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07/18/2005
Artist Profile: Lea
Lea breaks all stereotypes of what a "tattooed woman" is. She flows from bohemian painter to jet set model to rock star tattooist, and does it with style, attitude, and Prada shoes. Lea has graced Parisian catwalks and covers of tattoo magazines. Her artwork has adorned gallery walls and human skin throughout the world. And she also plays the accordion. A chameleon. An anomaly. She defies easy categorization and labels.
But her passion for skin art--whether on her, her clients, or her characters in oil on canvas--falls in line with many serious custom tattoo collectors. She explains:
Tattoos have amazing unlimited powers. They offer strength, or make the wearer feel bad or good depending on choice of design; they can heal or free a person. But they also have a lot of power on the untattooed spectator--people are rarely ever indifferent to tattoos.[...]I see it as using my body as parchment to write the story of my life.
Born in Paris, France, she began modelling at the age of 14. On the day she turned 18 years old, she got her first tattoo (on her butt), which was covered by ridiculously expensive couture fashion on the catwalks. But in 1992, she could no longer cover her passion after having tattooed a dragon on her chest. From high fashion, she went underground, and in 1992, she modelled for an avant-garde designer and everything she wore showed off that tattoo. Yet, her catwalk career soon ended shortly afterwards.
While Lea says that she has had a passion for tattoos all her life, it intensified after meeting her husband, Florida tattooist Dave Archer. Lea moved to Florida and became Dave's wife in 1995. After arriving in the US, Lea was painting furiously to earn cash. At one of her first US gallery shows, a renowned Florida tattooist approached her and suggested she use her painting abilities to create tattoos. The next day, she picked up one of Dave's machines.
Today, her and Dave own and operate the Big Kahuna Tattoos studio in Boca Raton. While Dave prefers to do blackwork, Lea loves to work on all different styles of tattoos, as long as they are "BIG!," she emphasizes.
Dave taught Lea a great deal about tattooing techniques, but she also learned by observing her favorite artists work on her own skin. While she says that she loves all her tattoos equally, like a mother says of her children, it is the flower on her forearm by Greg James that she shows off right away to those curious about her body art. A stunning work of Japanese-styled tigers by Henning Jorgensen extends just above James' work to her shoulder completing the sleeve. Along those same traditional lines, Mike Rubendall and Troy Denning have added beautiful pieces to her leg. You can see all their influences in Lea's own Japanese tattoo work.
Tattooing has definitely influenced Lea's fine art work and vice versa.  She says that her drawing technique has improved from tattooing, and being a painter before a tattooer allowed her to translate "a painterly image" on skin without much difficulty. Still, her paintings depicted tattoo imagery before she ever picked up a tattoo machine.
In Lea's earlier work, you find tattooed characters, whether they be modified Medusas in her 1996 oil on canvas entitled "Entre Ciel et Terre" [between heaven and earth] or gun-toting rockers in "Les Enfants de L'enfer" [children of hell] of the same year and medium. Prints of Lea's paintings are available on her website.
Lea's dream art project is to combine her two passions and ink a full bodysuit in the distinctive style of her paintings. She also plans on finishing her own suit, saying that the older she gets, the more profound an impact getting tattooed has for her. "Watching my body transform over the years gives me concrete proof that time is passing by, and therefore, with the acknowledgement of death, I'm reminded to live life at its fullest!"
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