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PRAISE FOR JONATHAN SHAW'S UPCOMING NOVEL 'SCABVENDER: CONFESSIONS OF A TATTOO ARTIST'
    "Jonathan Shaw is a shameless evildoer and a decorated veteran of the drug war whose deviance is only exceeded by his clever ability to weave his sickness into a true classic piece of American literature.
He is Oscar Wilde and Charles Manson tattooing his own 'Portrait of Dorian Gray' on the white underbelly of a society desperately in need of this type of fearless storytelling."
-Marilyn Manson
"Finally, after twenty-plus years of coaxing, cajoling, pleading and basic needling on my part, my ol’ scallywag brother, Jonathan Shaw has put pen to paper, dragging and drudging up virulent and violent memories of his not so cute past and present. Been waiting too long for this. So have you, whoever you are, believe me. If you don’t yet know him, you will. If you didn’t want to, too bad. Once he’s in, he’s in.
    J.S.’s words, work, life, lives, deaths, rants, rage, hilarity and taste rank with the best of ‘em. If Hubert Selby Jr., Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neil Cassady, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Edward Teach, Charley Parker, Iggy Pop, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Joe Coleman, Dashiell Hammett, E.M. Cioran and all of the Three Stooges had all been involved in some greasy, shameful, evil whorehouse orgy, Jonathan Shaw would surely be its diabolical, reprobate spawn".
- Johnny Depp
                                                                                                                 "Jonathan Shaw has had his passport stamped in hell so many times he could get his mail there. Vile as junkie-cum, beautiful as a dead drunk's bible, Scabvender will keep you clawing at the pages, wondering how one man can wreak so much havoc, suffer so much for Art, and still have enough brains left to put a sentence together, let alone the heart to create this unique, riveting, hyper-colorful and --scariest of all -- brutally true adventure. Written in blood, Scabvender takes us places most people never come back from. This is gonna hurt, motherfucker, but the author is living proof that whatever doesn't kill you can get you laid... What are we, in the end, but the sum of our scars?"
-- Jerry Stahl
"A writer of immense passion and soul, a true survivor who has painstakingly documented an archtypal descent into the various hells of this festering disease of a planet, Jonathan Shaw has the courage to vivisect his own soul. And what pours out is a staggering stew of passionate decay, rage, revulsion, desire, ecstasy and pain. As in an autopsy, Scabvender captures the putrid smells, the stinging sounds and the blistering sights in a complex, sensuous tapestry of the author's own dark pathology. In the dungeon reserved for outlaw writers, Jonathan Shaw is right at home with both Carl Panzram and Louis-Ferdinand Celine."
-Joe Coleman
"Jonathan Shaw’s SCAB VENDER is one hell of a wild ride through the bizarre netherworld of his own damaged consciousness. His experiences are real and his language and insights kinetic and brutal. This is what the French would call “littérature mauditâ€, and Shaw’s writing certifies him as a subversive and criminal inhabitant of the world of human expression."
- Jim Jarmusch
"Jonathan Shaw is the great nightmare anti-hero of the new age".Â
-- Iggy Pop
"Jonathan Shaw's passionate descriptions of the surreal, paranoid jungle he inhabits capture the haunting poetry of his soul...SCABVENDER is an original and compelling work..."
--Hubert Selby Jr.
"I picked up Scabvender at bedtime, thinking that, like many books people give me, it would literally bore me to sleep. Quite the contrary! I stayed up, compulsively turning the pages, and read the whole thing in one night! Wow! What a story! How the author lived to tell it, only Jesus knows. Jonathan Shaw is a true Alchemist. In his work as in his life, again and again he has turned shit into gold."
-- Inger Lorre
" In the great tradition of cultural criminals like Genet, Rimbaud, Artaud through the Beats, Jonathan Shaw constructs an aestheticly complex language of social abnegation that, itself is part of a greater historical context of life-as-art. Scabvender is a tour de force nightmare ride across the dark underbelly of the American Dream. The author has played the cards life dealt him with integrity, poetry, style and wit. And if he's had to bluff more than once he has always kept at least one ace up his sleeve. Shaw’s immense contribution to the psyche of our collective disenfranchisement weaves together the expressions and identities of iconoclastically unique personae into the fabric of a broader and more durable worldview."
                                                                                                                                                                        -- Carlo McCormick, Art Critic, Senior Editor, Paper Magazine
"A stranger-than-fiction, true-life journey through the twisted world of an authentic art-terrorist."
 -- Billy Shire, La Luz de Jesus Gallery
" Jonathan Shaw is a fucked-off hunk of shit, a fish-asshole cunt-sucker!"
-- Charles Bukowski
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A native New Yorker raised in NYC, Los Angeles and Rio De Janeiro, Jonathan Shaw became obsessed with Low-brow style illustration art and painting at an early age. Weaned on the bold, shocking graphics of the lurid 1950's American comic books of his youth and the lyrical post-modernist tropical abstractions of South American street muralists, his artistic sensibilities were formed through an unlikely bi-cultural melding of subcultural influences. Embarking in his late teens to travel the world by tramp freighter and thumb, he became fascinated with the poetic power of haunting images glimpsed in third-world dockside dives and soon made a commitment to enter what was then a very underground calling: tattooing. As an apprenticing tattooist in the early 70's, Jonathan cultivated close working relationships with legendary masters of the largely clandestine sub-culture of the tattoo, including Bob Shaw, a notorious 2nd generation tattooist whose roots reach back to turn of the century carnival and folk art traditions. Old man Shaw was the young tattooist's personal mentor and the artist from whom Jonathan proudly inherited his nom de guerre- a time honored carny/tattoo tradition- and the name he works by to this day with a pride and respect befitting the honor.
Known for his bold, innovative approach to traditional tattoo concepts, Jonathan Shaw has long been on the cutting edge of the largely expanded field, pioneering design styles whose effects have rippled worldwide, paving the way for much of the art's newfound mainstream acceptance and popularity. In the 1980's, he was the first working tattooist to curate now legendary gallery shows coast to coast showcasing work by tattooists past and present and opening floodgates for the current wave of tattoo- inspired outsider art trends so much in vogue in today's art and fashon world. Through his efforst as founder and editor in chief of "Tattoo Art International" magazine, once regarded as the seminal encyclopedia of worldwide tattoo history, he put tattoing on the world map of outsider art forver. Today, retired from tattooing, Shaw divides his time between Rio De Janeiro and Los Angeles, building up to make more some noise in writing, film, and arts. After a career spanning over two decades of innovation in a field where mystery and mysticism is the mundane, Jonathan Shaw approaches his work, whether in design or letters with a freshness, spontaneity and practiced execution that belies many years of toiling in the mean streets of true outsider art. His artwork hangs in several important collections and has appeared in major group shows worldwide.
-m. delio
If Jack Kerouac were around today to pen the sequel to ON THE ROAD, he'd no better than to set the work at sea as well as on land and borrow a few pages form the life of Jonathan Shaw. Shaw, like the famous beat author an erstwhile merchant seaman, is a tour de force artist who's worked like a man possessed, slumming in latin american seaports and schmoozing with idle rich, exploring the dimensions of tattooing and creating fresh mediums of it.
From "JONATHAN SHAW -- A TATTOO ODYSSEY"
by Frank Booth
May '96
