“His style is always changing,” says Manny Navarrete, who is watching with Lopez. Navarrete is a serious “collector” (enthusiasts who invest serious money in having their bodies permanently marked only by the best), of Lopez’s work. His torso, legs and arms are adorned with doe-eyed Helguera-style women, a Marilyn Monroe portrait so real she looks like she might giggle, a portrait of Vicente Hernandez, and dozens of other intricately interwoven images done over several years.
“He’s my walking billboard,” Lopez says of Navarrete; the tattoo on Navarrete’s chest won Lopez the aforementioned second-place prize. The two have gone on dozens of convention trips together, with Manny operating as Lopez’s right-hand man. “I couldn’t do any of these trips without these guys,” Lopez says about Navarrete, Rios, Mark Osuna (another friend and collector) and the others at the shop. He’s now working on a Michelangelo series on one client; the partially completed Renaissance Moses sculpture draped in shadow across Osuna’s arm is an entirely different style from the full-mouthed beauties Lopez drew on Osuna’s leg (which won him the third-place award mentioned above).
Russ Roca
Old-school crew: Lopez in his tattoo room at Lowrider Tattoo with
shop manager Anthony Rios and "collector" Manny Navarrete
Courtesy Edgar Hoill
At the London Tattoo Convention last fall, Lopez did small signature tattoos for his fans
Russ Roca
Skin canvas: "Walking billboard" Navarrete is covered in Lopez's artwork
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“The Chicano style just went to another level,” Osuna says, as he thumbs through a Renaissance sculpture book, one of the many art books the self-taught Lopez has collected. Indeed, for its retrospective on the history of Chicano tattooing, the History Channel made several stops in LA and Orange counties—including Lowrider Tattoo.
Today, Lopez is working on Beto, another collector. He dips the needle in ink, draws a fine, threadlike line on Beto’s arm, wipes and draws again: an eyelash, the tiniest crease in a full lip, the small round beads of a bracelet, a few loose hairs. His brother Gustavo, who has been going to the shop and apprenticing since he was a kid, and two other apprentices, look on. It’s a hypnotic process to watch. With a careful, freehand stroke, he adds dimension to a lip, an eyelid, a fingernail.
Lopez is relaxed and chatty, oscillating between cracking a joke to seconds-long intervals of intense concentration. “He doesn’t just take a drawing and slap it on skin,” says Adam Vu, an art student at Cal State Fullerton who is apprenticing at the shop. “To turn it into a painting on an arm is something else. The thing that separates these guys from other black-and-gray artists is the softness—it’s exactly how you’d want an oil painting to look.”
A running joke at the shop is the ubiquitous question Lopez is inevitably asked by onlookers or aspiring artists who are awestruck by his work. “There were once some guys here from Australia . . . and they kept asking him, ‘What’s your secret? What’s your secret?’” Rios repeats, laughing.
The only secret in Lopez’s book is hard work, a lot of patience and humility—the things that got him to a stable place where he feels he’s growing as an artist.
“In my case, what made me become so dedicated and spend so much time with it was being in a wheelchair. If I wasn’t in a wheelchair, I probably would not be as patient,” he says. “Other people start to mimic tattoos, and by mimicking, you get better. Someone influenced me, and I’m going to influence someone else. If there was no one else better than us, we would never better ourselves.”
daltan@ocweekly.com
For more images of Lopez and his work, click here.
