After almost twenty years in the craft, it is today in Chambéry that Mark Blackscab is pursuing a busy career. Specializing in realism for several years, he finds in the natural and mountainous environment of the “Porte des Alpes” - as Chambé’s also called - an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Dreamlike and tinged with spirituality, his works pay homage, among other things, to the beauty of nature. They also reflect the serenity found in Mark after a long fight against his own addictions. A battle he is now waging for others with the Addict association.
What is an English guy doing in Chambéry?
I’m from Maidenhead, South-West London, not far from Heathrow Airport. When I left England 30 years ago - I was 18 and I was getting into trouble - I was like : “Fuck’em I can do better than this, so I’m gonna look for something else.” I didn’t know where I was going, I just left and I ended up in the South of France. I got lost for a long time, punk lifestyle, party, drugs, alcohol. I kind of totally lost myself. I got my first tattoo when I was 24 in Cannes from Yohan (Art Cannes Tattoo). I put my foot in that world and I was like “Waow”. Tattoos have always been part of my life since I was really young. I already been going to tattoo shops since I was a kid, I had load of friends getting tattooed and stuff. When I got my first tattoo, I thought it was so cool. I quickly had another one and I thought that’s what I want to do.
What was it you liked so much about tattooing?
Before I left England I did an apprenticeship to be a graphic artist. That was before the softwares, everything was done by hand. I’ve always been fascinated with drawing. My grandad -I used to live with him when I was a little kid- was very enthusiastic about my first drawings. He told me : “You’re gonna make something good out of that ”. Since my grandad was encouraging me to do that, I kept drawing all the time, punk characters, comics stuff, etc. At the same time when I was 6-7, I was drawing tattoos with big pens on my forearms.
Everything started in the South of France then?
I was seduced by the whole world of going into the shops, the buzz of the machines, getting tattooed, the guys, the team… Fuck, it was so good. And then I met my wife in 1997. That was the year when everything changed in the right direction. She wasn’t not from the same social background as me, I come from a family in which there wasn’t much money, socially we weren’t well off. But she was like : “You want to make something out of our life? You’re really good at drawing, you like tattoos, go for it!…” I thought she was right and I believed I could make something out of it. Already with her, if I had carried on getting fucked up like I was, she wasn’t going to stay around too long. I knew that, and I was in love so… I thought : “Fuck, I’m going to have to put my shit together if I want to keep her”. I tried really hard to drop the old style of life. I started tattooing, getting tips from Yohan - although he didn’t have space for me to work in his shop- and I had a friend opening a piercing shop. Then, I moved up with my wife to Moutiers (Savoie), at the bottom of the 3 Vallées, from where you can get to Tignes, Méribel, Courchevel, Val d’Isère. It went really well for three years and then I moved to Albertville, where I staid for fifteen years, working with Bruno from Body Piercing International.
Was there a style you were specifically into at the time?
I always go trying to do what everyone else doesn’t do, and Yohan was doing Japanese traditional stuff. Japanese in the 1990s, before it exploded, was popular, pretty dominant in tattooing. Since everybody else was doing that, I thought I’m going to try something different. And then there was all the tribal black stuff going on and black was cool with me -that’s actually where the name Blackscab came from. Obviously, a good point to start from cause doing solid black is far from being easy. But after opening up the shop in Moutiers I got to realise how much you got to pay and how much you got to earn to keep the shop moving - I had children coming into the game at this point too. From just black it evolved pretty quickly. I’d always been tattooing black stuff but I was drawing pretty much everything. I really liked doing realistic drawings. Robert Hernandez, Tin-Tin, were the guys I was looking up to, as well as Aaron Cain and Guy Aitchinson. Because they were bringing realism to abstract making it biomechanic.
And now?
I just do realism. I decided to focus on that about 4-5 years ago. After 18-19 years of doing everything, I realised that if I really wanted to get better at something I had to specialise. In 2015, after 18 years of tattooing I felt like I was gonna get stuck at a certain level. I wanted to evolve. I don’t believe in getting stuck, you either advance or go backwards. There isn’t a fucking pause. After a while, if you’re not fucking feeling it, doing a bit of everything anymore, you shouldn’t be doing it. This is basic respect for yourself and for the clients. You’re marking people for life. From then on, I went to visit other tattooists, and at conventions, asking questions… and after 18 years of tattooing, I started from scratch again.
Why did you choose realism?
In the 1990s, oddly enough I always really liked doing totally abstract or totally realistic stuff, which are two ends of the same stick. I just followed my heart. That’s always been the case. My wife, when she sees the drawings I do today, she says : « You’re fucking crazy, how’re you going to tattoo that?!», and I don’t actually think about how I’m going to tattoo it when I draw it, I just try and stay outside the comfort zone. Go where fuckin no one else dares to go! There’s no real life in what we already know. I’m not saying I’m doing stuff nobody else does, but I try to do stuff I haven’t done before. I refuse to redo something I’ve already done. So, every time I have to do a design, I try to push it a bit further than the last time.
What are you pushing now?
I’ve really got into those kind of dreamy transparent… kind of like hallucination or dream… abstract in realism, you have to look at it for a while to see what is going on. I really wanted to dive into the technical stuff to master all that kind of transparency stuff, fusioning two images together. But once you’ve been swimming in that sea for a while, well, you can get out and go swimming in an other sea. Now I’m trying to push it back the other way and bring it to more simple, easier to see, bolder but with all the technical aspect. Advancing is keeping something of what we’ve done already. We can’t do anything new from nothing, that the process of creative evolution.
