October Flash and Booking
Hello and welcome to October Flash and Booking (for the second time)! As always, in order to book a session with me, please respond directly to this email or send a separate email to sevkoresh@gmail.com. Booking guidelines are in the second portion of the email body.
The end of August brought a big change for me- my first Regularly Structured, Not Self-Employed Job in over a year! The aforementioned job is also, hilariously, at the place I have previously said I was embarrassed to have already mentioned so many times in this newsletter- good ol Book Barn in Niantic, CT. (This development is making me feel like that meme of Jared Leto where the first picture is Jared Leto with his jaw on the floor delightedly watching somebody walk down a runway wearing a green coat and the second picture is him later on the red carpet wearing the same green coat.) It's a big adjustment and balancing a more mundane working-outside-of-the-house situation with the other very personal work that I do is a major learning curve thus far, but all in all I'm extremely excited about it and it is way healthier for me than a) being confined to constant solitude in my little house with the exception of tattoo sessions and zoom calls and b) being totally financially at the whims of the ebb and flow of tattoo bookings, which can really take a toll. Because of this change, there will also be changes to my tattooing schedule, in that my availability to work with clients will be very limited. Starting in October, I will only have 3 or 4 days a month open for sessions (roughly one session a week) and I will only have availability to tattoo on Mondays. I realize this change is limiting for clients, but is sadly it's the only way I will be able to maintain two and a half jobs and any semblance of my sanity that still remains!
My new employment at a bookstore also means that this newsletter's already heavy "Seven's Monthly Book Club" vibe will most likely intensify, so if you like that, you're in the right place. For example, this week I brought home a little pocket copy of Rachel Carson's "The Edge of the Sea" after opening to a random page mentioning bryozoans and wondering how it was possible that I had never read it before- if you are a freak like me and would get excited about 200+ pages of what is essentially scientific prose (and beautifully written prose at that) tracking the natural history of the Eastern Atlantic Coast and its inhabitants, then boy do I have the book for you.Â
Accidentally concurrent with the recent Autumn Equinox, I have been thinking a lot about night- I’m finding myself having a growing affinity for it as the days slowly darken. As much as the sun fading at 7pm is a common harbinger of seasonal depression/is accompanied with a light sense of dread, I find myself pulled toward investigating what is stirred within us at the time of the year when night becomes a part of our outer and inner landscapes with which we must actively interface, instead of enjoying night's buzzing warmth for little more than 3 hours before tucking ourselves in to face the daylight again soon. Though in the trenches of March I know I will again find myself yearning for the chorus of crickets and cicadas that mitigate the loneliness of the dark for a season, I hear these insects now as their song begins to fade and find myself almost wishing for the silence of the night of winter, as controversial as it may be.Â
Every year my family and I go to the beach in Rhode Island to celebrate the Summer Solstice, and every year as the sun finally sets we take a walk down to the edge of the beach. By the time we return to our blanket day has darkened, and more than anything I think we all look forward to watching the moon rise and hearing the sound of the waves almost menacingly amplified by the cover of night. This is always my favorite part- in a funny way, this annual trip seems more like a celebration of the night than a celebration of the day (but maybe we're just goth). This past year, solstice was stormy-skied, and we walked to the edge of the beach in the starless purple of night with no sunset to speak of save an ominous orange tint on the edge of the horizon more reminiscent of my own imaginings of the early earth than of the picturesque sunsets our species has come to know as a commonplace pinnacle of natural beauty. I think often about the feeling I got from this version of the beach- it's a sensory experience that I have deeply internalized and feel I could never forget, it lingers with a disembodied intensity similar to that of a vivid dream- and as I picked up "The Edge of the Sea," I found that Rachel Carson described it better than I ever could:
"The shore at night is a different world, in which the very darkness that hides the distractions of daylight brings focus to elemental realities. Once, exploring the beach, I surprised a small ghost crab in the searching beam of my torch. He was lying in a pit he had dug just above the surf, as though watching the sea and waiting. The blackness of the night possessed air, water, and beach. It was the darkness of an older world, before Man. There was no sound but the all-enveloping, primeval sounds of wind blowing over water and sand, and of waves crashing on the beach. There was no other visible life- just one small crab near the sea....in that moment, time was suspended, the world to which I belonged did not exist and I might have been an onlooker from outer space."
As I read this passage, I remembered being terrified by the largeness of the sky at the edge of the shore at night, the cover of enormous clouds making me feel utterly megalophobic and claustrophobic simultaneously; feeling comforted as one especially bright star or perhaps a planet peeked through the boundless dark to wink at me, assuring me that there was in fact a familiar universe still suspended in space beyond the looming ultraviolet sky. It truly felt, as Carson said, like I was in some world that had never made itself apparent to me before- a world that did not care to make me feel at home or welcome, reducing me to a silent ghost of human diurnality. All sense of earthly landscape and familiarity washes away when the crests of waves are the only thing that distinguishes the vastness of the sea from the vastness of the sky. On the beach at night, I always feel much smaller and much younger than I ever have- not young as in youthful, but young in the sense of understanding that I am the creature in that particular environment that has had my roots in this earth for the shortest time. The abyssal quality of a beach at night inspires a uniquely acute sense of the transience of humanity. On the beach at night a human being is somehow even smaller than a lonely ghost crab, because unlike the ghost crab, we vibrate with a primal fear of the never-ending astral dark.Â
I look forward to the days darkening so I can satiate my curiosity as to why nature's night feels like a world where we humans don't belong. Maybe it's because night is a great teacher of silence and patience, two things to which I know I personally have historically been averse.
I also recently watched "Night Tide" which paired nicely with my aforementioned reading- it stars a young Dennis Hopper (circa 1961) who essentially harasses this gorgeous gorgeous woman into going on a date with him and they somehow fall in love despite him being annoying as hell, but later he finds out that she might actually be a mermaid who murders sailors. This movie has it all: a high-contrast black and white underwater sequence, an incredibly confusing resolution (?!), a young Dennis Hopper. Definitely recommend to anyone looking for some old school nautical horror to start off their Halloween season.Â
In honor of reading "The Edge of the Sea" I'm including some ancient marine flash which you can find below. FYI two of this month’s flash come in pairs, i.e. there are two separate items in the image which form a whole object. I’m open to doing only one piece of each image but would love to do both! Also I’ve been obsessed with agatized coral recently so I threw a couple of those in there. (btw I will trade for agatized coral fossils…)
Booking is first come, first served. Please respond to this email to the desired date/dates you are looking to book, the number of the flash piece you are interested in getting, and comfortable range of budget. If your desired date and/or image has already been secured, I will gladly offer some alternatives that are available. Modifying flash (zeroing in on a part of an image, extending texture to blend more seamlessly with skin, etc) is always an option! I am taking customs within the realm of the subject matter I usually deal with: found/decayed objects and relics, marine/paleobiology, geology. If it involves a textural representation of the effects of time on an object/planet or if it looks like an alien life form, I’m usually interested! NOTE: If you have a specific custom concept inspired by or similar to a piece that you’ve seen me do, feel free to inquire- however, I never ever replicate pieces which I have made before, so please do not ask me to do so.
Upon receiving an email request to secure a piece and date, I will send back an intake form with information for you on pricing, process, etc, as well as some information for me that you can fill out regarding sizing, placement, accessibility and sensory needs, etc.
OPEN DATES: October 10th, 17th, and 24th.
AVAILABLE PIECES:
Thanks for bearing with me through this weird time, really excited to hopefully be able to experiment with some bizarre, big, ambitious stuff now that I have to be even more purposeful with where my energy goes when it comes to tattooing.
In awe and exploration,
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