Rising Stars: Meet J Partylord

Today we’d like to introduce you to J Partylord.

Hi J, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been drawing since I can remember…..my grandmother was an art teacher at a small Lutheran school in Southeastern Wisconsin. My older cousin Steven was enamored with comic books and death metal album cover art. His dad inadvertently introduced me to B grade horror and sci-fi films at probably far too tender an age. My parents were both middle-class working people who followed their dreams and passions in lieu of pursuing the “safe” route forward.

I was raised just north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in what was a rural suburb in the 1980s. I spent a lot of time hanging around various areas of Milwaukee throughout the 90s and 2000s, skateboarding, playing and attending punk/hardcore and heavy metal shows, and getting clowned on in school for being a nerd. Skateboarding wasn’t cool where I grew up and neither was anything that fell outside the norm. At some point in middle school, a conscious shift occurred and I pivoted away from wanting to pursue a career in veterinary medicine and focused instead on creative endeavors. In high school, I started playing in a variety of punk and metal bands and leaned farther away from my rural upbringing. After essentially flunking out of UW Milwaukee my freshman year, I worked a variety of random jobs doing landscaping, custodial work, snow removal, and a smattering of construction/handyman jobs as well as working in a factory so I could continue playing music.

When that got old I went back to school and eventually moved to Chicago to pursue a degree in Visual Communications. There I learned that I hate spending endless hours in front of a computer monitor, got married and divorced and decided I wanted to take a stab at learning the ins and outs of screen printing, a skill set that has always interested me. I couldn’t stay in the Midwest because it felt like a cop-out and that I would get stuck there and be miserable. That’s not to say I don’t love it there, I really love where I come from and I miss it frequently, but I had to get the hell out. It was either Denver or Portland, and it seemed like Portland was blowing up and getting blown out. Denver had a more up-and-coming vibe when I moved here in 2010 and felt like it had the potential for something to happen and that kind of fueled my decision to land here. I got a job at the bottom of the ladder in a small family-run screen printing shop in Castle Rock, and I worked my way from being an errand boy and screen cleaner to being a screen tech to a pressman/prepress to being the production manager before I burned out and just needed to get the hell out of commercial screen printing. In that time we’d gone from a small shop with two smaller presses and maybe six employees to the second largest shop in the state, processing thousands of garments weekly. During my employment there I started my own small “company” printing mainly band merchandise and small promotional items for local businesses, running out of a variety of basements and garages, as well as doing custom show posters for the Hi Dive, with a handful of close friends. I took a job slinging slices at Benny Blanco’s Slice of the Bronx at night and screen printing all day.

As I hurtled towards thirty I tried to suss out how I could move more towards a more solid creative career doing something more fulfilling than arguing with late-night drunk assholes about pizza toppings. Around that time my boss at Benny’s introduced me to the person who would become my tattoo mentor. What started as a normal friendship, became a working friendship as he offered to teach me to tattoo out of what once was the Emporium of Design, one of Colorado’s oldest tattoo shops. Today I believe it’s still called End of Days Tattoo and is located in Colfax Avenue. I spent the last six years or so working for him at both of the Bonaroo Tattoo locations in Aurora and Parker, before making the move to work for Alicia Cardenas at Sol Tribe Custom Tattoo and Body Piercing at 56 N Broadway here in Denver in November of last year.

In 2018 I became a father and have set a lot of things down to focus on raising a child and moving forward in my career as an artist. Around 2020 I resigned as the curator of the art space inside TRVE Brewing at 2nd and Broadway, a position I held for seven or so years I believe, working closely with the staff to showcase many up and coming artists in the Denver area and developing a handful of recurring annual and bi-annual events that are still part of the schedule at TRVE’s taproom. I will be showing some new works there in October of 2022, which will be my first solo show in close to 8 years. I still screen print for fun, but I mostly work on my own pet projects and merchandise in a way that doesn’t exhaust me. Occasionally I will take on outside work if a project seems exciting or it’s for the homies. I occasionally take on freelance illustration or design work for close friends and am always willing to hear about a project or idea someone has. Beyond that you can find me at Sol Tribe 4 days a week, making tattoos and building custom skateboards or painting flash and hanging around South Broadway on my days off, riding skateboards and playing pinball with my daughter at Mutiny Information Cafe.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I don’t think anything is ever a smooth road, especially if you love it.

