https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Carlos: Carlos Torres has been tattooing for over 20 years and is mostly self-taught. Early in his career, Carlos worked at a couple of tattoo shops before he got his big break at So. Cal Tattoo in San Pedro, CA. It was there he learned the most and built his tattoo portfolio. Carlos specializes in black & grey realism and surrealism tattoos and loves creating original pieces of art. In addition to tattooing, he enjoys photography, painting, sculpting, teaching workshops, and traveling. His travels to international and domestic conventions have earned him awards including Best Small Black & Gray, Best Large Black & Gray, and Best Backpiece.
In October of 2017, Carlos opened his own studio, The Raven and The Wolves. This fine art gallery and tattoo studio is located in the heart of downtown Long Beach and is home to 8 artists.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Carlos’ start in tattooing
- The power of mentorship
- Apprenticeship in the tattoo practice
- Intuition and learning to be in-tune with your gut
- The ever-changing nature of tattooing
- The art of tattooing in relation to other mediums
- Carlos’ love for realism
- Being a “loose painter on skin”
- Mastering a medium
- Mood and stress having a factor in tattooing
- The human element, and subjectivity towards ideas
- The clients desire for a tattoo, versus the artist’s interpretation and advice
- Carlos’ recent work within oil paints
- Freedom
- Growing up in the ghetto
- Staying positive in the midst of life
- Teaching making you a better artist
- Being informed by toggling back between art medium
- Covid-19 and Carlos’ time spend thinking about lif
- Taking time off and implementing fresh ideas into your ar
- Creatives becoming caricatures of themselves
- Having child-like sensibilities with your art practice
- “Holding onto your dinosaurs
- Observing people losing their creative instinct
- The cliche’s of adulthood
- Storing ideas and inspiration
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Sophia: Sophia Rokhlin is an author, speaker, and nonprofit organizer dedicated to supporting the conservation of indigenous wisdom and territory. Through engaged botany and ecology, she bridges the worlds of traditional ecological knowledge and Western science.
She is a Program Coordinator at the Chaikuni Institute, supporting sustainable ayahuasca cultivation and reforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. She is a co-author of When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism, and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance (Watkins, 2019) on the global spread of ayahuasca. She helps coordinate Folk Medicine, a live-stream benefit for communities of the Amazon rainforest impacted by COVID-19. She sits in the Ayahuasca Community Committee for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Her research appears in publications including the New York Times and the BBC.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- The beginning stages of Sophia’s work with indigenous people groups
- How human communities understand and grow in community with each other
- The differences between the “American path” vs the path that indigenous people groups take
- The association of wavelengths and the togetherness of individuals
- How western culture has lost a sense of togetherness
- The concept of reciprocity
- “Sowing seeds for the future, while living in the present”
- Capitalism and the approach to success
- Coronavirus and it’s affect to our larger structures
- Working together in teams
- Happiness
- Technology and social innovations
- How indigenous people groups approach health and wellness
- America viewing health in an allopathic way
- Environmentalism
- The romanticization of interconnectedness
- The traditional and modern uses of Ayahuasca
- Meditation, present-mindedness, and prayer
- The loss of ritual within modern society
- Being honest with yourself
- Living in a world full of tools, but having the lack of community to utilize them
- Human wisdom
- The mindset of jumping from interest to interest, rather than going deeper into a context
- Art being an expression of exploration
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About William: William von Hippel, Ph.D., grew up in Alaska, got his B.A. at Yale and his PhD at the University of Michigan, and then taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University before finding his way to Australia, where he is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has published more than a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books in social psychology, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- William’s start in social evolutionary science
- The fear we experience being attributed to evolution
- Technology affecting our evolution
- Social vs. technological innovations
- The difference and similarities between hunter and gatherers and us now living in the modern world
- Great ideas being found
- Sexual selection within evolution and how it has shifted with the influence of dating apps and the internet
- Maximizers vs. satisficers
- Finding the fundamental purpose of your life
- The meaning of life
- Coronavirus and self-isolation
- The evolution of collaboration
- Being present-minded
- The fallibility of memories
- Sociopathic tendencies within humans
- The cost of empathy
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and self-actualization
- “Killing the Mastadon”
- How art and science fit within evolution.
- Objectivity
- The acceptance of the truth
- The end result of science and art being incredibly similar
- The concept of the “starving artist”