Christopher Agostino’s Transformations

Face Painting, Body Painting and Performance

email: christopher@agostinoarts.com

website: agostinoarts.com

The art of transformation is a performance art, whether on stage or on a face.

In 1976 I painted my first faces for an event, as a young acting student learning about makeup’s power to transform identity, which led to a lifelong exploration of the cultural traditions of masks and body art. Thousands of faces later, I am the artistic director of Transformations Facepainting, presenting exceptionally creative face and body painting at public events in New York, and I have developed a series of stage performances which combine storytelling and painted faces, including my signature StoryFaces shows for schools and family audiences, and Talking Art — origins, inspirations and appropriations.

You can see the range of what I do in a video encompassing one particular year of my work: 2008 Transformations 

Facepainting as Performance Art — StoryFaces is a performance style I developed organically over many years. Taking my facepainting onto stage in a performance was a natural combination of my work as a face painter exploring the traditions of mask art with my experience in theatre, which includes story theatre, clowning and physical theatre training. I began with talking onstage while demonstrating how to paint a face, then found stories I could tell that fit faces I was already painting (the first being a tale about butterflies ) until I began to develop stories and faces designed for performance, including stories that continue across multiple faces and animated face stories, like The Amazing Face Story.

In this example of a StoryFace design, I paint the golden face of the Sun Goddess and the blue of the Peacock flying up into the sky on the face on an audience volunteer to illustrate their tale as I tell it. I’ve also used this folktale for an experimental BodyStory performance.

See the video: What Is A StoryFace?

Transformations! The Story Behind the Painted Faces is my book, published in 2006 by Kryolan GMBH, Berlin. It includes chapters on cultural uses of masks and body art, and the inspiration I take from knowing I am part of such an ancient tradition—illustrated by my re-creations of traditional designs, such as “Theyyam Christine“, the “Kabuki Christopher” face I painted on myself, and my favorite event photo “Manhattan Papua New Guinea“. At the heart of the book is my belief that face painting is an interactive art, with profound cultural origins, that still retains the power to transform identity and bring some magic into the world.

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Mask and Body Art Traditions: Soon after I began painting faces, a magazine article on Chinese Opera masks led me into researching the cultural sources of masks and body art. This research informs my work today, both in an understanding of all that is possible in face and mask art and in a recognition of my place as a modern artist within the profound and ancient tradition of the mask-maker. In my stage presentations and face painting at events I include faces from art history and world cultures to help elevate the public perception of face painting and redefine it as the modern expression of a traditional art.

Transformations is a kinetic art form. It is a cumulative art form. My art is not the design I paint on an individual’s face, it is the full group of faces I paint at an event and the response of the people that see them — more important than what I paint on someone is how they feel when they see themselves in the mirror and in the eyes of the people that watch them as they wear this new, fantastic mask identity — more exciting for me than a photograph of a face I paint is seeing that face amongst the crowd, without any context, like a surprising piece of magic breaking into our too real world.

The Transformations Face Painting company: As I began to paint faces at events I gathered a dedicated group of New York artists to work with and developed a mask-like face painting style with bold designs that can be quickly painted to maximize the number of faces we can paint and our impact on an event. For many years we would paint thousands of people annually at events for the Bronx Zoo, Parks Department and Housing Authority and setting a standard in New York for what a painted face can be. At events, our goal is to paint faces so exciting that we draw a crowd of onlookers, surprising each person we paint with a new design, making the people we paint feel like performers as they leave us and move through the crowd.

Documenting the ephemeral: I also attempt to document the cumulative, kinetic aspect of my art with slideshow videos of every face I paint at particular events. Here’s one from 2011: EveryFace at Materials for the Arts, NYC.   And we have a company tradition of producing collectible postcards, the example here is from the series “Doesn’t Your Face Deserve to be Art?” with a Degas design painted at an Art On Your Face event at the Hudson River Museum.

Painted Bodies. Living Art. — fine art body painting. The body painting I do is also informed by my understanding of the traditional origins of this art and my desire to create art that surprises and inspires through the act of transformation. My portfolio includes fine art body paintings done in studio to be exhibited as photographs and bodies painted in public as performance art. Angry Ocean/Waterfall Tears was created as a response to the Tsunami in Japan, through the lens of images from an exhibit at the Japan Society of works by the master printmaker Kuniyoshi — and I view this photograph of the body painting as a prime example of why I paint bodies rather than canvas, as the image gains so much from the eyes of the model.  Picasso Nuba is part of the Modern Primitive Art series of body paintings exploring the connection between the revolutionary modern art of Picasso, Matisse and the like and the inspiration they took from African masks and other tribal arts, and designed to blur the line between canvas painting and body painting.

Bodies Alive! — painted bodies in performance. Why do I paint on people? Because they bring my art to life. And the best at this are dancers and performers. Coming into this field as an actor I have always seen face and body painting in connection to the theatre, and bring my work on to a stage whenever possible. Bodies Alive! is our company’s collective term for performance art body painting, including both live painting at galleries and events, full scale stage productions including collaborations with dance companies (see the Nuba Bird Dance ) and other artists (see UV Action Painting with Carolyn Roper and Emma Cammack), and painted body fashion shows  (see The Odd Ball video )

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Best guess: I’ve painted close to 300,000 people since 1976.

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“I believe that more important than the design you get painted with is the experience of being painted, the experience of seeing a new identity when you look in the mirror, and how that identity is perceived when others look at you. A facepainter, by changing how the world perceives the person they have painted, alters that person’s perception of the world and of themselves.”