Before You Stop the World and Get Off

To be a student of history is an exhausting practice, because you are really just assessing the present moment through the lens of those who came before. Humans carry emotions and instincts shaped centuries ago — we grieved through the plague, we grieved through World War II, and we grieve today — and so we repeat patterns we cannot entirely escape. History repeats; we are cyclical creatures, thought to be evolving but probably far less than we imagine. Yes, technology races forward at a post‑human pace, but we remain beings reckoning with our own stories: the sons and daughters of a century before, and the century before that.

I was mulling this argument over after a conversation with Elliott Pittam, the London tattoo artist whose narrative paintings have quietly become one of the more intriguing developments to spill out of England in recent years. Pittam is drawn less to headline history than to the sedimentary stories that accumulate in old newspapers and neighborhood lore; his research into Victorian clippings and quotidian London habits feeds a studio practice that treats painting as mise-en-scène. The canvases read like stage sets—figures arranged with an almost forensic attention to motive and mischance—each gesture registering as cultural residue. “We're very ingrained in what we do, and I think that's quite interesting as a subject to explore,” he told me, weeks before his solo at Haricot Gallery in London, opening June 26, 2026.

In Pittam’s work, human behavior remains quietly provocative. We repeat familiar rhythms, yet as subjects we never quite age out of being observed. There is a strange grace to that—why film still matters, why we keep turning to literature and painting. People remain endlessly compelling, complex material, and Pittam works in the long tradition of probing our capacity for self‑analysis.

Evan Pricco: There’s a history here, where you have been working in, and come from, tattooing, which is a solid creative, artistic base. But the paintings mark a transformation, and maybe we can even say a separation of powers, so to speak. 
Elliott Pittam: It’s quite separate. I don’t know, is it frowned upon to be a painter who comes from tattooing? 

EP: I don't think so, but maybe I’m coming from a more optimistic vantage point. 
EPittam: Some people turn their nose about it a little bit at it, especially over in England. Like, “Oh, you didn't go to art school and you didn't do this, and you didn’t come from that.” But there's always people that break through, anyway, and I think that is what is important. 

EP:I think that if you do tattoo work, it's like going to a certain kind of school. You're basically doing artwork every single day, regardless if you want to or not. People are relying on you to do good work. That is pressure. That is a deadline. I think a very important thing with tattooing and my friends who do it, is that sometimes you just don't want to fucking deal with somebody that day, but you have to. You have to do art on somebody, having to talk to somebody while doing it, and that is so different from getting private time in the studio by yourself and making. Tattoo teaches you a lot about the creative process I would think. 
EPittam: I definitely loved the transition. It's quite refreshing. I think with the shop I worked at, Old Habits in Dalston, I got really lucky by being asked to work there. They were my favorite artists from England. They had this very cool style that was coming out of the shop. Liam Sparks, who owns the shop, travels around the world, has a lot of influences. He's very good and I learned a lot from him. 

So I was really fortunate to get my foot in the door at Old Habits. But when the lockdown happened, my partner, Cara, started making rugs and then that went on to her doing watercolors. She started to encourage me to try something new, and kept saying,  "Yeah, you should paint, don't worry about what people think.” And I thought to myself, that's the direction I want to be going in. I want to paint. I can't see myself tattooing 18 year olds when I'm 60 and I want to do something that's more for me and less about other people." She was doing her new thing, so it motivated me to do this, and it's taken off a little bit, which is great.

I've only been painting for maybe two, three years. I'm really new at it. But I mean the first year or two, I definitely hopped over a few different styles and tried to find what I was trying to say or just tried to find that style. I was so confident in what my tattooing was that it was like, oh, I need to have a lane and I need to find my voice. 

EP: Right, so you didn’t want to have the same visual language. You wanted this part of your artistic output to be original to you. 
EPittam: I think it took me a minute as well because I was really trying to detach tattooing and painting. I was really doing some painterly things, and then it took me a minute to kind of realize that actually I should be using all this stuff that informs me. I've been looking at references for tattoos for the last 10, 12 years and there's stuff in there that I was like, "Oh, that would make a terrible tattoo, but for a painting, it's so good." So I've got all these little reference ideas, just the library I've collected over the years.

Working with Liam, I could never tattoo the same as him. He’s amazing. But what I could do is look at how he collected references. He'd go to all these book fairs and antique markets in Belgium and around Europe where he'd pick up the craziest little illustration collections, old Victorian-era police articles from newspapers. He collected a library of references. And I think that was really when it clicked for me. I said to myself, "That's what I found the most interesting, that's my source, this is what I enjoy.” So I began to explore a link between the images you see then in the Victorian ages and how it relates and is similar to today. We haven't changed that much. We are really not progressing as much as we think. 

EP: This reminds me of the New York Times interview I heard with the director of Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, when she was asked about the grief that Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare felt over the loss of their son. The sort of simple version of history would suggest it was during the plague, death was so common, children dying was so “normal.”Like grief almost shouldn’t exist because it was what everyone was going through. And she said, in summary, "We haven't really changed our capacity for grief. We've been grieving, we grieve. We grieved back in the 1500s, and just because a lot of people were dying doesn't mean that we didn't notice it or it didn't affect us." And I think it's really important in this day and age to remind people that we evolve, yes, but human behavior and emotion hasn’t changed all that much.
EPittam: That's it, right? It's almost like just another day we've all lived it before. It's the same day. We're all going to work. We're doing the grind.

EP: Let’s talk about the show at Haricot. On a glance, and the way you have cropped the paintings on your feed, you have sort of captured a bit of malice, or mischievousness. And it all seems quite theatrical, like a play. I had this thought that when you go to the theatre, I love to follow the background characters who aren’t the stars, just to see what their expressions are, where their attention goes. And you get so much of the story from following those actors. Your paintings are doing that to me; I’m following the bit characters. 
EPittam: I remember an interview with Harmony Korine where he said, "I don't think about the plot or the story too much. I want to make a movie of all these individual scenes in my head." And that really resonated with me with trying to sort out this exhibition and not having too much of a narrative. But actually, in doing that, it’s becoming an even better story. I always get an idea of what I want to paint and then it's about piecing that together rather than having one grand idea. I wanted to piece it together just like one scene and one frame at a time.

EP: Were there any surprises to you as these 16 works were coming together?
EPittam: 100%. I think even through the color palettes I think I felt like I was getting somewhere in a cohesive way. It's kind of been nonstop and such a short period since I found out I was getting the show. I've had to really just fly through them all, but I think in doing so, it's made them all very, like we said, cohesive. They do fit together. I think if I'd had too much time to sit on it, then maybe I might have gone in some other different directions that might not have been so fluent.

EP: Now when you are tattooing, does it feel different because you have this different outlet? Now that you're starting to see some real momentum and it feels good and you've kind of built this new universe that you're working with? 
EPittam: I still tattoo the same stuff. I like traditional, classic designs and I like them done well. I think my mindset will always know what I like in tattooing. So to execute, it just means I've got to do really fine detailed stuff and it's like sometimes not so fun to go back to when you've been doing all this loose big fun stuff in the studio. Some days, I really have to motivate myself and remember, "Okay, I've got to spend fucking six hours doing a palm size." And then sometimes you get to listen to someone's life story about how their dad doesn't like them… (ha, ha!). I’m joking.