Nicholas Baxter

b. 1981, New Haven CT

Having spent his life in pursuit of creative expression in multiple mediums, Austin TX based artist Nick Baxter uses his unique holistic approach and independent spirit to craft not only world-class custom tattoos, but also highly realistic oil paintings that confound with meticulous technique and fool-the-eye illusions. And with over 2 decades of immersion in the sometimes overlapping worlds of tattooing and painting, Nick also offers his diverse body of knowledge to other artists and tattooers through numerous educational products, seminars, and workshop experiences.

His current tattoo work focuses on large-scale illustrative projects that combine elements of his meticulous realism painting style with bold traditional tattoo sensibilities and compositions that flow seamlessly across the body. Nick uses his diverse artistic skill set to interpret all kinds of representational subject matter into the tattoo medium, whether in color or black and gray, as well as to create imaginary works with believable dimension and depth in the biomech and bio-organic genres.

Nick’s painting output is just as multifaceted; while producing work in the classical realism genres of still life, landscape, and figurative art, Nick also combines elements of each into a hybrid of sometimes unnerving photorealistic precision, producing works dwelling somewhere in the surrealist world. His latest work incorporates overlapping layers of imagery, distorted cartoons, and Trompe L’oeil (“fool the eye”) illusions to form stark postmodern critiques of society, psychology, and culture