by Christopher Agostino
I was checking out a colleague’s video on You Tube when I saw one of mine come up in the column of suggested videos, and I was very surprised to see it had 45,811 views, way more than any of the others I’ve posted. [Shortly after this post, it was age restricted on YouTube, so here it is on Vimeo]
2008 was an adventurous year. The impulse to start collecting faces in slideshow videos came in response to a comment by an artist I met while painting at a Parrish Art Museum event. She came in to the gallery where we were painting and told me she had seen our faces all through the village of Southampton on her way to the museum (there’s a few photos in this video from a Parrish Art Museum event.) What she wanted to tell me was that we were creating a “kinetic art form”—particularly, that the style of our facepainting, with very colorful faces and every one different, made her look for them as she saw the painted people moving through the village, wanting to see each face. “kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer.” (from Wikipedia)
Facepainting at an event is a collective art. It is the sum total of the faces we paint that is the art form, rather than each individual face. Her description of this as a kinetic art had me thinking about this collection of faces in motion, and how to try to document that. That led to creating “Every Face” videos, in which I photograph every face I paint at an event and put them in to a slideshow in the order painted, and that led to taking a selection to put a year together in 2008.
The music is “I am An Animal” by Pete Townshend. I felt ok using it because he gave it away as a free download on his web site, on an album of odds and ends and some unreleased “Scoop” tracks, which are the demo versions he recorded of his songs as he wrote them before bringing them into the studio to be done by The Who.
See more of our Videos.
Related articles
- First Night Hartford – Face Painting Adults and the Final Faces of 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- Automated art at Kinetica Art Fair (telegraph.co.uk)
- Face Painting Gallery – 2011 Holiday and Christmas Faces (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- Arts | Long Island: Parrish Museum Displays ‘American Portraits’ – Review (nytimes.com)
- Kinetic Art: The Page Turner by Joseph Herscher (selectism.com)
- Face Painting – Kids for Kids Event – Inspirations from Africa and India, including Rangoli (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- The Kinetic Art of Face Painting – Pt.1: Sending Art off into the World (thestorybehindthefaces.com)