Working in a creative vocation seems like it’s still viewed as a high-risk, low reward scenario, and if we’re being honest, a lot of the time, it is. It’s a hustle no matter how you look at it, and big ups to anyone out there who’s working hard and making it happen.

My parents always wanted me to go to school and get a good job, be more well off and be more comfortable in my life than they were. We did alright but it was definitely a struggle. I’ve pretty much worked a full-time job since I was 13 years old, which isn’t out of the ordinary for a lot of people I know. Almost none of those jobs had anything to do with my passions, save for working at a skateboard shop and screen printing.

I think the biggest struggles have always come in the form of mental health stuff for me, and while I have no official diagnosis, I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression since around 7th grade. Suicidal and intrusive thoughts, loneliness, social anxiety, feelings of not being good enough, all the textbook stuff comes and goes in big ways sometimes and it can feel daunting and even insurmountable when you’re in the midst of it.

I’m super scatterbrained sometimes and lose track of or take on too many things. Becoming more organized has always been an ongoing and constant struggle for me, both physically AND mentally. I’m also a chronic overthinker and will sometimes cause myself a lot of undue stress by trying to make things too perfect or just convincing myself things are too hard for me to accomplish in a way I feel good about. This is almost never actually the case.

Learning to tattoo is, in and of itself a struggle, and was one of the harder educational experiences I’ve had in my life so far, second only to becoming a parent, and there’s no handbook for either thing. Just people who’ve been doing it longer, and hopefully are giving you sound advice.

There’s never a shortage of people telling you you’re not gonna make it, you’re gonna washout, there’s no future or money in what you’re doing, etc, and unfortunately, I wasn’t built to listen to those kinds of people, no matter my relationship to them. And sometimes that can be a really lonely place to be. It can feel obtuse and degrading and sometimes those thoughts get inside my head and start to cycle and it can feel debilitating and invalidating when you’re caught up in it, and it can really kick the legs out from under you emotionally and put a huge damper on your motivation.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
At this point my main focus is tattooing, and a lot of my work stems from there. I mostly focus my time on American traditional/Neotraditional tattooing, with my own spin to it. I try to stick to traditional tattoo ethics, as I understand them, without becoming too bogged down with “following the rules.” To me, this life has never really been about following the rules. Learning the rules so you know how to bend and break them properly has kind of always been my philosophy.

I guess I’m known for my style which blends a lot of my disparate influences from punk rock flier art and skateboard graphic illustration, to graffiti and relief/screen printing techniques, cartoon animation and comics, as well as a strong background and more formal education in digital art/graphic design. I also try to imbibe things with a sense of humor. I like to make things that make me laugh or smile, or snicker when I look at them.

I think I make things that people may not expect sometimes. I like bright colors and high-contrast imagery. I like to play with contrast in subject matter, making gruesome things soft or cute and vice versa. I’ve been adding more psychedelic aspects to things in the past few years, as well as spiritual/esoteric imagery and symbolism. I think it’s important to have consideration, especially for things we put on our bodies as well as in our homes because these things hold energy and inform our worldview to a certain extent.

Beyond that, these days I’m just trying really hard to not overthink things too much.

Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
So many lessons.

F*ck the haters. Even when it’s that voice inside your own head telling you you can’t do something or you’re not good enough.

Work hard.

And really importantly, be authentic and honest with who you are. Claim your influences. Own where you are in your journey forward. Learn something from everything you do or make, even if it’s not your best work.

Become comfortable with critique and criticism, even your own. Find something good and something you could do better next time in everything to make or do.

Always add a little yellow to round out the color palette, and let your work speak for itself.

Pricing:

• Shop minimum for tattoos is $100 solid
• Hourly rate is $160-200 for larger-scale work
• Freelance rates range from $25/hr to $75/hr
• Always happy to entertain trade offers, mostly on freelance work

Contact Info:

• Email: partylord.tattoos@gmail.com
• Instagram: @jpartylord

Image Credits
Scott Colby Photography