Traveling up river to see deVita, watching the urban carapace slough off on either side of the tracks to reveal the hills and trees underneath.., the ruins of Bunnerman's Terminal a roofless castle like building on a tiny island thirty yards off shore, dismembered turrets jutting mysteriously out of the water.., it's time to get off.,, climbing into Mr. Jones' taxi van.., stopping at one prison after another.., dropping off guards and prisoners wives.., up liberty past George Washington's headquarters..,, just beyond the abandoned elementary school.., up the hill and left onto overlook place.., from number 23 you can see the vista at the end of the road.., an overwhelming panorama straight out of a nineteenth century oil painting. I don't want to make a sound more surreal than it was.., deVita certainly wouldn't approve.., but it really was like stepping into another world.

Inside deVita's house it is dimly lit, and the rooms are obsessively layered with images. The floor is painted with larges abstract shapes, Tibetan bats, pre-Colombian decorative merits and strange atmospheric effects. On the walls layer upon layer of images and objects interact in mysterious, meticulously considered ways. Assemblages in fruit crated juxtapose such diverse items as photos of young Chinese gangsters, old newspaper-clippings, banjo parts, olive oil cans, unidentifiable bits of hardware and cardboard, all arranged in tense, evocative compositions. In one corner is a pen housing two large, prehistoric looking turtles. A simple inventory of just one room would take pages and pages. The endlessly forking histories of the objects would read like the chronicles of small country. Every one of the hundred or so times I've visited, I notice some fantastic detail I've never seen before and have to ask if it has always been there. I'm almost always told that it has. Although occasionally, between visits, some shifting of the layers will have taken place and a new layer of artifacts will have been exposed. Sometimes a topic will come up in conversation that will require digging through piles of artwork or searching through files of ephemera, incidentally unearthing a human skull in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, or a pulp magazine cover that depicts a youthful deVita in the background dressed as a Cuban soldier holding a noose and laughing.

In the back room, is an old roll-top desk that deVita tattoos out of, He plugs his machine into an electric socket on the side of a base that holds a light bulb, which in turn runs to a light switch which runs to a black electrical unit which supplies the power and is wired to another light. Inside the desk is everything he needs for tattooing. From glass bottles of ink to a paper towel rack mounted underneath. On the sink counter next to the desk is a beautiful, complex, autoclave that wouldn't look out of place in an alchemist's laboratory. To the right of the autoclave are two file cabinets that hold thousands of acetate stencils from the tattoos deVita has applied over the last thirty-five odd years. The stencils are thick pieces of acetate that have the outline of tattoo designs scratched into them. Charcoal powder is shaken onto the surface of the stencil and then wiped away so that all that remains is what is trapped in the grooves, much like an intaglio print. The stencil is then pressed onto an area of the body that has been shaved and smeared with a thin layer of Vaseline, so that the outline of the design remains on the skin.

I had my whole left thigh tattooed by deVita, as well as both shins, one forearm and various spots on my arms, deVita's sense of composition is on of the most powerful and unique in American tattooing. Watching him place stencil is always a revelation. He manages to find just the angle and placement to interact with the space and the designs nearby in the most tense and vital way. His compositions are never predictable or static. He has suffered from a very mild form of "essential tremors" since he was a child, and his line is charged with the struggle to overpower the sporadic oscillation. His shading and coloring follow "tattoo logic", conventions of abstraction that develop from the exigencies of the medium, and the intuitive application of these formal considerations override concern for convention or illusionistic naturalism.

In 1998 I wanted to get copies of deVita's stencil collection, so he suggested I take rubbings on tracing paper using brown prismacolor crayon. In the 1970's Sailor Jerry Collins had sent Ed Hardy some stencil rubbings in brown rather than black. Ed sent some brown rubbings to deVita and deVita noticed that they looked much more "artistic" that way. I spent a couple of visits working my way through the drawers of stencils with my brown crayon. At one point deVita grabbed a crayon and a couple of stencils and made a composition overlapping an image of Christ with a Japanese koi. "There you go. How about that?" It looked mysterious and cool. Since then, he has done hundreds and hundreds of stencil rubbing compositions, sometimes adding a background with crayon, sometimes actually drawing over the stencil image as if it was a tattoo. It took someone with deVita's intuitive sense of composition, and folk art aesthetic to be the first to utilize the preparatory media of tattooing (stencils, colored pencils, tracing paper) to create fine art. But this kind of creative resourcefulness is absolutely typical of deVita's personality. He applies it pretty uniformly to most aspects of his life, from home repair to cooking or dog-training. His acquisition of a Xerox machine led him to develop techniques for transferring Xeroxed images to wood and incorporating these images into compositions using cardboard cutout stencil-images applied with a sort of Zen calligraphy approach. "Tony Polito and all those guys would try different recipes for ink and write everything down. Then they change it a little and when they got it the way they wanted it, that's the way they'd do it forever. I would keep changing things, and when I got it perfect, I'd do it different the next time anyway." His tireless obsessive experimentation and imagination are part of what make him such a rare and amazing phenomenon in tattooing a medium that is generally characterized by extreme aesthetic conservatism.

Scott Harrison
N.Y., N.Y.