The experience of getting tattooed is a highly sensory and engaging experience. Roughly 40% of the people reading this knows what it feels like to get a tattoo. 
The experience of the tattooist can be far more exciting, the olfactory and auditory senses are immediately taken up in volume by the smells and sounds of the shop.If your visual senses aren't fully engaged at this point they will be as soon as your carbon stencil is applied, this also applies to your sense of touch. When placing the stencil to the client you are working within their field of energy or their Aura, this heightens the astral senses and helps you to acclimate to that person much faster than most other forms of human contact.
You hit the foot pedal and your liner machine begins to purr. The process of outlining a tattoo is both riveting and scary; all of the other disciplines an artist has learned up to this moment come into play, but everything is in overdrive. This is creativity on the edge. There is no erasing, white out, or gesso on this, you have only one chance. Tattooing is focused immediacy.
When your outline is complete you switch over to your shader machine: this part would seem simple enough, but for most it is the fork in the road where experience and knowledge of ones craft dictates the outcome as that of a work of art, or one of dreadful mutilation. Using your reference and sense of form and depth, you feather in the various tonal gradations or color you need in the piece. Soon enough you emerge from a haze of adrenaline fueled creativity, but this art form will never sit in a museum or an auction house ( because it's not for the rich or the powerful to bid on, nor to be placed in the vaults of a museum ). No, like those who wear it, this art came from the earth and to the earth it will return. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                           Steven Lee Matz

Welcome to the Artist Spotlight at Rogue Gallery. Every month, we will be highlighting a new artist or subject matter that we find truly inspiring and buzzworthy. In this month's Spotlight, we proudly share the work of Rick Andriola. We found Ricks work to be a refreshing fusion of pop art, street art and fine art utilizing color effects reminiscent to some of the screen work of Andy Warhol. He captures familiar faces and scenes that are engrained into the collective unconscious mind of American culture. Join us in our admiration of new art and inspiring creatives again right here at Rogue Gallery next month. For now, enjoy.

Based out of Athens GA, Rick Andriola, a street artist from Saratoga Springs, NY describes himself as a “go big or go home” type of person. He has always been a fan of comic book art, graffiti, street-­‐art, and pop art and his love of film can be seen in his subject matter. He likes painting on huge canvases. To maximize the size of his paintings, he began to build the canvases himself. He now builds them for other artists as well and guarantees lifetime durability. His “designed-­‐to-­‐ship” multi-­‐panel paintings have even been shipped to China. He wants to hook everybody up, one wall at a time. Check out more of his work at WickedBigArt.com.