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The artist Jane Moseley may have only walked two shows at the Spring 2018 collections, but they were among the most talked about moments of the month. In New York, there was her turn on the Eckhaus Latta runway, where models were a cool-girl contingent of personalities and influencers, such as the songstress Kelela and the pregnant artist Maia Ruth Lee. The model popped up again in Paris, this time for Balenciaga, where her dramatic new boyish haircut made waves both on the runway and off. “I’m a micromanager,” says Moseley, who stockpiled a bunch of short-hair reference images for backstage hairstylist Holli Smith before landing on the perfect happy medium for inspiration: Stella Tennant. Flash-forward to the day of show, which, in a twist of fate, Tennant opened. “I literally had her hair! I had [no choice but] to hide from her. I felt like a weird, single white female.”
The painter and sculptor has always marched to the beat of her own drum (the fact that she has five cats named Judas, Gepetto, Opossum, Jimmy, and Human is but one example), but it’s what is under her clothes that currently has her Instagram fans talking: her colorful sleeves of original tattoos, visible on international covers and on that Eckhaus Latta runway. “The fact that I had tattoos never fazed [Eckhaus Latta] at all; they always saw them more as accessories to their pieces,” says Moseley of the design duo, for whom she first started working with as a model nearly half a decade ago. Here, the artist, who thrives in the dark—her dad is cult horror film actor Bill Moseley, after all—offers tips on how to find the delicate balance between daring and tasteful when dealing in the art of the tattoo. For Moseley, her 30-plus body adornments, which include a bracelet of skulls on her left forearm, a Roman numeral five near her bikini line, and an anime chick on her bicep, are all about placement, collaboration, and, of course, raw instinct.
On Doing Your Research
I grew up watching horror movies and alongside people with tattoos, given who my dad was friends with and my interests in music. The fact that it’s basically illustration but on your body was something pretty easy for me to get into. [How I choose my tattoos] is not something I can easily articulate—it’s coming from a more guttural level. If I see something and it’s beautiful, and I feel it viscerally, then that to me is something that inspires me. Cartoons, visual references from either Instagram or a film or a museum, reading fantasy or weird fiction books, or even classical literature—I compartmentalize it all and I store it. [Currently], I want a Medusa head, but not a vile Medusa, a sexy Medusa.
On Having Friends Gather Inspiration for You
I had a friend go into a tat shop that had generic flash on the wall—they all kind of looked like the Eddie monster dude from Iron Maiden [Eddie the Head] or a weird composite of a bunch of metal ’80s and ’90s monster guys. Anyway, it was on a wall in this shop in Silver Lake my friend was in and he loved it, so he sent it to me. And I obviously loved it, too, so for my 28th birthday, I got it.
On Choosing Your Ink Color
Some people have a harder time taking in color, but my skin takes color well—it stays very vibrant. Sometimes, I regret color because black and white looks really cool, but because I see tattoos as more of illustrations, I want the entire thing. If I can accentuate or heighten the tattoo, why not? Color, to me, is important to the integrity of the image.
On the Perfect Placement
I was never like, “I’m gonna be a tatted-up girl and separate myself from the pack.” It was more like, “Oh, I like that, I’m going to get it, fuck it!” And then, they just accumulated after a while—so placement became a puzzle. It’s all about finding the right delicate balance. So, I micromanage. Sometimes, it’s just trial and error—you can understand how the tattoo will look and interact with the other [designs] by putting the stencil the artist first makes for you in different places on your body. I’ll often bring a friend with me so I have their input, too.
On Knowing When to Take a Break
On my back, I have a really big tattoo of [the anime character] Motoko Kusanagi. There is this amazing tattoo artist from Japan who does really good anime, and so I hit him up over Instagram and asked if he was going to be in L.A. anytime soon and he answered, probably with help from a translator, “Yes, I’ll be at this tat convention in Long Beach in a few months.” So, I sent him a [reference] image and a deposit via PayPal and met him there—it was being held on this cruise ship, The Queen Mary, on the ground floor, so basically under water. It felt like he was sticking knives in my back for six hours. I had to [stop] every hour or two. I was so foggy and dazed, I looked like a mental patient walking around that ship. That was three years ago, and I definitely took a little break from tattoos after that. But, you eventually forget.
On Having No Regrets
All my tattoos are of things I love—even the ones that are less cool than others, I still love them because they are a part of me in a way. It may be a cringe-y part of me, but it’s a part of me nonetheless. They are all very earnest and straightforward and that’s the type of art I like to make. I try to make [art] less about pleasing or appealing to other people and more about being honest to who I am and what I like. And whether that strikes a chord with a big audience or not, at least when I go to sleep at night I know I was authentic to myself. That’s all I can do. Especially in an age when everything is so saturated and we have so many references and things being cross-contaminated, it’s hard to feel like an individual. So, [this is how] I can be separated from the rest.