New Faces — Faces At Play: Face Painting images of Sports, Dance and Physical Activities

In my Transformations Facepainting company, we’ve set a goal for ourselves this year to match the way we paint faces to suit events with special themes, working to alter both the imagery we use and the style of the facepainting. It’s a way to be more supportive to the goals of these events and also a way to push ourselves into new directions. Earlier this October, we painted at the Summit Medical Group Sports and Healthy Living Fair ( http://www.summitmedicalgroup.com/about/ ), which is designed to get kids inspired to do sports and other physical activities to stay healthy. Jennifer, Britt and I decided we’d ask the kids and adults we painted about what physical activities they enjoy doing, what kind of active games they play outside or if they play any sports ‚ and then we’d turn their answer into their face design. It led to a lot of new, off-the-cuff designs. We had fun, we tried new things and learned from each other’s experiments, and we had people standing around to watch and see what new idea we’d come up with next — which is a large part of what we want to achieve with our approach to facepainting as a performance art, to make it as exciting to watch as to participate.

I was particularly taken by the work that Jennifer and Britt did. There’s a playfulness to the designs they painted that perfectly matched the “active play” concept of the Health Fair, and which seemed so appropriate to the kids we were painting. Whereas I was too concrete in my use of figures, both Britt and Jennifer let their figures bend and float on the face for a lyric, “childlike” effect — in the style of the illustrations of Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold ( www.faithringgold.com/ ), or the floating figures of a Chagall painting. Although the individual faces were quite beautiful, especially as they both use colors so well, the impact of this playful approach was best seen over the collective effect of the day’s faces, so I’ve put some of the fotos together as a slideshow.

a girl on monkey bars

Jennifer's "Swan Lake" - such a nice idea I tried it myself at my next event

One of the things I appreciate most about having a company of talented artists is the inspiration I gain working beside them. Britt painted this girl jumping rope early at the event, and I made a point of trying the idea myself so that I can remember it and use it again.

From "Tar Beach" by Faith Ringgold

  

http://www.agostinoarts.com

New Faces – October 8 + 9: Zombies, Halloween, Vampires, Save the Turtles and Art on Faces

"Zombie Attacke" painted at the Mill Neck Manor Fall Harvest Festival

This weekend offered more opportunities for creative adventures in facepainting, made even more fun by the wonderful Indian Summer weather here in New York. All of our outdoor events were packed with happy people. ‘Tis the season for facepainting, as we move past too hot summer weather and approach Halloween — the international holiday for celebrating transformation (haven’t you noticed that people are more willing to go wild in October?). My artists and I are collectively working on new ideas, egging each other on into new directions and working particularly on bringing more imagery onto the face, i.e. treating the face more like a canvas, and reaching further into other styles of art for inspiration. And, as we get increasingly enthusiastic about being more creative, we find an increasingly receptive public joining us in the adventure. All weekend long I heard people on line saying they thought it was cool and exciting that we would be surprising them with the faces we painted, with nary an indignant demand for a Spiderman face.
Here are faces from three events:

"Ballerina"

The 50th anniversary of the Mill Neck Manor Fall Harvest Festival (http://www.millneck.org/news/fall_festival/fall_festival.html) where we’ve painted for many years — at this event the organizers do charge people to have their faces painted, yet we still get to surprise them with our designs.

The Wildlife Conservation Society “Come Out of Your Shell” Run for the Wild at Coney Island’s Aquarium, raising funds to save turtles (http://e.wcs.org/site/PageNavigator/RFTW_AQ_homepage.html). Here we only painted variations on turtle designs on the adults and kids running the race.
The Parrish Art Museum Family Festival (http://www.parrishart.org/) in South Hampton. Whenever we paint at a museum we see it as an opportunity to present facepainting as an art. For this event our theme was “Art On Faces” as we were turning the participants into images from famous artists and paintings, while talking with them about the painting or about the artist and their style.

"Demon From Hell"

Two angels, from a William Blake painting

"Picasso Zombie"

from a Monet painting of Venice

Irises, from a painting by Van Gogh. This was the final face I painted at the Parrish Museum event, a nice way to end the weekend.

"Vampire Bite" - adapting an idea from cultural sources, the Jaguar or Serpent helmet mask designs from Aztec and Mayan examples

Impressionist Landscape - Sailboats from a Monet painting. I painted two sailboat landscapes (seascapes?) in succession, one this Monet image and the 2nd a Fauvist" style image from Andre Derain

Favist landscape, from Andre Derain's "The Red Sail"

from a foto of a Hawksbill turtle surrounded by fish, painted at the Run for the Wild in Coney Island

This was from a scene I remembered, snorkeling off of St.John many years ago I watched a sea turtle skimming along the turtle grass and occasionally rising up to gulp air at the surface. I tried to paint it in the way one sees things underwater, a little obscured and unclear.

We ended the painting at the Run for the Wild with this group of five young women. For this event, I was painting with Jennifer and Laura.

http://www.agostinoarts.com