"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.
I was back at the NY Aquarium at Coney Island for an event this morning for the first in a few years, and that meant painting again some of the more unusual sea creatures we have worked out faces for over the years. We painted a significant number of adults as well as kids, and I was very glad when a men sat down at the end of the end and asked me to make him “spooky”, thus allowing me to turn him into one of my favorites, the Giant Squid — a face that just doesn’t work as well on a kid.
Sea Lions
Laughing Gulls
Lionfish
The Giant Squid
Here’s one of my “Every Face” videos of faces at the Aquarium a few years back:
And tomorrow I get to go even further off the usual menu of facepaint designs as we will be turning people into DNA, Isaac Newton, Moon Shots and such at our fourth year painting faces for the World Science Festival Street Fair at Washington Square Park.
