Author Archives: Christopher Agostino

Traditional Facepainting – World Masks Workshop

by Christopher Agostino

This week brings an opportunity for teaching a group of High School students how to paint faces. In conjunction with a performance of Before Cave Walls…The Transformation Lecture, I will be doing a hands-on workshop with a group of art students who will then have the pleasure of painting several classes of elementary aged students. We present these programs in schools within a cultural context, and so the face patterns I will be bringing into these workshops are traditional designs from world cultures.

Click on this link for the pdf guide sheet for this World Mask Workshop WorldMasks_facepainting_agostinoarts

From the magazine article that first fired my imagination about painting faces based in cultural traditions

Choosing which cultural examples to present students is always a conundrum. There is an infinite wealth of source materials, and I recognize that the limited selections I present may seem to represent a much larger world than they can. The examples I present in a workshop setting are different than those I might demonstrate in a lecture performance, as I want to give them designs that a novice facepainter can emulate. (For example, in presenting this program to experienced makeup artists I will include the classic female role face from the Chinese Opera which requires a facility with blending colors that is difficult for beginners.) I also use examples with minimal pictorial imagery because I want the students to work free from the idea of trying to create a realistic portrait of an animal or such. The less complicated the design examples, the more they can focus on what it feels like to transform a human face. And that is the primary goal of this workshop, to give these students the experience of being the mask maker.

Here are the 6 faces I am using as the key cultural examples.

Amazon: A Mayoruna matriarch wearing markings and whiskers signifying a powerful cat like a jaguar

Africa: Surma people, from the Omo River area of Ethiopia.

Papua New Guinea: Example of traditional face art from a highlands culture, painted for a festival

Native American: Portrait of “Fast Dancer” of the Iowa culture, by George Catlin, with the hand symbol signifying he is a warrior

Africa: An example of the asymmetrical bodyart of the Southeast Nuba, Sudan.

Japan: The “suji-kuma” pattern to portray a samurai

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See a video and images from the workshop:  World Masks – Facepainting Workshop

Rebirth revisited — Ukrainian Eggs and Ancient Eggs

In response to my post about the spring and how I choose to experience the season of rebirth, one of our company artists, Laura Metzinger, sent in this post:

From Laura:  I had long been interested in learning how to do the traditional Ukrainian (pysanky) wax-resist method of egg decorating and my library offered a workshop in 1990. I left with enough of the basics to continue to explore it on my own, and discovered that supplies could be found in NYC at Surma, a little Ukrainian shop, est. 1918, on East 7th St. They have a wide selection of books and tools and are always more than happy to offer suggestions and advice. SURMA – The Ukrainian Shop

The samples of my work here include some traditional and original designs, and all were created between 1990 and 2000. While pysanky eggs are associated with Easter, the practice of decorating eggs pre-dates Christianity, and hearkens back to the celebration of seasonal changes.

kistka (tool for applying the wax) and beeswax cake, with an egg showing an original design of Laura's

The tool for applying wax to the eggs is called a kistka. Although there are sleek, electric versions available, I like to use the more primitive, copper wire wrapped tool. It’s used by heating the copper cone at the end of the tool in a candle flame, and then pushing the point into a cake of beeswax. The heat draws up the wax into the cone, and then is used to draw designs on the egg. I use a darkened beeswax, as it’s easier to see when applied to the white egg and lighter colors. It’s especially nice to be doing this in a group, as the candles burning and the pleasant smell of beeswax create a very special atmosphere.

The process calls for working the design colors going from light to dark. Anything that you want to be white must be drawn with wax first. The wax prevents those sections from taking on any subsequent colors. Working from light to dark, wax is applied and the egg is dipped into progressively darker shades. After the design is completed, the egg is held closely alongside the candle flame. This is the best part; as the wax melts and is wiped off, the brilliant colors come into view.

