How did a 32-year-old college dropout from Louisiana, with no formal training in art ? well, to be frank, no training at all ? end up with a oneman show in a New York gallery and a client list that includes Robert Downey Jr. and Orlando Bloom?
For Scott Campbell, it all started at a tattoo studio in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. “I’m just the dirty kid who snuck in the back door,” said Mr. Campbell, who said that he got the bulk of his art education tattooing teenage gang members in San Francisco in the 1990s.
That tattoo career took off in 2005, four years after he moved to New York and opened his studio in the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
One day an impatient Australian came in and commissioned a small bird in flight on his left forearm. The next day, Mr. Campbell said, the television show “Entertainment Tonight” came with cameras, grilling him on what kind of tattoo he had just given Heath Ledger.
Mr. Campbell became something of a celebrity tattoo artist, charging as much as $300 an hour ($1,000 minimum) to ink customers like Courtney Love and Josh Hartnett. The nature of his craft, he said, helps to explain these friendships. “Tattooing is a very intimate exchange,” he said.
Mr. Campbell grew up in rural Louisiana in a fishing village called Hermitage. “I hated it when I was a kid,” said Mr. Campbell . As a teenager, he would order William S. Burroughs novels from New York and dream about the world beyond.
His rebelliousness inspired him to get his first tattoo - a skull on his leg - at 15, to his mother’s horror.
At the University of Texas he studied biochemistry and planned a career as a medical illustrator. Eventually, his restlessness took over. “I have the attention span of a gerbil,” he said. He dropped out and spent a few years in San Francisco, where he worked in that tattoo parlor, before bumming around Asia and Europe , and then landing in Williamsburg in 2001.
He dabbled in mixed-media art; the painter Michael Bevilacqua encouraged him to exhibit in group shows, Mr. Campbell said. The work started to sell.
Last April, Mr. Campbell’s solo show at OHWOW, a gallery in Miami, sold out, said Al Moran, its director. Now Mr. Campbell is opening a solo show on April 29 at the gallery’s new space in Manhattan - its first since moving to the city. “All sorts of people were coming” to the Miami show, Mr. Moran said. “Tattoo kids were coming in, and museums were coming in.”
Mr. Campbell said he was nervous to show in New York. But he added, philosophically, “If the art world shuns me, I can still do tattoos.”
By ALEX WILLIAMS
EVAN SUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Scott Campbell is preparing for a New York show of his fine art.
