Born in 1961 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA, Mike Davis lives in San Francisco where he works as a tattoo artist since 1992 in his own shop Everlasting Tattoo. He began his career as a tattoo artist in 1988. After being Dana Brunson’s apprentice, he developed a style combining contemporary vision linked to the evolution of the tattoo in the past 20 years and has a parallel painter career.
Great lover of art since his childhood, he attributes to his mother passionate, passionate about craftsmanship, his taste for painting. In 1997, completely self-taught, he began the realization of his first paintings and delves into a thorough study of art history. His subjects and styles borrow from many registers ranging from French surrealism to the Flemish masters of the Renaissance such as Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel to the Californian designer painter Robert Williams from the lowbrow movement. In a symbolist approach, Mike Davis sprinkles in his paintings a plethora of intimate references covering episodes of his daily life and his favorite objects. One way to test the intelligence of the spectator, offering a singular imagery of madness and excess.
In tribute to the surreal and mannerist art, Mike Davis is also working to combine his love of classical painting and clues belonging to the world of tattoos. His works are exhibited in galleries in New York and San Francisco with frames we realized himself, and are also collected in Europe. His paintings have been exhibited in Paris in HEY! modern art & pop culture – Part II (2013), directed by Anne & Julien and presented at the Halle Saint Pierre Museum, and he joined the short list of tattoo artists (forty artists for the world) who participated in the now historic exhibition “Tatoueurs, tatoués” at the musée du quai Branly (May 2014, October 2015), in which Anne & Julien were the curators.