In a recent Ted Talk, David Brooks tossed off Picasso as the exemplar for a quality of the mind he called “blending”—being able to take two disparate concepts and combine them into something new—referring to how Picasso revolutionized art by blending European painting with African masks. It was a reference Brooks was able to use easily, without much explanation, because it is well understood as a pivotal moment in art history, primitivism in Modern Art. The other example David Brooks used for blending was a child pretending to be tiger. Cue the facepainter.

Have I been “blending” all this time as I turn people into something other?As a facepainter am I a “blending facilitator”?

As David Brooks ticked off the five or six qualities of mind we should be cultivating in ourselves, and by implication (I think) looking for in our politicians, I did feel that being able to blend was within my range. Over the 30 odd years of transforming people I have become a pack-rat of visual inspirations for what I can paint on the next face. And I will look at peoples’ faces on the subway and imagine them painted as I work out a new idea based on current inspirations.

Taking a painting of a face by Picasso and painting it onto someone’s face is another sort of transformation than turning someone into a tiger. It feels more ironic. Their face is still a face, a human face, so I haven’t changed their identity from human being to a wild animal or such. And I feel some irony in taking the images of an artist who so famously transformed the human face into something unhuman and startling and in some measure re-humanizing these images by applying them back onto a face. Though the final effect does remain startling, judging by the typical reaction of people when you paint something like this on someone at a party.

Speaking of startling, what about hearing David Brooks pushing a humanist approach to politics, and saying that the most important element in education is that people learn from people they love?

To find David Brooks’ Ted Talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html

Related articles

• Joseph A. Palermo: David Brooks’s Anti-Poverty Program: “Bourgeois Paternalism” (huffingtonpost.com)
• First Night Hartford – Face Painting Adults and the Final Faces of 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)