Aba Bayefsky was a Toronto-based artist and educator. He studied art at Central Technical School and later at the Academie Julian in Paris. During the Second World War, Bayefsky enrolled in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and eventually became an official war artist, with a mandate to depict air operations in north-west Europe. He also made paintings of his personal experiences of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in May 1945. As he commented in an interview, "For the first time I became aware of man's monstrous capacity for evil." The images from this time never left him, nor has his anger at what was suffered by the victims of the Holocaust.

Following the War, Bayefsky became an instructor and the Ontario College of Art (OCADU) and in 1958, joined the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1979, Bayefsky was recognized for outstanding achievement in the arts and service to the nation through his induction into the Order of Canada.

In the late 1970’s Bayefsky developed an interest in tattooed individuals – echoing a broader cultural acceptance of tattooing that was beginning to take hold in Canada at the time. He became an insider to the world of tattooing and made numerous trips to Japan between 1979 and 1982, where he met with and painted tattooed individuals and tattoo masters.

The Canadian art world did not share Bayefsky’s enthusiasm. In 1981 he exhibited his tattooed portraits for the first time. “Initially the Tattoo Series was not well received. The tattoo was a controversial subject matter, an underground hidden world, too gritty and avant-garde for many.” - Thomas Beckett, Beckett Gallery.

Nevertheless, there is a revival of interest in the artist’s tattooed portraits. They were exhibited at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre’s Gendai Gallery in 2016, and in 2018 a major article about the work was published in The Journal of Canadian Studies, titled “An Artist’s View of Tattooing: Aba Bayefsky and the Tattoo Scenes of Toronto and Yokohama, 1978–86”, by Jamie Jelinski.