You like details too. Where is the balance between the desire to push the limits and the reality of a tattoo that will age?
That’s what has been fuckin forgotten today! I come from the old generation. Now it’s about the fucking photo that you put up, right? You can put 10 hours of fucking details into a small tattoo, and it’s true it’s fuckin fantastic when the tattoo is finished but, what is getting lost today: a good tattoo is not about how it looks when it’s just been finished, it’s about how it looks like in two months, in two years… in twenty years! I really try to keep that in mind. The design in the beginning is going to be super complicated, like the tattoo of the owl I did for instance, with the feathers and everything on it. I could’ve spent twenty fucking hours doing the same piece but not all the details would’ve been there in ten years time. That would be a fucking rip-off! You’re going to make them suffer for 25 hours for stuff you could’ve done in half the time. I did the owl in two days in a row, probably did ten hours on it, I took out all the unnecessary details that would’ve not aged well. That’s what the old guys are complaining about today. The young guys are coming in with one needle fucking details… Don’t do the tattoo for the photo, do the tattoo for the client. I don’t tattoo for myself, I tattoo for the person getting the tattoo. Respect the client and stop thinking about your Instagram account.
There are a lot of references to mountains, animals, flowers… in your tattoos.
I kind of go with what the people are asking for. I work in the mountains... In the city, in an urban environment, you go for horror shit, right? I really want to do more realistic portraits, but the job of a tattooist is to represent what the client really wants to reflect in his tattoo. I like to try and feel what it is they really want to express in their tattoo. So when they look at their tattoo it makes them feel good. If we come back to the horror shit, I suppose I’ve probably never really gone down that area because I’ve never got tattooed myself to express a negative feeling. I like tattoos that express something positive. I’ve done a few horror tattoos like hands with blood, a few people still ask, but it’s still telling the story, a journey that somebody’s done from a painful period in their life to better things. So, even though I’m going to put blood and gore in a tattoo, it’s probably because it’s just explaining the transformation the person’s gone through.
From a street shop to a private studio, the difference is in the relationship with your customer : the time spent together to build up a project ?
Totally, because I’ve got more time. People that come to me, I really try to understand what is behind the tattoo, what’s behind their idea. I go as deep into the story as the client wants to go, as they allow me to go too. And normally when I ask, it actually comes out. And that really makes the design go in a certain direction.
Big size pieces? Small size?
I like doing big pieces but it’s fucking long. It’s nice to have small pieces from time to time. It’s great to see the finished work in one session. I love doing it! I like doing color too but the general demand is black and grey and everybody seems to appreciate the bluey-grey I use. I love doing colours, it’s a totally different challenge.
What did you do creatively during this lockdown time?
Lockdown was time for introspection for me. How do I make my life more correct ? So that the rhythm of life becomes more correct, more balanced. The more balanced your life is, the better the work you’re gonna do. There’s a higher level of concentration when you’re going into a long session, if your life is in order, your mind is purely on that fucking area. When your life is in disorder, you’re carrying all of that shit. During that period, I was doing designs for tattoos and there was also my work with the association ADDICT, an association that helps people with addictions. During lockdown I was able to finish the cartoon I’d started for the association, it took me four years to finish it. In the past I received a lot of help to overcome my addictions, so now I’ve got keys and I try to give those keys to other people.
What problems did you have?
Alcohol from like 10 years old, I started getting drunk. I saw everybody else drinking and it seemed to be the way to have good fun. So alcohol, to soft drugs, to hard drugs, which almost took my life. And then from kicking one habit and then quickly falling into another one, after a while I just got to think I would be an addict forever. Because it seemed when I got rid of one, there was another that came to replace it. To finally understand that if you’ve got that kind of personality, you can’t change the way you are. We have been “programmed” that way. And then I met Ramon Junquera, the founder of ADDICT. I was having problems at that point and I hadn’t even realised that it was causing problems with my wife and children. I learnt this approach about 6 years ago and it totally worked for me to the point I don't have a problem with alcohol anymore.
No more war?
Yes that’s right! Because the personal war in addiction is partly in holding back. Let’s say you have to go to work tomorrow, you have to do a good job with it, so you can’t drink. So there is war within yourself, to hold the addiction back. With this program, I’ve healed the wound that pushed me to drink. So, today I try and teach this technique that worked so well for me. If people have got problems with addiction, no matter what they are : sex, alcohol, cigarettes, hard drugs, video games, telephones... I can help them. That’s my other passion. Everything I do for ADDICT feeds the rest of my life. It’s where I have to be at my absolute best, because it’s people’s lives we’re talking about here. That also makes me a better tattooist.
What is the ADDICT approach?
Instead of trying to get rid of the product, it’s about making the consumer a better person when he consumes. So, first of all, it’s about learning to enjoy the product, with simple but intense exercises. When we’re addicted to something, we have lost all pleasure. Adding pleasure to the consumption is to be satisfied at the end of it. Which already means no frustration, and no need for another one so quickly afterwards. It’s learning to consume with the better part of yourself rather than consuming with the worst part of yourself. And watching your consumption decrease, to finally, in some cases, disappear. Anyone who wants to know more, please, do get in touch! + IG : @markblackscab www.associationaddict.fr
