Jeff P. - Everything That Burned

ARTISTJeff P. PAGES120 BINDINGHardcover SIZE6" x 8" WEIGHT0.9 lbs CONTENTColor Flash Flash is not made to be preserved. It is made to be used - painted, stacked in a drawer, pulled out for a client on a Tuesday afternoon, traced over until the paper wears thin. That is the entire point of it. That is what Jeff and so many tattoo artists love about it. On the morning of October 19, 2016, a natural gas explosion destroyed the building that housed Art Work Rebels Tattoo Studio on NW 23rd Avenue in Portland. Somewhere in the rubble was a metal flat file. Inside it, years of handpainted flash, 11 x 14-inch sheets of watercolor board covered in skulls and pinup girls, snakes and skeletons, designs traced and re-traced in the tradition of the craft. The site was sealed due to asbestos. Nothing was recovered. What remained were photographs. Not careful scans — Jeff had stopped sending his work out to be professionally documented, feeling he was being too precious with paintings that were always meant to be working tools. What survived was casual, imperfect, and entirely his own: handheld shots taken by an artist who never imagined they would one day be the only record. Everything That Burned is built from those photographs. It is the complete archive of Jeff's pre-explosion flash, arranged in reverse chronological order from the last sheet he painted to the first. It does not pretend to be more than it is — not a polished retrospective, but a document of work that lived in a shop, on a wall, in a drawer, in the hands of someone who spent years making it and one morning lost all of it. The photographs are imperfect. The loss was total. The book is what remains.