Our friends at CanvasRebel recently connected with John Moses. Learn more about John below or in the article linked here.
John, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
It’s difficult to narrow it down to one there are three that come to mind. The struggle is between undergraduate thesis work of inviting myself to family dinners and making custom serving ware for each menu, the ‘Doodle Books’ I’ve kept for the last seven years, and the poetry I’ve spent the last few years working on. If I have to pick just one though it’s my Doodle Books.
In 2017 I was working in higher education as a part of a team designing curriculum and implementing residential learning experience for highly gifted youth. It was great work and I greatly enjoyed it but consuming as well. Between the regular job, teaching in a community arts studio, and just life – I realized in the fall of that year that I hadn’t filled a sketch book in ages. Part of this was due to the number of sketch books I tote around on a daily basis. If you find me in the wild, I typically have a minimum of five on me.
Despite lugging these tomes around with me on my bicycle and having all the varieties of paper, size, and bindings the ideas simply weren’t making it our of the head and into the real world frequently enough. I also struggled (and still do) with a scarcity mentality. Having grown up in poverty every page and drop of ink still feels precious. Both the physical materials and the time to do something I was often told was frivolous as a child. However, I knew it was important to spend time daily on some aspect of my own art and set myself a challenge.
I intentionally bought cheap sketchbooks, armed myself with a sturdy but reasonable pen, and set myself the challenge to do a minimum of three pages a day. What was one more sketchbook to add to the daily carry? The goal was and is to not go to sleep until I’ve met that challenge of three pages a day. Whether that means I’m doing them as I’m nodding off in bed, pretending to take notes in a meeting, or on in any variety of social settings. I’ve been largely successful with that goal. A day has been missed here or there but now I find myself with a stack of Doodle Books that act as personal record.
With how my brain works I can look at a page and know where I doodled it, what I was thinking about, and the general flow of the world around me. A large success with this project has also been the daily practice of giving myself permission to indulge my art practice. The small steps really do add up over time and have allowed me to find the courage to pursue art as my primary career path.
John, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is John Moses and my goal in life is to be a Renaissance Person. The pursuit being to have some mastery of multiple fields of study from arts to maths to culinary skills and beyond. I struggle to do just one thing. My brain and soul need the variety and I deeply feel that life is too short not to dabble in a bit of everything. Currently my main focuses are tattooing and writing but I’m actively scheming on how to spend more time in the wood shop and how/where to build out a ceramics studio.
A friend in my writing group describes me occasionally as a “poet of the liminal.” It’s one of the highest compliments I’ve received and encompasses a lot of my ethos. Across my fields of study and work a unifying factor is finding and exploring those moments of something passing from one thing to the next. Trying to find the moment when a piece of clay has been thrown and stretched to the perfect form – just a breath from collapse. Exploring the power of sparse words to create a powerful image or feeling and how different folk interact with that experience. Capturing the vision of a client’s rough sketch and following their train of thought to craft the perfect tattoo for them.
I’ll try to focus on what I stated is the main two focal points at the moment though. I currently work at Idle Hands Tattoo located in the historic Sequoyah Hills neighborhood of Knoxville, Tennessee. I found my way back to the craft after some time away to refocus and heal/process from some injuries both to the body and soul. I’m thrilled to be back and have found a shop where I can practice the craft in a way that aligns with my values. It’s an honor each time I’m trusted to alter someone’s body permanently and something I take seriously whether it be a quick flash piece or a fully custom design I’ve spent hours refining.
I fell in love with the idea of tattoos and tattooing reading Moby Dick when I was 9 or 10. The description of Queequeg’s tattoos sparked something in me that never went away. I began being tattooed when I was 18 and haven’t stopped since – it took me a while to find my way to tattooing professionally but I’m beyond grateful I’m on this path now. There’s a magic in being able to alter your body. Changing this corporeal form to something that seems more true to you, adorning it with meaning, or just getting a piece cause it looks damn cool and ya like it. All paths are valid and I enjoy helping people find the one that best suits them.
Shifting gears again, I want to speak about my writing. Before I began practicing visual arts I alway had knack for telling stories. My aunties in Maine, who have been some of my biggest supporters, still have cassettes of my ‘radio show’ that I recorded. I would save every penny I could earn to pay for tapes and postage. Painstakingly recording them on a thrift store cassette player with a record function I would share the ramblings of a child interspersed with tales. Yarns that I often had a hard time separating from reality. I still find that separation of fact from fancy challenging and as an adult I’ve found some of the childlike wonder again in stepping away from that delineation.
My most recent project has been a collection of poetry that I’m very nearly done editing. I realized that like my need to create visual art I also have a deep need to tell stories and express myself through words. Left unattended that drive can often present as anxiety and my brain creates all sorts of fancies to stress me out. Nurtured and directed I find myself producing much more beneficial works. I showed a third of the the 39 poems in this collection earlier this summer in a manner that married my visual work and the words in a meaningful manner while also encouraging others to create their own acts of poetry.
If pressed to put my ethos into a sound bit it would be this:
Be Curious & Create.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Simply, value it. Choose where and with whom you spend your money and time. Go to your friend’s openings, share their work on the socials, speak highly of them, and if you’re able to – buy something from a real person not a corporation. There’s power and resiliency in community but it takes conscious effort to nurture it. Make it a priority. Put down your phone and step into the world to experience and share with your fellow humans.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
It all comes down to finding a better way to be and exist in this wild world. Encouraging myself and others to find kinder ways of being and nurturing genuine connection. All of my work, through one path or another, ties back to an idealistic goal that the world doesn’t have to be a hell-scape and we can choose how we show up in it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://idlehandstattoo.ink/artist/john/
- Instagram: Art/Person: @john___moses ; Tattooing: @ink_mos
