasons I am still uncovering. It is like being an archaeologist to your own mind, or even to the foundation of your own existence. That isn’t even the most rewarding part though, the most rewarding part is presenting this new thing you have brought into this world to others. That is because when these unfamiliar consciences witness this creation, they absorb it into their subconscious and the synapses in their brain form new connections between neurons and relate the foreign visual to a personal emotion, a memory, or a feeling in a matter of seconds. It is always so intriguing to hear the projections and insights others have triggered by looking upon something they haven’t seen before, but even more so when individuals happen to have the same connections that you, the artist, were thinking of as well. Being able to effectively communicate something subconsciously through an image or object is something sacred that I cherish participating in.
On the tattooing front, the most rewarding part is playing a role in people’s self-expressive autonomous journey. Tattooing is a way for an individual to show ownership over their own body as a consenting adult despite what others think. Tattoos can be intentionally meaningful that make the individual feel nostalgic, loved, seen, respected, strong, or literally any other idea you can think of. Tattoos can be powerful personally or culturally and have existed since the beginning of mankind. Or, they can be absolutely pointless with no purpose except for the sake of comedy. Yet, that in and of itself proves tattoos, at least in western culture, have evolved to represent autonomy! Whether it be flowers for a lost loved one, an anatomical heart for self love and resilience, or Doodle-Bob from SpongeBob SquarePants, I pride myself in being able to help this person achieve their desire to have their skin permanently altered. More specifically, I feel most abundantly grateful to those who take my advice based on my experience and artistically elevate their requests, or even consider adding one of my personal artworks to their tattoo collection. Nothing beats the feeling I get after creating a beautiful tattoo with my clients and seeing that smile and positive energy shine through them as soon as they look at the finished product.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
When it comes to tattooing, my goal is to foster an amazing community of clients where we can nurture one another’s ideas and opinions to create killer works of art that leave both parties beyond happy! At the moment, I am more than content tattooing any style for the sake of experience, but once I find the styles and imagery that speaks to me most, specializing in that genre and finding a clientele that allows me to live off of that work would be an absolute dream. This goal is going to take many years and lots of dedication, but honestly, it is the only place I see myself in when I think of the future.
As for my fine art practice, my current goal is to keep my finger on the pulse of Baltimore’s galleries and vending events. I would love to do as many as I possibly can, but struggle to see flyers and calls for art after the application deadlines have passed. Even though I am newer to the vending game, I have been researching all the best ways to do it right and consistently ask myself, “How I can improve? How can I make my art more accessible?” Once I sell the more large scale original artworks at these events, it will give me the opportunity to create even more large work with my newly freed-up storage. Since I have so much artwork from my years at art school, I have been working on a smaller scale than normal this past year to save space and I am hoping to work back up in scale soon.
In the world of long term goals, me and my partner have a very specific dream of ours we love to talk about when thinking about the distant future where we combined all our passions under one roof. We don’t have a name for it, but essentially we would love to open a venue to function as a fine art gallery space as well as a live performance space on the first floor with a tattoo studio and print studio above it. We see this layout working like a human body, all of the individual parts working together to help one another. Shows could bring in tattoo clients, tattoo clients could purchase prints from their favorite tattooists, artists could join a residency with the print shop and sell their work in the gallery, printmakers could produce flyers as well as merchandise for the venue and all it’s commodities as well as offering it’s services to local gallery artists and performers. It is the perfect ecosystem! As for right now though, it is not about the destination, it is about the journey, and we are having a great time!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://infernacelia.wixsite.com/website
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infernacelia and https://www.instagram.com/infernatattoos
