SNU Y FF

Julius Margulies (aka Snuffy) is a multidisciplinary artist whose mediums include skin, sound, screens, glass, fabric, metal and concrete. Snuffy’s boundary-pushing, surrealist work has celebrity friends and fans rolling up their sleeves, and digital and physical collectors clamoring to own his art. We caught him at the opening of Primordial States, his new show at Palo Gallery in New York City, for a chat about NFTs, using art to let go, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

SAMANTHA BLOOM

So Snuffy, what’s the most important advice you’ve ever received?

SNUFFY

There’s not a single moment, but all of the advice I’ve received that’s stuck came in times of trauma: I’d gotten arrested, or gone through a bad breakup, or failed at something massive. The advice, in short, was to accept failure and learn from it. I guess that’s kind of become my MO: nothing is really a failure unless you don’t learn from it.

SB That’s a big theme across your work, especially your “Addiction Series“. Does pushing through trauma or failure require some intrinsic selfbelief, or can it be generated?

S I think now, what I’m doing with my art is letting go – creating and then analyzing myself through it, as opposed to the other way around. It actually takes such a toll to force myself to think about something. We were talking about this at the gallery: the level of perfection required in tattooing is daunting, the precision isn’t fun or explorative. I’m actually discovering who I am more by going into a meditative state, making, then making sense of it later.

Whether you push through or whether you let that thing define you, it’s still defining you. I rest my hat on my failures because I learn from them and don’t allow them to happen again. I’ve become really good at tricking myself, and I do think it takes sheer will to mentally trick yourself, but that’s how I’ve quit smoking, or drugs. It’s just... this isn’t what I do anymore.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

S I never had somebody to shake me and say, get up and do the thing . I’ve probably lived 10 different lives. I installed car stereos and car alarms at like these‚ Fast and the Furious-type car shops. I did that for a while and then got into trouble with the law. And then I got into real estate, renting apartments in Boston. And then after bouncing around, I started setting goals and doing things with intention. I keep a very strange cast of characters around me. When ever I need advice, I triangulate information be - cause nobody has full context on every thing. I think to make an informed decision, it’s important to ping ideas off of people that live in different worlds. For me, that’s people like Jeremiah (Joseph), my friend Dor, and my brother. The only thing they all have in common is that they only dress in black.

SB You’ve worked in areas where there’s a strong culture of apprenticeship. In tattooing, the normal pathway for that would be to apprentice for someone. Was that your experience?

S I got where I am tattooing by shooting from the hip. I had a pseudo mentor in Oskar Akermo, one of the best tattooers in the world, but our relationship was super unofficial. I would call him and be like, ‘Hey, I need to shade this area. Should I use like a five mag or a nine mag?’ I think he watched me tattoo twice in the first year and a half.

But I recognize that everyone isn’t going to proactively go out and find that person to nurture their curiosity. And because I never had a traditional mentor, I’m super serious about giving that to my own apprentice.

Tattooing is super easy... you’re just putting color in places and not putting color in other places, manipulating darkness and light, creating dimension. But I’m not teaching him how to tattoo, I’m teaching him how to think.

He’s going through my school, and because I saw him work his ass off, my goal is to make him so good that he surpasses me. Today, he’s tattooing a celebrity at my studio that’s been trying to get on my books forever, so I think we’re getting there. What’s the point in teaching someone if they’re not going to be better than you?

SB I’ve always considered you an artist that’s media-agnostic. You‘re so willing to work in any format. You’re tattooing, your show up now at Palo Gallery consists of drawings rendered in three-dimen sional light boxes, you’re creating life size sculptures. You’re also a very early adopter of NFTs, and released a big series on NIFTY Gateway this summer. Is your approach contingent upon format,