About Johanna Bloom

Johanna does not care how you pronounce her name, as long as you say the “h”! Her art is a love letter to animals, people, nature, and spirituality. Her childhood religion separated her from those around her, with teachings like “animals don’t have souls”, and “non-believers go to hell forever.” Johanna struggled fiercely with these concepts, and found art as a way to express her disagreement. She likes to paint white eyes to symbolize spiritual vision, and sometimes paints her dreams and nightmares. She draws her friends, family, and pets to show them how deeply they are seen and admired. All of her paintings are studies, seeking to understand and draw closer to the characters around her. She learned tattooing as a way to financially support herself and her horse, and to further declare herself apart from isolationist religion. She has found it to be a deeply healing art form.

Her logo is a sparrow with bat wings. The sparrow, the most underestimated yet fiercest of birds, represents a long journey at sea. The bat wings represent the ability to travel through dark places. The combined creature is a traveler and a misfit: everywhere she goes, part of her belongs to a different world. This symbol became her logo. The name “Class Bloom Artwork” is a tribute to her childhood horse, a racehorse named Class Sprite, who taught Johanna to be fearless.

Johanna was overjoyed to find that that her art grows as her character does. She experiments with this, incorporating many new styles on her journey. Her first love was drawing animals, and then she discovered a gift for portraiture in high school. She visited the Picasso museum in Barcelona and found that Picasso also started his career in realistic portraiture, and abstracted from there. Inspired, Johanna adopted his technique of creating a portrait using a single unbroken line. She attended art school in Los Angeles, and learned to work in most 2D media, including charcoal, pastel, graphite, scratchboard, oil, acrylic, and watercolor.

Johanna graduated as a licensed tattoo artist in 2017 in her native state of Colorado. She has tattooed all over the country, from South Florida to Denver to Indiana to the East coast. She currently tattoos occasionally in Denver, CO, and Scranton, PA. Her work has been featured and commissioned by BuzzFeed, the United States Equestrian Federation, Scientific American Magazine, Stratus Chamber Orchestra, and Valor Symphonics Orchestra.

Johanna taught herself digital art to excel as a tattoo artist, and it quickly became her favorite. She likes to combine all her favorite things from the different styles she has learned along the way: the accuracy of realism, the bold lines of neotraditional tattooing, the splashiness of watercolor, and unique “scribble” textures pulled from her practice with Picasso’s uniline sketch style.

When Johanna is not creating, she enjoys exploring with her friends, riding her dressage horse, Diddi, and adventuring with her two black cats, Omen and Eden.