This page features art by resident artist and gallery owner, Dirk Hays.
BIOGRAPHY
Growing up in the early '60's in the Deep South, visual artist, Dirk Hays would spend hours reading comics, and essentially taught himself to draw by mimicking his favorite artists, such as R. Crumb, Al Jaffe, Big Daddy Roth. and Basil Wolverton, to name a scant few. It helped that his father was by trade a signpainter and the tools were always readily available to produce his "masterworks" and various cottage industry projects, such as screen-printing t-shirts in his bedroom for friends and painting vanity plates for them for their teenage chariots.
Dirk attended Auburn University, graduating in 1982 with a BFA in Visual Communications, and moved to Atlanta to accept a job in advertising. He worked as an art director for 6 years at the same small agency, where he was in charge of numerous large corporate accounts, ranging from Boca West Resort to Jack Nicklaus Development Corporation. He then left to freelance graphic design for less corporate clients, while pursuing his other artistic endeavors. During the next ten years, he would participate in various group shows in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco, with his whimsical sculpture and paintings. Hays also worked as art director, designer and puppeteer on several adult puppetry productions at Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts, with critically acclaimed director Jon Ludwig, as well as doing some acting in plays and extra work in movies.
In 1994, he was offered an apprenticeship to learn the art of tattooing and jumped at the chance. Soon, he was the manager of the shop and after working there for 7 years, he left to open his own studio in the neighborhood where he and his wife reside. East Atlanta Tattoo has been going strong for 6 years and has just expanded to include an art gallery. While learning to tattoo, Dirk took a hiatus from painting for awhile, but soon got back around to it, out of sheer need.
"I was aching to paint again and I really felt like I had been so immersed in tattooing for so long, that I had let that side of me go."
Dirk is veritably a self-taught painter, because he never explored that in college, due to concentrating on the disciplines more directly related to graphic design and marketing.
"I regret that I never really took any painting or even illustration classes to speak of, because sometimes I feel like I'm working on sheer intuition, pushing the paint around on the surface until it looks right to me." Hays doesn't really work in one particular style or another these days, bouncing from 3-D wooden cutout assemblages to sculpting to painting on canvas or toys, but to be sure, most of his chosen imagery harkens back to those artists that he used to study for hours as a child.
RIGHTS TO ALL IMAGES ON THIS SITE ARE THE PROPERTY OF THE ARTIST OR THE GALLERY AT EAST ATLANTA TATTOO AND MAY NOT BE USED OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF EITHER
