Tattoo shop, art gallery coloring in downtown Vancouver community

When artist and tattooist Ricky Gaspar moved his Hazel Dell tattoo studio to lower Main Street in Vancouver, the first thing he confronted was graffiti.

He wasn’t glad to see it on a wall across the street from his new shop and art gallery, he said, but he was glad to be the right guy to do something about it.

That day in August, Gaspar arrived to discover the landlord across the street hurriedly spray-painting over somebody else’s unwelcome spray-paint job. Gaspar introduced himself and suggested a colorful mural. The landlord liked that idea, and paid for the paint.

“Just as we’re moving in and wanting to be involved in the community, somebody defaces that wall,” Gaspar said. “We said, ‘Hey, if you want something bright and colorful instead of an eyesore, we’d like to do that.’ ”

Now, the plywood panel on the west side of Main — behind which building rehabilitation is underway — shows off a vivid collection of Polynesian and mezzo-American images and designs that Gaspar painted with several artistic friends, including his apprentice, Jesus Torralba.

Across the street at 601 Main St., Gaspar has launched a double-named business in a double-decker space. His Polynesian tattoo shop, Local Boy Tatau, and his new art gallery, Nemesis Rogue, share the open, airy ground floor of the historic Heritage Building, a former U.S. National Bank. It still feels like a bank lobby, Gaspar noted, with a waiting area in front, tattooists replacing the tellers in back and one flight of stairs leading to an open-air mezzanine that used to be the manager’s office.

Only 10 people may be up there at one time per fire code, but Gaspar said he hopes to install a back stairway exit so that mezzanine can function even better as a unique, up-in-the-air art gallery.

It already is that now, and the curiously mischievous exhibit that opened there in September will continue for another month. Bring your cell phone and follow the provided instructions for “inverting” its colors — so that black is white and red is green — as you view “A Showcase of Light, Color and Perspective” with artworks by Alex Valle and Beth Myrick.

Valle’s pieces in particular were designed for “big reveals” when the colors are reversed. A flat-blue tiger becomes vividly orange and leaps forward; a surreal, Dali-esque landscape featuring blue skeletons under a speckled white sky becomes a dark, scary, starry nightmare.

“We want to invert your perspective. We want to invert the daily lives we all live with art that’s fun and surprising,” Gaspar said.

Feed the community

Gaspar specializes in Polynesian tattoo, but when you try to nail down his personal ethnic mix, he resists a bit — on principal, he said. The Olympia native and Army brat has lived all over the country and all around the world. He’s more interested in what people share than the labels that separate them.

“We all share common threads. That’s what I want the art and the tattoos we do here to show, our sense of community,” he said.

Gaspar was an art major as well as an athlete at Linfield College. Then, he played professional arena football, a faster-paced, higher-scoring version of the game that’s played on a smaller, indoor field.

A few years of that was plenty, Gaspar said. “I was happy to prove I could do it, and I was happy to walk away from it with my wrists and knees still OK.”

Actually, Gaspar said, his wrists and knees hurt. He lives with pain that he rates at 6 out of 10, he said, and he definitely feels it when tattooing.

“You know what they say, you’ve got to suffer for your art,” he said, chuckling. “I can live with it.”

But suffering is the last thing Gaspar has in mind for local artists, art lovers and the whole community. He wants his business to be fun, positive and nourishing. He wants to invite artists who don’t get to show in “fancy” galleries, he said. Some proceeds from Nemesis Rogue art activities will always go to the Clark County Food Bank, he said.

Meanwhile, he said, the very practice of tattooing is increasingly respectable in mainstream society, at least here in the Pacific Northwest. Between his growing customer base and the goodwill of the community he keeps trying to nurture, Gaspar feels pretty confident that he’ll be able to stay in the Heritage Building.

“We feed the community, the community feeds us,” he said.