Author Archives: Christopher Agostino

The Ox in the Flower Bed – a tale from a dream

by Christopher Agostino

 

The Rectory at the church was known for its beautiful gardens full of lovely flowers. One day the Rector was walking through the garden, muttering to himself so intently that he didn’t notice the ox standing in the flower bed until he’d run right into him.

“Oh, you miserable animal, trampling my flowers!” said the Rector, “what was our Lord thinking when he made such a ridiculous beast as you? You’re a heathen and a foul smelling one to boot. What are you doing in my flower bed, you monster?”

“Father,” said the ox, “the fields have lain so fallow that I was hungry, and I noticed that your beautiful flowers have been overgrown with clover. So I thought I’d eat the clover and clear the bed.”

“So you were hungry, the nerve of ya, with a gullet like that when aren’t you hungry, you awful thing you,” replied the Rector, ” and my lovely gardens ‘overgrown with clover’, you say. And why do I need you to be bringing me more to worry about, you giant lump of flesh, when I have my own troubles enough to keep me company. Like how am I to replace that leaky roof when the baskets come around half empty and so little money in the box? And who’ll be teaching the Latin Grammar now that Miss Willis has gotten herself in that way? And what about the trouble that rascal Michael is in, what will Father Timothy think when he hears of that? And sure that the garden has gone to pot with Bertie’s back in the state it’s in. What about that rattling window and that sticky door? And just how are the nuns going to keep a handle on Sarah and Tilly when those twins have a mind for mischief?…”

“Father,” interrupted the ox, “perhaps I can help a little bit.” And he lowered his head to resume munching the clover in the the flower bed.

“Ah, and it’s a great good friend to the church that you are, you marvelous creature you,” said the Rector, “would that more of my flock could see the task before them and set themselves to it. Ah, what a lovely day. Don’t the flowers smell wonderful?”

——————————————–

The start of this story came in a dream, during the night of August 30, 2009. I dreamt I was performing at something like a library and I finished a long story and said I’m going to end with a tale about an unusual animal. Kids started calling out guesses, I told them they’d never guess it, because it is a musk ox. Then I duck out of the room to the hall where Lorraine is in another room and I ask her to tell me the story of the musk ox. She relays a tale that starts like this one, with the ox in a flower bed and a character like the priest complaining, but her story has no ending – so I don’t know what to do as I need to go back to the audience, which is when I woke. It was early morning. I thought about it in bed to craft the complete tale and, even though I fell back asleep, I remembered it upon getting up and wrote it down. I keep a composition book by my bedside because I can sometimes snatch useful bits of story or visual images out of dreams.

When I sat down to write it out as a story I did some quick research and discovered that the Musk Ox is found mostly way up in the Artic Circle – so I turned him into just a regular ox.

Via Google Image search, from a website promising that their "Musk Ox pictures are updated on a daily basis." Free-extras.com

Is A Painted Body Naked? – Pt. 2: Painting Clothing On vs. Painting On Clothing – Demi Moore Vanity Fair

By Christopher Agostino

Why is it that if you paint underwear on a naked model she seems to be wearing more clothes than if you paint almost anything on a model wearing underwear?

My beat up cover from Vanity Fair, August, 1992. Demi Moore, body paint by Joanne Gair, photograph by Annie Liebovitz

There’s a slowly growing awareness of bodypainting in American Pop Culture, and I’d mark its beginning with Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. Prior to that, bodypainting was for hippies, Woodstock and Goldie Hawn. More than just a masterful exhibition of a makeup artist’s ability, that cover broke boundaries.

Goldie Hawn from Laugh-In

This was a naked woman (a celebrity!) on the cover of a mainstream magazine — yet she wasn’t naked. It was a successful fashion image — yet she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Bodyart functioning as conceptual art, playing with perceptions and expectations of the viewer, maybe you can even connect it to what Man Ray did in his famous “bodyart” photograph.

The year before when she was on the cover naked and pregnant, Demi Moore positioned her arm to cover her breasts. This time, the body paint was deemed sufficient covering for this magazine to be displayed on newsstands, which we can take as a significant statement of “no” in regard to the question “is a painted body naked?”

As exciting for me as that cover was the little bit on the editor’s page about how long it took — demonstrating the serious approach that can be brought to body painting — and the name of the body painter: Joanne Gair. When did you ever see “body paint by” as a credit line before? She has got to be the closest thing we have to a “famous body painter” in mainstream consciousness, and this public understanding of bodypainting as illusion remains prevalent with her work in the very popular annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Regarding SI, I don’t think that anyone could argue that the painted models there are any more (or less) naked than the models in the real bikinis.

