MAGAZINE ARTICLES

“I view celebration as being all relevant to the experience that the person is having, it can be good, it can be bad or it can be a milestone that has been passed in a person’s life” these are the words of Marc Stapelberg, an up and coming tattoo artist on loan to the Mother City from the nations less than favourable capital, Pretoria.

Born and raised in Pretoria, Marc pounced on the opportunity to work in one of South Africa’s most stunning cities, a city that hardly sleeps, with beaches and sun during the day and a nightlife that could be compared to that of a mini New York.
As someone who has a “surfer boy” mentality, but living in a land locked city this was one of the easiest decisions that he has ever had to make. We are talking about a guy here who would rather spend his free time having a crisp cold beer at a beach front bar in shorts and a t-shirt with other beach bums than sit in a trendy bar with what he would only describe as “fake #!^*”. So he followed the calling of the sun and hopped on a flight to the lazy Mother City.

With his super chilled attitude and blistering hot skills, he soon found a home working at one of Observatory’s very own tattoo studios with a difference, Young Guns. A tattoo studio where the artwork is not just being inked under your skin but also all around you. A studio that brings a refreshing twist to the classic tattoo parlours of yesteryear.
They have artworks on their walls from various young Capetonian artists and all of them are for sale. This is the whole concept of Young Guns, young people supporting other young people to showcase their artistic talents.

In this cut throat industry that has become a global trend, it has become more and more of a necessity for an artist to focus on a specialisation that they will become known for. This becomes their finger print that personally identifies and sets them apart from other artists. For Marc his love lies in realistic black and grey portraits and in script. Even though he has years of experience and a healthy portfolio, he is still the new kid on the block in the Cape Town scene and still has to make a name for himself on the local scene.

When asked why he loves black and grey portraits, he had a very simple answer for it. He loves the ability to capture the realism of someone or something with immense detail that you cannot really achieve with colour. They say that a “picture is worth a thousand words” and this is quite true when it comes to the art of tattooing.
With scripting he has no idea as to why he loves to do it, all he knows is that he still gets excited when he gets to do script work, even after years of tattooing. He has created his own fonts by chopping and changing other fonts until he found a font that he likes and that he thinks will best suit the piece at hand. Taking a font out of a font book would be like a designer only using Times New Roman or Ariel for all their clients.

But back to the topic at hand, celebration. When asked if he has any tattoos that symbolise celebration for him, he had to first have a look at his tattoo covered body and think for a moment. His answer was “Most of my tattoos are aesthetic or are small reminders of things and events in my life, that doesn’t make them any less important to me than someone who gets a memorial piece tattooed. I just chose to cover my body in small reminders of things that were important at the time and that I thought looked cool”

The only tattoo that he said was a celebration of anything was a tattoo on his neck, which reads “Maman”. He explained that it reads mom in French as his mother is from Belgium and she is what he described as his number one lady in his life. He says the tattoo celebrates his mother and his heritage and he placed it on his neck for everyone to see that he is proud of his mother and all that she had achieved.

In the end his answer to celebration quite cleanly wraps up why some people get permanent reminders inked into their skin. “Celebration can be for the good times and the bad times. It can be immortalised in the way that you best feel it should be represented. It truly is all relevant, as no two people are the same and the same goes for tattoos. People shouldn’t let others dictate to them what a tattoo should mean, as how I choose to celebrate a memory is quite different to anyone else, celebration is personal preference”