He’ll have you at his gold toothed shiny smile, and while his surface is a sparkly one—metaphorically and literally speaking—you’d be remiss to stop there. Ray Wallace is a multi-faceted visual artist, musician, tattooer, and most importantly—a man.
It’s not a gender thing with Wallace; we’re talking about being a man in the sense of owning up to his actions, taking care of business, being honest with himself and others.
The son of a Major in the Air Force, Wallace grew up globally, meandering throughout South East Asia, where his family opted to live with the locals instead of on post for the most part, an experience that Wallace enjoyed, noting that if you lived on post in places such as The Philippines, you were considered a target by Communist rebels. Besides, how else was he going to hang out with all the wrong people and master the art of scoring porn and firecrackers? “I think my parents had a death wish for me—I definitely wouldn’t have let my kid have free reign of the town during a coup [d’état].”
Their tours in South East Asia were sprinkled with stateside stints with brief stops in places such as Houston, where he was born, Oklahoma and Niceville, Florida, “They had a sign out front that said ‘Nice People, Nice Town’ something like that. It was horrible,” said Wallace. He was 13 when they lived in Florida and that’s when Wallace says he became a “hellion,” a little punk kid obsessed with The Misfits and all that comes with it.
After Florida, they moved to Korea where he decided to clean up his act, do well and graduate from high school—that’s also where he first heard of a magical place with beautiful skies and mountains known as El Paso, TX. El Paso would have to wait. First, there were matters of the Ubud kind to tend to in Bali. Here’s the quick lowdown on Ubud style oil painting. The pre-war modernization of Balinese art originated from three villages, Ubud being one of them. Ubud artists make more use of open spaces and human figures surrounded by stylized waves and foliage. This style of art was attractive to Wallace so after high school, he set his eyes on Ubud.
Just know that you can’t make this stuff up. Turns out that if you save a royal ass, you’re bound to get repaid and Wallace was about to reap the benefits of an old favor done by his uncle for a Balinese prince—exactly what the favor was remains unclear.
Wallace landed an apprenticeship at the Rudana Fine Art Gallery, owned by Nyoman Rudana, an important patron of the Indonesian arts who on top of several impressive accomplishments, helped found the Museum Rudana and founded the Rudana Art Foundation to help develop and promote art in Indonesia by sponsoring gifted young Indonesian artists. Wallace, a young talented part-Indonesian artist, hit the jackpot—his first real taste of oil painting.
“I could have very easily just stayed there, I think a part of me wanted to struggle more so I started applying to colleges in The States,” said Wallace. That’s when he learned that he’d been accepted to the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP), El Paso by way of Ubud, if you will.
Actually, it’s more like El Paso by way of Korea. It was in Korea where he met Gabriel Montes, a talented violinist and El Paso native much in the same boat as Wallace—American kid in American high school in Korea. So that settled that, Wallace, now accepted to UTEP would leave Bali for El Paso, TX where he would land smack dab in the middle of a vibrant music scene. El Paso was home to several touring bands, At The Drive In was about to break out and our nights were filled with unpredictable swagger.
It wasn’t all roses right away in El Paso, first there was the shock of being in the desert, and then there was dorm life at UTEP, which involved a skinny, weird, long haired kid living with the UTEP football team. “I think they all thought I was gay until, in their words, I ‘banged a chick’ in my room, it was like ‘Oh my god, Ray has a girl in there!’ And then everything was cool, I got back slaps and got to be called ‘dawg’ it was such an odd beginning here,” said Wallace.
Wallace studied fine art at UTEP for 3 years but never graduated, “[At the time] I really didn’t see a point in me staying, a couple of my professors didn’t see the point of me staying.” Wallace was doing a fine job of keeping himself busy outside of school via his art. He had made good friends with Alfred Campos from El Paso band The Fla Flas, fell into the scene and taught himself to screen print. That’s really where it all began; making shirts for a far gone venue known as The Clinic and one-off shirts for the shows that happened there, “That’s where I got my beak wet with screen printing and enjoyed the immediacy of it,” said Wallace.
Wallace would come and go from El Paso several times all the while oil painting and screen printing remained a constant. In the early 2000’s, at the age of 25, while living in the D.C. area, Wallace discovered tattooing, first by getting them, then by wanting to become a tattooer. Good timing would strike. His tattoo artist, Kenny Brown, liked the drawings Wallace was bringing in for his personal tattoos, an artist left the shop, and Wallace was invited to apprentice under Brown in Manassas, VA. Initially intimidated, Wallace accepted.
“Apprenticeships are difficult,” said Wallace who initially struggled with the idea of permanently marking a person with a design he didn’t necessarily find aesthetically and sometimes conceptually pleasing himself. “In tattooing, the thought process and the aesthetic approach are different and it took me a while to learn the things I needed to in tattooing and to unlearn the fine art schooling that I had. Fine art got in the way. It’s a transition that’s difficult to make, if not difficult, fraught with pitfalls,” said Wallace.
A self-professed “medium whore,” Wallace is quick to admit that he goes through cycles of favoring a particular medium over others, be it music—as Secret Life of Sparrows, or visual arts. Of all the mediums he’s tackled, tattooing has definitely been the hardest on him. “Tattooing is a beast; your whole life gets wrapped around it. There’s the people involved, there’s shops, there’s shop drama, there’s a certain level of pressure—there’s a person attached and you definitely want to be present 100 percent or more, otherwise, you’re doing everyone a disservice. I’ve actually dropped tattooing for a few months at a time just because I was not feeling it and I couldn’t , with good conscience take people’s money if I wasn’t there completely, it seemed really dishonest to me. Everyone takes their own path. I feel kind of bad about it sometimes and my teacher was like ‘Fuck it man, everyone has their own timing, their own path and you really shouldn’t feel bad about it, you wouldn’t have learned the things you know now without going that way.” It was during one of those “breaks” from tattooing where he dedicated himself to music, releasing an album as Secret Live of Sparrows and touring with Jim Ward. It was after touring when Wallace fought it out with his own biases to arrive to where his today.
“Tattooing teaches you how to be a fuckin’ man. In order to do a good tattoo you have to have a good amount of brains to draw upon the history, to do history justice and to do it right and to speak that language right. You gotta have a lot of heart and passion for it because it’s hard. You just gotta have balls. It’s the Wizard of OZ shit, you know, you gotta have brains, heart and balls. That’s what it takes to be a really good person too,” said Wallace, an artist, a man.
Ray Wallace currently resides in El Paso, TX with his fiancée, their dog and kitty-cat. His music and prints are available for sale through Tembloroso.com. To see more of Wallace’s work, visit his website www.flawlesswallace.com
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