Sailors in Tattoo Parlour 2017

Joe Machine made this painting, ‘Sailors in Tattoo Parlour’, without a known date, and it’s a scene packed with, well, sailors getting tattooed. It’s like the whole composition is built up from faceted planes of colour, giving it a kind of rigid structure, but the details are so loose and free. Look at the face of the sailor getting the tattoo – he’s got a cigarette hanging out his mouth and a ‘don’t mess’ stare that seems to dare you to look closer. And what about that tattoo of a woman, ‘Charlotte’, on his arm? It’s like a portal into another story, another life. The colours here are like faded memories: muted blues, purples, and browns all adding to the overall sense of faded glory. It reminds me a bit of some of Philip Guston’s later work, where the everyday is elevated through a kind of rough, almost brutal honesty. Art, after all, is just another conversation, an echo chamber of ideas bouncing across time.