Some of the designs I explored during Halloween season. We had been doing Halloween-themed events from the start of October, and it kinda crept up on me. After the first weekend I took some time to make sketches for faces using the cartooning/animating techniques I’ve been experimenting with for my StoryFaces performances, and trying to use the mouth and nose in more playful ways.
See the video: Li Chi Slays the Dragon from Bodies Alive!
An ancient Chinese legend brought to life on painted bodies.
Li Chi Slays the Dragon is one of the stories I tell most frequently. Mostly as a StoryFace, illustrating the tale on the face of one volunteer as I tell it, but, once upon a time, I had the chance to expand the story onto a cast of performers as a tale told with painted bodies. This video is from that performance at the Face and Body Art International Convention in 2008, as part of the Bodies Alive! show we presented there. I was joined in the painting by Christina Davison, Sara Glasgow, and Jennifer Wade, with help from some volunteers, and in performance by Blair Woodward, Cully Firmin, Rebecca Reil and Chloe Agostino. See my StoryFace version of Li Chi live at PIFA. Learn about the Bodies Alive Show. Learn about BodyStories.
My specific inspiration for how to take a legend like this and turn it into a sequence of images on painted bodies came from a puppet show I saw at the New Victory Theatre by Ping Chong, adapting to the stage Japanese ghost stories from the classic movie Kwaidan. Ping Chong’s stage design re-created a cinematic style, varying the size of the puppets and the perspective of the settings he placed them in to do closeups, or long shots or tracking shots, to tell the story sequentially — like in a movie.
The development process included sketches of the body designs which I scanned and then moved around in photoshop to create a rough storyboard, plus some color and design tests done in the course of my regular facepainting gigs. To help the performers understand the visuals that their painted bodies would create on stage, I sketched the designs onto T-shirts for them to wear during rehearsals. Included here are the studio photos taken at FABAIC by Rich Johnson, plus some of the other images created during the process, and since.
It is easy to be inspired by Matisse. Seeing Henri Matisse the Cut-Outs exhibit at MOMA, the exuberance of color, the freedom of forms — you want to be able to paint like that. The later rooms with the wall-sized works, and especially the photographs of how his studio was so full of this art as he created it — you want to live in rooms like that. I walked out of the exhibit wanting to play with color, to hold it in my hand and create pure forms with it as he did. Even if you don’t like Matisse, you have to be inspired by the absolute passion he had for creating art, so undeniable that it that led him to invent a new way to make art when he could no longer paint. Chapter 10 of my book is titled “Matisse’s Cat”, in reference to the inspiration I draw from these struggles of great artists to find a way to satisfy that passion, and Matisse particularly because he spoke of the struggle, and left us evidence of his explorations and battles with line and form and color. I was writing about my own struggles to develop new cat face designs, particularly one based on a statue at the Bronx Zoo of a puma coming down a cliff, and in this iteration I had simplified the puma shape so much that it reminded me of a Matisse cut-out, and that encouraged me to loosen my hold on the realistic image and pursue it’s essence instead. This is the encouragement I take from Matisse: aim for the essential.
Matisse — Blue Dancer
We paint faces mostly with pure color. You might do blending in the sponge work, but then the imagery on top is usually solid colors with minimal shading — so the Cut-Outs relate directly. In adapting the Cut-Out figures to a face you have the additional playfulness of trying to fit his forms to the shapes of the face, which becomes an exercise in the fundamental skill of placing a flat image over the curves of the face. And I do mean “exercise” — I learn more about painting faces when I try to imitate the Cut-Outs.
The Rumanian Blouse 1940
Matisse’s painted portraits also adapt well, as he worked often with flat areas of pure color and precise linework. Strong colors and clean linework make for effective faces.
Face Gallery (Body Paintings below) ——————————————
stained glass window
The Fall of Icarus
girl at the exhibit
Icarus
face by Jenn
Blue Nude IV
The Dance I 1909
from Red Fish 1911
The Dream 1939
at FABAIC 2011
Matisse has also been the inspiration for a couple of my fine art body paintings. In 2011 I used the Icarus image and the blue figures from his Cut-Outs on a demonstration body I painted for Kryolan Professional Makeup at the Face and Body Art International Convention. Using Matisse imagery allowed me to show off the intensity of Kryolan’s colors, while I continued to explore fitting his organic figures onto the curves of the human canvas.
Matisse-Icarus 2011
Matisse-Icarus 2011
Matisse Remix 2008
“Matisse Remix” is a bodypainting I did in 2008 as part of my Modern Primitive Art series, exploring the connection between the birth of “modern art” at the start of the 20th century and the traditional arts, masks and sculptures from Africa and Oceania that was part of its inspiration.
Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1912
Red Fish 1911
Matisse’s “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” 1912 is considered one of the earliest paintings influenced by African masks, and Matisse was considered either very brave or very foolish to make such an “ugly” portrait (especially as it depicted his own wife). I added in imagery from one of his most popular paintings from the same period, “Red Fish” 1911. I’ve always been fascinated by Matisse’s ability to walk the line between the beautiful and the startling.