NICK BUBASH

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Nick Bubash lives and works in Pittsburgh as a fine and tattoo artist, where he opened Route 60 Tattoo in 2008. He was educated in fine art at Penn State University for several years, before moving to New York City where he learned the art of tattooing from Thom DeVita from 1969 until 1974.

His education continued in the 1980's at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia where his focus was on figurative sculpture and printing making. Upon graduation with highest honors, Bubash received the Scheidt Grant that allowed him extensive study in India.

His style and inspiration is wide ranging in both tattooing and fine art and comes from many sources. His voluminous output ranges from popular to highly detailed tattoos, drawings, paintings and collages; to extremely realistic bronze sculptures of animals, fantastic gargoyles and assemblages; to making lithographs and etchings.

This exploration of many styles can be traced back to his many years of tattooing where the tattoo artist is called upon to execute any number of very different images every day.
"I was trained as a print maker and figure sculptor all the while working as a tattoo artist. Although I remain deeply involved with the formal aspects of fine art such as the workings of compound and complex forms in figural sculpture, I can't deny the flash images of my everyday experience.

A combination of conservative traditional figuration and hard core pop flash images and subject matter, creates what sometimes feels like a chaotic leap between unrelated thoughts. I feel that my exploration of the joining of these, sometimes incongruous, images leads me in a spiral direction: inwardly to my center and outwardly to the universal street corner."

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