Natalia Tyrer is "a little afraid of needles", something surprising if we take into account that we are talking about an artist who started tattooing at the age of nineteen. It all started, she tells us as we chat quietly in her studio in Palma, when her partner at the time let her practice on his body. "He had a lot of tattoos and didn't mind if I made a mess," she confesses, smiling. The bug for art, however, came from long before: as a child she was already drawing in notebooks, as a teenager she got into graffiti with her friends and then tried acrylic and oil. She was always experimenting and learning in a self-taught way until, after high school, she began to study illustration.
Two years after, however, she dropped out of school and moved to Barcelona to study Wall Arts at Escola Massana and, while working as a waitress at night to make ends meet in the Catalan capital, a friend introduced her to some tattoo artists. Then, for the first time, professionalization began to present itself as a serious possibility. She stayed at their studio for a year and, as she admits, "I really learned with them, because until then no one had taught me".
"When I tattoo with dotwork I enter into a meditative state".
After finishing her studies, Natalia traveled the world for a long time and in Australia, she says, she found "a very professional studio, I stayed there for a year and a half and I understood that I wanted to dedicate myself to this". That's how it was. Back in Mallorca, she settled on the island and found a job as an employee, but it was clear to her that it was something temporary, because "I wanted my own business. My dream was to work alone, without bosses, and I found this place close to home. Just six years ago she took the plunge and set up the studio where she has been working ever since on Bartomeu Rosselló Porcel street.
The "nerves, the vertigo and the great responsibility" she felt when she started, as Natalia says, "for the love of art" at the age of 19, have been transformed into a talent that captivates tattoo lovers with her style, which she defines as ornamental and which draws from oriental and Tibetan influences. Her illustrations, which she engraves on the skin, follow the dotwork or pointillist style, which consists of making dots on geometric designs, more or less intense, in such a way as to create a powerful visual effect. A way of working that demands maximum concentration and that, Natalia explains, "makes you enter into a meditative state".
"For me it's incredible to think that you are doing something for life for that person and to see that they are satisfied".
Before getting down to work with the needles, however, there is another, more creative phase, in which Natalia draws the tattoo. In the studio, in fact, she has a room where she paints and gets inspired because, as she acknowledges, a tattoo begins long before it is actually drawn and depends on the fundamental part: the client's trust on her. "Some come with very clear ideas, others come with a very open mind and give me freedom to create," she says about her client profile that has been changing over the past six years: "at the beginning it was mostly women between 30 and 45 years old, but now more and more men come". When she finishes, of course, it's time to receive feedback from those who have put themselves in her hands, a key moment for Tyrer because, she says, "for me it's incredible to think that you are doing something for life for that person and to then see that they are satisfied".
Although she is extraordinarily good at tattooing and it is the artistic medium to which she dedicates her working life, art is part of Natalia Tyrer's way of life in all its forms. "I'm painting all day long. Even in between tattoos, I paint. "Fleeing from labels, Tyrer experiments and does not want to be pigeonholed, something that is demonstrated with the recent exhibition in which she has participated, Diálogo, together with the Madrid sculptor Santiago Villanueva at the 2Q Art Gallery, in Palma, with a work that she began to create three years ago and in which all the pieces are connected to each other.
Create, create, create. This is the passion of Natalia Tyrer, who has illustrated the cover of Íñigo Gibernau's latest book, plans future exhibitions (during our talk, she hovers over a possible exhibition in Tokyo) and even tattoos herself. Because someone who breathes art in abundance, as she does, is capable of creating incredible works on any canvas, even on her own skin.