Eggs with Trypillion designs

I love the symbolic meanings given to the imagery, which vary according to the source. And the use of eggs as a symbol of rebirth is timeless. All the colors have specific meanings, as do the designs. Most obvious is the use of plant and animal images. Earlier meanings were associated with the seasons, farming and harvest. Later on, many of the images were associated with Christianity. I have incorporated designs from other cultures, such as Native American symbols, which are very close to the Eastern European designs. I’ve also done a number of Trypillion designs on brown eggs. The predominantly black & red swirling designs come from artifacts discovered in the Ukraine, and are believed to symbolize the female, from whom new life comes. There are a number of ways of approaching the design elements. There are repeating border designs, end-cap designs and pictures. Traditionally, the repeating border designs are stylized plant elements. I like to incorporate Native American wave symbols in my borders and end-cap designs.

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Thank you, Laura. With my perspective I can’t help but make a connection between this tradition of decorating eggs to the discovery of etched ostrich eggs from 60,000 years ago — some of the oldest objects yet to show the use of symbolism by early humans. From the online article in Science News: “The unusually large sample of 270 engraved eggshell fragments, mostly excavated over the past several years at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, displays two standard design patterns…. Each pattern enjoyed its own heyday between approximately 65,000 and 55,000 years ago…. Researchers already knew that the Howiesons Poort culture, which engraved the eggshells, engaged in other symbolic practices, such as engraving designs into pieces of pigment, that were considered to have been crucial advances in human behavioral evolution. But the Diepkloof finds represent the first archaeological sample large enough to demonstrate that Stone Age people created design traditions, at least in their engravings.

See the article: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/stone-age-eggshells.html?print=true and another  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8544332.stm

 

Traditional Bodyart – Nuba; Sudan; Africa – 1: changing my perceptions

by Christopher Agostino

In the ’80s as I began to seek out cultural sources to better understand this art of transformation that I was engaged in I found “The Painted Body” by Michel Thévoz in the Strand bookstore. One photograph in the book stood out. The design was black and white, the gaze of the subject so direct. Most striking, it was strongly asymmetrical. Yet, still, balanced and beautiful in a way so different than any faces I was painting, or the Chinese Opera and Kabuki designs I had been studying. I wanted to learn how to paint a face like this.

Thévoz’s book remains unique in its focus more on the sociological significance and psychological underpinnings of transformational art than on its methods and practices. This photograph was only identified as “Nuba face painting, Sudan”, with no information about it in the text. It was at a place in the book exploring a subject that drew my attention because it related to what I was trying to achieve by painting people in designs from other cultures — the question of why our modern response to a painted face is fear and discomfort. He discusses Freud’s reasoning that we have “a reaction of dread at what we are nevertheless obliged to recognize as intimately our own, a reaction which in fact signals ‘the return of what we have driven back.'” Freud’s succinct phrase for this modern response to the primitive transformation: “disturbing strangeness”. To this day, I make it a point of painting at least a few faces that are disturbingly strange at even the nicest of events — it keeps people on their toes. I am glad that Michel Thévoz and Freud have given me an insight into this impulse, and I connect this photograph to that understanding.

When I first saw it, this black and white Nuba face reverberated with many connections to concepts I was trying to work out. It’s the same colors as the hundreds of KISS faces I had painted over and over on Friday and Saturday nights at Adventureland Amusement Park in the late ’70s, but it’s a KISS face as painted by Picasso. It was 30 years before I fully realized that particular connection in a design blending these two influences, but even at the time I saw that this “primitive” “tribal” face was very “modern”. As I began to do educational programs in High Schools on the history of masks and makeup, I found that these Nuba faces got a great reaction from the teens, just as the KISS faces did a decade before.

That black and white Nuba face is also so bold and so simple, another push in a direction I would pursue throughout my endeavors. And just the fact that it stood out as so very different in a book full of bizarre looking humans helped me to see that anything is possible in a facepainting design, there are no rules. That lesson has been pivotal for me.

My fascination with the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba of the Sudan only increased as I began to learn the story behind their faces, and from the initial inspiration of this one image a lot of work has flowed. The photograph in Thévoz’s, for example, was taken by Leni Riefenstahl, and there certainly is a story in that.

Search “Nuba” on this site for additional posts about this subject.

It only occurred to me as I was writing this that transforming hundreds of teens into KISS faces at an Amusement Park in 1977 may have been my first experience of tribal facepainting.

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