Rip Van Wagoner

      While the historians and art buffs of the Catskills busied themselves with talk of Thomas Cole, Olana, and the Hudson River School of Art, a new wave of art history was making it's way up the  Hudson from NYC, where visionary artist Alex Grey's spiritually charged psychedelic work The Sacred Mirrors had stoked the soulfire of one of Catskill 's beloved tattooists, me Richard "Rip Van" Wagoner.