Picture fine art. Picture a fine artist. Crumple those pictures and toss
them, because they don’t look anything like Ian Robert McKown or his
art. In 2003, Mckown managed restaurants; he was a corporate cog in
Boulder’s cuisine machine; and he hated it. One afternoon, while getting
some tattoo work done, he asked the artist, a tattooer named Chris
Smith, how he’d gotten started.
Are you interested? Smith asked.
“I’d really never thought of it,” says McKown, “but I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ so
I ended up taking a few days to draw up some ideas I thought would be
good tattoo art, you know? And—I guess he really liked it. I put in my
two weeks notice and walked away from the corporate world and just
kind of became a tattooer. I started apprenticing under Chris right away.
I was 30 years old.”
This decision + immediate action equation would later result in McKown
trying his hand at fine art. Once again, an impulsive choice fueled by
emotional resonance had a profound impact on his life and art. Five
years after becoming a tattoo artist, while on his way into an art shop for
supplies, McKown passed a news rack and saw, on a magazine cover,
a still life by David Leffel, an American-born painter who works in the
Dutch/Flemish Old Master style.
“It was a still life on the cover of, maybe Fine Art America,” says
McKown, “and I remember seeing it, and, for the first time in my life, I
had an emotional register with a piece of art—I actually felt what I was
seeing. That was the moment of impact, the ground zero, as it were . . .
I’d never realized you could capture something like he does . . . capture
a moment in that way. I went out and got some oils and decided to learn
how to paint Dutch/Flemish realism, you know? It was 2008, and that’s
when I first started painting.”
18
INKSPIREDMAGAZINE.COM