Winston the Whale turns familiar creatures into a bright, strange world of rainbow color, shifting outlines and mischievous detail.
A long-headed alien has rainbow stripes running through its ribs and a row of smiling faces across its skull. The claws are blue. The teeth are still there. It’s a familiar nightmare given a completely different mood, and it makes a good introduction to Winston the Whale.
The Portland artist, also known as Dave, gives creatures and everyday objects a kind of restless cartoon life. Bodies split open, eyes multiply and solid shapes seem to bend or drip. The color is immediate. Spend another minute with the work and you start noticing how carefully the black shapes, open skin and repeating patterns hold it together.
A shift in the picture
Before tattooing, Dave worked in murals and street art. In a 2019 profile in Willamette Week, he described moving from Charlotte to Portland in 2009, putting a cartoon whale on stickers and eventually trying a hand-poked tattoo on a friend. A later request for a red-and-blue anaglyph design helped bring wider attention to his tattoo work.
That doubled image still has a place in the selection here. Bert and Ernie appear in red and blue outlines that sit slightly apart. The faces are easy to recognize, but the offset gives them a visual wobble. There’s very little ink filling the space. The effect comes from the relationship between the two drawings.
Elsewhere, that sense of instability takes a different form. A long rainbow creature curls around itself, with eyes scattered along its body. You can follow its outline, but the extra eyes keep pulling you back around. It feels animated even in a still photograph.
Color with a backbone
The mix has roots beyond tattooing. Colossal’s 2018 feature connected Winston’s work to 1960s imagery, Scandinavian folk art and Memphis design. Those references make sense when you look at the flowers, repeated marks and bright geometric patterns. They give the work a familiar feeling without making the creatures any less peculiar.
In the bat-and-cat composition, a rainbow wing shares space with a row of eyes, a flower and a large feline face. There’s a lot happening, but the heavier black areas give each part an edge. The open skin matters just as much. It separates one idea from the next and keeps the smaller details from disappearing into the color.
The split unicorn makes its joke with fewer parts. Its two halves are joined by a short rainbow, with a few stars around the body. The little marks in its coat add texture without competing with that central break. It’s absurd, readable and cheerful.
The red-and-blue bat works through repetition. Circles and small graphic marks fill the ears and wings, while a wide grin anchors the face. The dark limbs and outer edges give the pattern a clear shape to live inside.
Room for a whole world
The tiger-and-castle tattoo expands that language into a larger scene. A collaboration with Mike Boyd, whose portfolio also features the piece, it wraps a blue-and-black tiger around a cluster of rainbow-roofed buildings. Pink paws, round windows and small orbiting forms create plenty of places for the eye to stop. The tiger’s body gives the whole scene its movement.
The strawberry takes a simpler route. Black bands filled with white stars cut through the red fruit, and a large blue leaf finishes the top. The silhouette is still unmistakable. Inside it, the picture opens into something that looks closer to outer space.
A rainbow mushroom and a pink skull bring the selection back to looser, curling forms. An eye floats above them. Green drips and blue curves move through the gaps. The skull’s teeth keep it recognizable, even as the rest of the image seems determined to wander.
A world that keeps growing
Skin is one part of Winston’s practice. His work also appears at Hopscotch Portland in the Walls Within exhibition, where his mural uses rainbow lines and interconnected forms on a much larger surface. The scale changes, but that interest in color and movement remains easy to recognize.
What stays with you in these tattoos is the pleasure of looking. A sharp-toothed monster can be funny. A piece of fruit can contain a night sky. Winston gives those ideas enough structure to work on skin and enough freedom to keep them strange.
Explore more work from Winston the Whale (@winstonthewhale).
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