Angelique Houtkamp
Angelique Houtkamp is a Dutch tattoo artist and studio artist as well as an entrepreneur. She was born in 1968 in Uithoorn and moved to Amsterdam at the age of 18.[1] She is known mostly for her vintage portraits of women in both her tattoos and her paintings. These works have now garnered an international cult following. Houtkamp’s artwork has appeared in a multitude of various art institutes, magazines, books, and tattoo shows over the years of her professional career as an artist.
Early life
Angelique Houtkamp was born in 1968 in Uithoorn, near Amsterdam, where she moved at the age of 18. There, she worked in many different professions, including as a dressmaker, bartender, makeup artist, jewellery piercer, waitress, and as an administrator for a chain of sex shops. She started a jewellery business called Goldies when she was 23. She was also the bassist of the death metal band "Facehugger", and the guitarist for another band named the "Slick Mechanics". She also starred as the character Rumpelstiltskin for a Dutch children’s movie named "Er Wasus..." In 1998, Houtkamp developed her skill as a tattoo artist and a year later turned this into a full-time career. In 2001, she appeared in numerous TV shows to speak about tattooing. After this, her art began to gain even more popularity and she established a place for her work in the fine art sphere.
Tattooing
Tattoo culture was never a clearly pronounced influence in the early years of Houtkamp’s life. The only interaction the artist had with the medium was with an old-fashioned snake-and-dagger tattoo that belonged to her uncle. Her uncle conceded his regrets towards getting the tattoo, but a young Houtkamp saw the mystic snake and ancient weapon as a fascinating aesthetic.[2] Later in her life, Houtkamp’s interaction with tattoo culture became more prominent. After about twelve years of working a collection of odd jobs, she decided to learn tattooing in 1998. A year later, she got a job tattooing at Tattoo Peter, one of the original tattoo parlours in Europe. She later left Tattoo Peter and started her own parlour, Salon Serpent, in Amsterdam, where she works alongside seven other artists. In the mind of Houtkamp, tattoos are connected with emotions pertaining to attraction, repellency, life, death, fear, and power. These motifs are made with vintage iconographs from old tattoo imagery and historical aesthetics. The popularity of Houtkamp's tattoos has captured the attention of multiple tattoo conventions, magazines, and art culture interviewers. Her work has featured in the publications of ITA and Penthouse, as well as Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine. She has also appeared at a variety of tattoo conventions and shows such as the London Tattoo Convention in 2012[3] and the exhibition at the Dva Gallery in Chicago in 2007.
Studio art profession
Angelique Houtkamp began painting studio art with oil and acrylic, but in 2009, she switched to watercolour, pen, and ink as her medium of choice. Her watercolour pieces are her more popular works and have gained a large following. She was first a self-taught artist until she learned the skills of watercolour from the artist Theo Jak, who was a student under Henry Goldfield. The techniques she used were typically used to create flash images for tattoo ideas in parlours, but Houtkamp has adapted the images into prints that have extended out of the parlour and into gallery spaces. The act of transferring body art onto paper allows Houtkamp’s work to be more accessible to public viewers. Her prints have appeared in sold out shows around the world, including in the Nelly Duff Gallery in London and in a group show put together by curator Miss Van in Barcelona, as well as in an ongoing residency with Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Her paintings have also been used for magazines, postcards, clothing, and CD covers. Houtkamp also works with sculptural mediums. From 2005 and onward, Houtkamp has made a collection of skulls. The pieces are created by using the skull of a human embryo to make molds using Plaster of Paris. She then soaks the plaster in coffee to conjure a vintage look before applying oil paint in decorative motifs that connect the pieces to her tattoo aesthetic.
Artistic process and style
Houtkamp's retro feminine images are devised from an assorted number of inspirations and artistic processes. The inspiration for her portraits comes from a varying number of antique aesthetics and from characteristics of Greek mythology to the Weimar Period, as well as from historic outsiders such as circuses, pirates, and gypsies. Her paintings and tattoos have also evoked a sentimentality for the 1920s flapper styles and pinup girls but with a femme fatale edge. The desired effect of her vintage motifs connects her art to themes of immortality, life, death, pop culture, and nostalgia. Her portraits have been described in many ways, from neo-femme to indirectly nostalgic to retro and vintage.[4] Houtkamp’s portrayals have a tendency to resemble old school tattoo flash, such as her adaptations of the Wild West, old Hollywood, hybrid creatures, and nautical symbols, thus showing her paintings’ connections to her tattoo profession. An aesthetic connection to tattoo is also seen in the bold lines used to outline her images which she shades in with a limited colour palette.[4] These techniques create a vintage style that Houtkamp further emphasizes by browning her paper with a coffee wash.[4] To brighten the images, she pays careful attention to the effects of light on her figures that allow them to stand out of their antiquated visage. Houtkamp’s process for making her paintings starts with a hand drawing of her design. She then scans the image and adjusts proportions and lines using Photoshop, while also using the program to plan out the painting’s colour scheme and lighting composition. Before the genesis of this technology, Houtkamp would scan her images and, using a photocopier, copy and paste her images to create the desired outcome. Now, when she has completed her first draft of the image, she uses her artistic blueprint to hand paint the final product.[1] To provide gallery accessible pieces, she creates a copy using giclee printing technology to obtain the best resolution for resale showing her watercolour methods.
Other commitments and personal ventures
Houtkamp’s growing profession in the arts is not only attributed to her studio art and tattoo art. She has engaged in a multitude of various other professional and personal commitments that have increased her visibility. Through her partnership with Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, Houtkamp has had two monographs published about her and her work. The first is Tattoo Darling: The Art of Angelique Houtkamp, published in 2007, and the second is Tattoo Mystique: The Art and World of Angelique Houtkamp, published in 2009. She is also featured in Outré’s publication of Tattoo Parlour: Artists from the World of Tattoo. Other art and culture publications have also picked up the artist’s talent, including Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine, which published a feature of Houtkamp and her work in the book Juxtapoz Tattoo 2.[2] Extending her artistic creativity to other media, the artist has taken her talents to other entrepreneurial ventures. She has started up her own greeting card collection and in 2004, she co-designed a bag and shoe line. A year after this, she took her talents to a Dutch wallpaper company where she designed arrangements for the products. Houtkamp’s crafty inventions are seen to be mirrored in her everyday life, which is surrounded by a world of vintage ephemera. The personal style of the artist mimics the retro yet modern edged aesthetic of her portraits, made apparent by her fashion and abundance of tattoos.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Media, Desktopmag.com.au Niche (2010-04-07). "Angelique Houtkamp | Desktop". DesktopMag. Archived from the original on 2018-11-22. Retrieved 2018-11-21. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ 2.0 2.1 Oh, Saelee, ed. (2011). Juxtapoz Tattoo 2. Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press, Inc. Search this book on
- ↑ Bhagwandas, Anita (2012-10-05). "Female tattoo artists make their mark". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-11-21.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Horine, K. A. "The Tyranny of the Spectacle: Tattooed Bodies in Contemporary Visual Culture". ProQuest – via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
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