I haven’t been posting anything recently because we are in the midst of re-creating our company website, and linking this site to it. Until that’s complete, the items I’ve been putting up here this past month are not yet ready for prime time.
However, this just came through and it is worth a look:
220 teams of artists competed, in front of 30,000 spectators. It is a grueling competition that produces an amazing spectacle and I congratulate the winners and everyone who competed.
Kryolan Professional Makeup was nice enough to bring me there in 2009 to demonstrate their product and perform my show — and I am very happy to have had that opportunity, it is a not to be missed event.
On the day of the Superbowl it seems appropriate to write about nipples. I’ve been reading a bit on the habit Facebook has of censoring body painting images, and the surmise that Facebook measures the level of offense based on the relative visibility of a female model’s nipples in the final image. One blog referred to it as “Facebook’s war against nipples”. Well, I have a relevant quote, too: “Everyone has nipples.”
One of the first discussions I had about all this was with a European body painter back in 2006 on the conflicted duality of the American cultural fascination with female breasts (in Playboy, advertising, Superbowls, etc.) versus the fear of the exposed female nipple. The subject came up because of the restrictions imposed about just how much of the model we could paint at the convention we were teaching at. The quote above is from Carolyn Roper, another European body painter, at a different convention in 2008. That convention had one of the strictest modesty requirements. Not even pasties or nipple covers were enough, the female models had to wear tube tops or bras to get painted for the classes and competitions. I’ve written before how poorly I think it works to paint over someone’s underwear, and at this convention I found it very awkward—and I’m an American, how much more so for the Europeans teaching there, like Carolyn. So she arranged to have a male model for her demonstration class to avoid the problem, and as she painted the salient portion of his chest she remarked about how everyone has nipples and so she didn’t see what all the fuss was about painting a woman’s as opposed to a man’s.
You really can’t got much more naked than this, can you?
If Ingres’s Venus, fully naked, hangs as a treasured masterpiece in a museum, if it is acceptable for an artist to paint nipples on a canvas portrait of a naked model, why should I have to hide a model’s nipples in a body painting? We already had Demi Moore‘s nipples on the cover of Vanity Fair on newsstands twenty years ago (see http://wp.me/p1sRkg-6v), so why all the fuss still today?
There was a funny sequence in the U.S. Supreme Court just recently as they adjudicated the case regarding decency standards on prime time TV when the question turned towards the offensive nature of a bare buttocks being seen (from the side) in an episode of NYPD Blue some years ago and the lawyer arguing against that interpretation pointed out that the US Supreme Court building was full of classic art images that included bare butts, many bare butts. Looking back at the most famous “nipple slip”, Janet Jackson’s at the Superbowl, which is also a topic of the larger case the Supreme Court is considering, it’s hard to decide which part of that half time show all about sex was the most offensive. I’m pretty prudish, or, rather, I have real trouble with what I perceive as sexism and the objectification of women, so the part that troubled me most was when the dancers dressed as cheerleaders chose to “take off all their clothes” because “it’s getting hot in here.” Janet’s breast was anticlimactic after that. You can review the show and form your own opinion: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x45h8i_super-bowl-xxxviii-halftime-show-fu_music
I believe that we each should have the freedom to control how we use or decorate our own bodies. And in regard to the freedom to display our bodies, I go along the lines of the way it’s handled on New York State beaches: “nude but not lewd”. In New York State a women can go topless any where that a man can, otherwise it is considered sexual discrimination. Just to know that this is the law is a good thing. It’s not overly taken advantage of. There is topless sunbathing sometimes on some NY beaches, even fully naked men and women on some, but that tends to be in generally understood areas of certain beaches (“nude but not lewd” is said to be the New York State Parks guideline on that.) I have thought that the more that American women are given the opportunity to be topless (at the beach, for example) the less power there will be in the cultural insistence on women’s breasts as indecent sex objects (and it is that implication of indecency that bothers me, not the sexuality.), but I am less certain of that than I was. Occasionally you’ll see a topless woman on a NY city street, usually for a political cause, like the topless women holding signs at the start of Occupy Wall Street that pundits used to ridicule the nascent movement and which John Stewart made fun of (he didn’t show them naked on TV, because even though he’s on a cable channel without any relevant FCC restrictions about that it’s just not done in the U.S. for fear of public outrage—but my local Comedy Central channel airs ads for a strip club just about every night during his show.)
