According to Victor Policheri’s MySpace page, he can’t seem to stay in one place. After spending some time trying to pin point Victor’s current exact location in the world, I’d have to say that the MySpace claim is for the most part, correct. Victor Policheri really can’t seem to stay in one place.
I don’t think that any single person can say for certain where a tattoo artist gains the necessary motivations, inspirations and energy which ultimately come to earmark their work. Yet I do feel that travel and the experience of different and new cultures has an extraordinary ability to alter not just a person’s artistic inclinations, but also their personal outlook, behaviour, taste and a whole heaping mass of other characteristics related to life.
Victor Policheri also seems to feel this way. Growing up in the wintery chill of Minnesota, Policheri decided at the age of 19 that tattooing was something that he wanted to pursue. He took out a college loan and instead of buying books, paying for tuitions and that sort of thing, he bought tattoo equipment. Armed with this new equipment, Victor didn’t go the traditional tattoo route of an apprenticeship, instead he slowly taught himself, eventually setting out on his trusty motorcycle for greener pastures in 1996. He travelled throughout America, briefly stopping in Olympia, Washington before moving on to Seattle. Seattle seemed to be a good match for Policheri, and he worked as something of a freelance tattoo artist, doing construction and odd jobs to fully round out his income. As time passed, Victor made close friends amongst Seattle’s tattoo community and begin to get full time work.
The work that Policheri had been doing as a freelance tattoo artist did have its own benefits, one of which was that Victor was forced to work without transfer machines, forcing him to draw all the work he did on to the flesh freehand. To this day, Victor credits this process for his ability to render his art more naturally to the flesh.
In the last few years, Policheri has really taken off on a global scale. He currently lives in Barcelona, Spain, but it seems to me that he could just about be anywhere. His website shows photos and gives information about his travels, his time spent in gorgeous South East Asia, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sweden, Finland. He travels and learns and tattoos, meets new people and manages to continuously create some very fine tattoo work. Take the time to scroll through his gallery and I guarantee you’ll see more than a few pieces that really catch your eye. His work carries both dark and bold characteristics and often manages to incorporate a Gothic sense of tone. But to simply describe Policheri’s work in these terms is an injustice. There is much going on in both his life and his work and for the time being, it seems that we’ll just have to wait until he resurfaces again from his latest adventure to spill some more ink on the big ol’ map of life.