Different canvases

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By Joey Berlin

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

COURTESY PHOTO

By any standard, Andy Rader qualifies as an art-lover. He’s virtually covered in art, after all.

Whether his medium is a canvas or his own well-tattooed body, Rader knows how to express himself. He’s pretty new to Emporia, but he’s already getting noticed for both types of art.

Last month, Rader and his girlfriend, Emporia State University art instructor Rachel Downs, both won Friends of the Emporia Public Library Bookmark Design awards for 2007. Rader, who now works at the library, earned his award with a koi fish painting.

“Me and my girlfriend thought it’d be fun to spend a couple of hours just drawing something up for it,” he said.

Rader, 30, was born in Nebraska and did most of his growing up in New Jersey. He had always been interested in painting, but he didn’t begin his tattooing career until becoming an apprentice at age 24. He and Downs, formerly a Wichita native, met in New Mexico last year and moved here together in August.

“Tattooing was something that I had always been interested in since I was a kid,” he said. “I just thought it was fascinating and had always wanted to learn how to get into that.”

Since learning the ins and outs of skin art, Rader has not only applied tattoos to others, but also designed tattoos for himself. And not just a few — his arms, chest, legs and stomach are covered.

“He is a walking canvas,” Downs said. “Yeah, Andrew is never naked. But since I’ve been with him, I have three new ones. So it’s contagious.”

The couple are both avid artists, but Rader said they’re never competing with each other, and they were excited to learn they had both won bookmark awards. Downs won for a quilt-like design.

“She always says anytime someone comes over to our house that people comment on my artwork more than they comment on hers,” he said. “I’m just like, no way ... anytime we’ve both had artwork entered in a benefit show or something like that, her stuff always gets sold, and my stuff never does.”

Rader said his favorite tattoo of his own is probably one on his chest of a luchador, or Mexican wrestler, with eagle wings. Most of his tattoos have an underlying meaning, but he said they reflect how important humor is to him.

“It’s not a bunch of, like, death and skulls ... they’re all fairly cartoony, comic-book kind of style,” he said.

For Rader, one of the things that makes tattoo artistry interesting is that customers will come in with new design requests all the time, and he will end up drawing something he had never even thought of drawing before. But tattooing, he said, has to be more planned out than painting.

“There’s a lot less room for improvisation, and you can’t go back in and paint over something if you don’t like it, or erase it,” he said. “So everything has to be planned out beforehand. Whereas when I paint, it’s a lot freer, and I can allow myself to be more creative in some ways, just because you’re not dealing with the same structure, the same construct.”

Rader wasn’t sure how he would fit into a small town like Emporia, where he believes people sometimes have preconceived notions about people who are heavily tattooed. But he said most everyone has been nice to him so far, although occasionally he gets a strange look.

“A lot of people just need to accept that there’s different-looking people out there and just different ideas,” he said. “They might not like tattoos or anything, but people do. The Earth is just going to keep spinning around the sun.”