Regarding the public acceptance of nudity in body painting, the best advocate for that acceptance is to expose the public to beautifully painted bodies, male and female in all shapes and sizes. Significantly, I think, there will be a step in the right direction at this year’s Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC http://www.fabaic.com/) in Fort Lauderdale as they have invited the general public to attend the body painting competition for the first time, on May 27 (2012). That’s gotta be a good thing and I am looking forward to being there—though I expect nipple covers will still be required for the female models, we are not in Austria yet.
Painting at the World Bodypainting Festival
The Horned Goddess, topless rock art from before 2000 BC, about as old as a painting can get….
Yet when I painted her onto a model’s face for my book, I felt compelled to remove the breasts so as not to offend anyone. Silly, right?
As I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that all I got out of that class with World-Champion body painter Carolyn Roper in 2008 was a better understanding of nipples, from my notes on that class here is one great insight into painting technique and a pro hint about caring for your model:
1- All water based makeup colors sink in to the color beneath, so every color you paint on top of another will pick up a tint from the underlying color. It is especially true of white going on top of colors. So plan for this in how you lay down your background colors, and leave extra time to go over white highlights again at the end of the painting.
2- Keep the model’s butt, hands and mouth clear until the last stages of the painting, so they can sit, eat, drink and hold things as needed during the long hours you are working together.
“…painting affords the dancers a stronger feel for the role and the character they are playing. What they have is no longer a mask. It is a new skin. The art of body painting means that we are able to become, for a moment, something, or someone, else…I love watching how the dancers, seeing their transformed faces in the mirror, begin to seek new forms of movement and dance and new poses as they endeavor to adapt to their new skin.” — Agnieszka Glińska
The recent issue of Make Up International magazine from Kryolan Professional Make-up contained an article on a beautiful book of body art from the bodypainting dance company Art Color Ballet of Poland. The book, titled “Art_Color_Ballet”, is available in the U.S. from retailers who carry Kryolan make-up. I got my copy at the FABAIC convention last May, and I treasure it. It is full of stunning fine art photographs of painted bodies in juxtaposition with painted canvases as well as photographs of bodies in motion in their dance performances.
I have only been fortunate enough to see Art Color Ballet in performance once, with the championship winning piece in the UV Competition at the 2009 World Bodypainting Festival in Austria. At that festival I did get to speak briefly with their founder, Agnieszka Glińska, at a time when she wasn’t busy painting. I told her that I take great inspiration from the work her company does—from the very idea of forming a dance company in which bodypainting is such an integral part—and she was gracious enough to take a look at a video of the Nuba Bird dance piece with my bodypainting designs. She also gave me a small print of one of their fine art bodypaintings, and I was excited to see that it is the one they’ve now used for the cover of the book (above).
You can find information and videos on their website: http://www.baletcolor.pl/?lng=en You can also find additional videos on You Tube
“The human body has also proved to be an inspiration. From the dawn of humanity, it has fascinated artists. In its very self, it is an expression of time and time’s transience. At first innocent and virgin, then erogenic and arousing, so as finally to intrigue in its atrophy and departing. In its complexion, smoothness and, with time, its patina, the shell in which we are clad sends forth a mysterious message as to our presence here on earth. In movement, the body speaks of its vitality; when we cover it in color, its eloquence will be all the greater.” –Leszek Madzik, from the introduction to Art_Color_Ballet
My snapshot of Art Color Ballet in performance at the 2009 WBF
