Ghostprint Gallery showing ‘Drawing Blood II’

So what do tattooers do when they aren't injecting colorful inks into human skin?

Judging by last year's "Drawing Blood" and its current "Drawing Blood II" follow-up at the Ghostprint Gallery, a hybrid of art gallery and tattoo studio, they exchange their needles for paintbrushes in impressive numbers.

The results could hardly be more different.

"Drawing Blood" offered a sampler of fine art by 50 tattoo artists. Its follow-up concentrates on the work of four painters, New Yorkers Daniel Albrigo and Timothy Hoyer and Floridians Phil Holt and Jeff Srsic.

"These artists are very good technically, their painting styles are distinctive, and they've been serious painters for a long time," says Ghostprint co-owner Thea Duskin, who curated the 15-painting "Drawing Blood II."

"I wanted to allow each of them to show more of their work."

All four acknowledge, in telephone interviews, that tattooing puts the food on the table -- professional tattooers typically command $100 to $175 an hour -- but they differ in how they view themselves.

Are they painters who just happen to tattoo or tattooers who just happen to paint?

"I'm definitely a painter who does tattoos," says Albrigo, who is showing three moody oil paintings involving a swivel chair and objects associated with dentistry.

"I'd rather be painting. I guess the painting is more fine art because it's all me. With the tattooing, there's always another person involved. A lot of people are trying to blur the line between tattoo art and fine art, but I don't do that. Tattooing is more like folk art to me, but tattooers can produce fine art.

"I do a lot of oil painting and works on paper with ink. The ink paintings definitely have a foundation in tattoo design, but the oil paintings are removed from tattoo work."

Holt sees himself differently.

"I'm probably a tattooer who paints, but that changes from day to day," he says. "I fluctuate. I go through seasons when I don't paint at all. Tattooing is just as gratifying, if not more so, than painting. I'm just playing by different sets of rules."

Holt, who calls tattooing "an illustration job," is showing five watercolor paintings of female nudes in a palette restricted to the tan-brown-black range. He calls them "strictly studies of form and shape from models that are friends of mine."

He draws a strict line between painting and tattooing.

"With tattooing, people come in with an idea and want to look a certain way, and I do what they want as much as possible," he says. "With painting, my desire is different. I'm working on a clean slate, not a three-dimensional object with a set of criteria. I can paint whenever I want on whatever I want."

Hoyer and Srsic agree with Holt and Albrigo on the differing approaches of tattooers and painters, but stake out a middle ground in their views of themselves.

"I think of myself as an artist who works in two different ways," says Hoyer, who founded the Alive Gallery, a combined art gallery and tattoo studio in Carytown in 1975. He ran it for two years, then got rid of the gallery and renamed the business Tattoo Alive.

Hoyer is showing two paintings with standing figures reduced to their musculature and accompanied by fanciful beasts. They have a surreal feel, but Hoyer resists calling himself a surrealist.

"I don't know if I can label it," he says. "It's just kind of stream-of-consciousness."

Srsic, who co-owns a combined tattoo studio and art gallery in Ybor City, Fla., with Holt, is showing three studies of heads plus a painting, "Skull Scroll," that he created in collaboration with Holt for a scroll show in Los Angeles.

"I'm an artist who paints and makes tattoos, but I do consider the painting to be more fine art," he says. "The tattooing is more of a commercial art."

"Skull Scroll" is the focal point of the Ghostprint array.

Holt and Srsic blew up a photograph of a skull, projected it on fabric, traced it, then cut the image in two. Holt tackled the left side of the skull; Srsic, the right side.

"We thought it would be interesting to see each other's approach on the same subject," Srsic explains. "I did a more photo-realist approach, and Phil got looser and more colorful. We didn't see each other's work until we put them together."

Roy Proctor, a freelance writer and theater director, retired in 2004 as the art and theater writer for The Times-Dispatch. He can be reached at .