80 • SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE
Wayne Simmons talks with some of
his favourite rebels within tattooing.
This month he meets Jefree Naderali
@jefreenaderaliREBEL
INC.
A
ll creativity draws upon the one energy—I’m
convinced of this.
Whether you’re an artist or a musician, a
writer or a dancer, the feeling you get when
you create, when you’re communing with whatever
muse you commune with, when you’re in that all pow-
erful, all consuming Zone, is very much the same.
Now, I’m not any kind of authority on this before you ask.
I play a little guitar—and I mean little—and I throw some
words together every month for this very mag. But I can
tell you now, when I’m in the moment with either of those
things, when the words are flowing or I’m really feeling
those chords I strum, it feels good in the exact same way.
I got thinking about this when meeting this months’
Rebel Incer, Jefree Naderali. As we talk, Jefree tells me
he used to be a dancer. Before he got into tattooing, he
did breakdancing and popping - which to the uniniti-
ated, such as me, basically refers to a particular form of
dance coming out of the West Coast Funk Movement of
the 1970s. And while it might seem strange to move from
dancer to tattoo artist, I would bet it isn’t strange at all
to Jefree. In fact, I reckon, if you look hard enough, you
can still see some of those dance moves within his art.
Take its versatility, for a start. In one way, Jefree’s
work could be described as photorealism and in anoth-
er way it could be described as the tattoo equivalent to
fine art, maybe even modern art. And when I ask him
about that, his reply is very interesting. “For me, art is
texture,” he says. “When I find my texture I say to my-
self, ‘Yes this is my art.’ Everyone can tattoo the aver-
age image but what makes my art unique is the texture.
When people see my tattoos it’s easy for them to say this
is Jefree’s.” He has a particular interest in the human
body, how it presents and how it moves, and of courseWhen I find my
texture I say to
myself, ‘Yes this is
my art.’