There is also a whole realm of Joanne Gair’s work beyond the painted bathing suits — look for her book “Body Painting”(2006).    http://www.joannegair.com/books1.1.htm

I haven’t attempted to paint clothing on anyone since the 80s, my bodyart goals are different. I have though been required at times to paint my art over clothing by clients and convention producers, over a bra or such, and it just doesn’t look right. Maybe because when the women is naked, or just in nipple shields, the paint can better pull off the appearance of being  a costume than if you can see the bra straps telling you that somebody is standing in front of you in their underwear. I’ve come to tell clients that this just doesn’t work right, so if they need real modesty we should have some kind of minimum clothing and work it into the design rather than try to hide it.

A few years back I was hired to do some “sexy” painting on a couple of models for a cd release party in a night club, with nipple covers and enough paint that they wouldn’t seem naked, plus the cd logos thrown in. One of the models showed up and wouldn’t take her bright blue satin underwear off — the client had hired the models and I don’t know what he told her to expect. She explained to me that she didn’t need to take her top off because she had seen photographs when body painters put fake clothing on naked models, so I should be able to make her look naked while she kept her bra on.

These days, there are also all those nifty prosthetic pieces from people such as BodyFX that make disguising the body parts part of the design  — like “starfish boobs” for your topless mermaid. From their website: “BodyFX Prosthetics are new and innovative products that will help you to create artistic and discreet body paints. Instead of painting bra’s, you can use an artistic solution. To overcome the nudity factor, BodyFX Prosthetics can be glued over the whole breasts or just the nipples. Using BodyFX Prosthetics, you will find more clients (and models) are willing to try body-art as a means of entertainment.”  http://www.bodyfx.co.nz/products/prosthetics.htm

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

To learn more about our programs and performances:  http://www.agostinoarts.com  Christopher Agostino

follow me for the face of the day:  https://twitter.com/#!/storyfaces

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The Nuba Bird Dance at Bodies Alive! – Nao Dance Collective

The Nuba Bird Dance, performed by the Nao Dance Collective as part of our Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) in Orlando, 2008 — in black and white bodypaint designs based on the analytical sketches of James C. Faris in his book "Nuba Personal Art"

by Christopher Agostino

The underlying creative intention behind Bodies Alive! was to explore how movement and performance can bring bodyart to life, so we sought to create a modern dance piece inspired by bodypainting. In any previous opportunities I’d had to bodypaint dancers for performance my task was to create designs to support an existing theme and concept. For this dance the makeup design came first.

Nao Dance Collective  http://www.naodance.com/  is a structured improvisational company under the direction of Linda Eve Elchak — just the kind of group we were looking for to create a brand new piece for a single performance. We discussed the project and I sent the music, sketches for the bodypainting and some insight about the functional effect of this type of tribal bodyart: that the use of hard-edged  geometric designs is intended to break the human form and destroy recognizable individual identity, and thereby create a new unified tribal identity. I suggested the dancers could take advantage of this visual confusion by contrasting movement as a group with movement as individuals. From that, they created the piece. It was thrilling for me to see what these elements had led to in the rehearsal before the Orlando show. We didn’t paint them for the rehearsal, so they had some concerns about what performing in bodypaint would be like, particularly if they had to be careful not to smudge it by touching each other — and I reassured them that I wanted the paint to be alive, to change and to smear and to transfer from one dancer to another as it would in a tribal dance.

The dancers were painted by a group of experienced bodypainters following my designs (see their foto below, and the video of the bodypainting room). Bodies Alive! required the participation of dozens of models and performers, along with teams of designers, painters and assistants — a resource we might only have found at an event like the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) http://www.fabaic.com/ , celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year, and I will be there again.

Putting the music together for this piece involved some serendipity. Although I wanted something tribal, I was taking these body designs so far out of their original context that I didn’t want anything directly connected to the Nuba or African culture. The chant is listed as “Kecak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant  from Bali” on a cd of Indonesia music from Nonesuch Records‘ Explorer Series  http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/explorer-series-indonesia Once you hear it, it stays with you. I had it stuck in my head for this, but didn’t think it was enough to build the dance around and was looking for alternatives when I heard “Surfer Bird” by The Trashman on Bob Dylan’s radio show. The pieces fit, the rhythm was right and there is that iconic Nuba face design of the ostrich over the eye to seal the deal.

See the previous post, and search “Nuba” on this site for more information.

Nuba Bird Dance Painters: Paola Paredes-Shenk, Leah Reddell, Kerry Ann Smith, Diane and Theresa Spadola, Pam Trent, Jeff Edney, Deidre MacDonald

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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