Category Archives: Artist Heroes

Why Body Painting? — 3: Origins — Touching Ancient Sources

“Chauvet Lions Watching”

by Christopher Agostino

At the core of my approach to bodypainting is my continuing exploration into its traditional sources and cultural functions. Just as a painter on canvas studies the masterpieces of the past to find his own way forward, I study the images and significance of traditional bodyart as a foundation for my work. Searching for an understanding of how and why we paint ourselves leads back to the origins of our humanity and our most ancient art. Whenever I paint someone I am aware of my small place in this vast tradition, one more human seeking to understand how our art can transform us. Although bodypainting is ephemeral, its legacy is timeless.

The Transformation Lecture – click here

This is a primal part of the story I’ve told myself to keep myself painting, that “before we ever painted a cave wall, we painted ourselves…” — my slogan. Going back 30 years when I was first trying to convince people that facepainting could be an art and not just something that clowns did at kid’s parties this was  an important part of my argument.

You search for validation when you are working in a fringe art form and I continue to get jazzed seeing moments like the one in the PBS Nova episode “Becoming Human” where, just as they are describing the final evolutionary shift that made us the humans we are today they are showing a re-enacted image of an ancient human painting themselves. Or the book How Art Made the World: A Journey to the Origins of Human Creativity by Nigel Spivey, which makes the case that it is our ability to conceive, record and understand symbols (through language and art) that lifted us above the animal state—”we are the symbolic species”—and he also points to our own skin as the original canvas for these social symbols.

Our skin is the physical edge of who we are, the place where we touch the world, and so, as we first gained self-awareness, that spark of consciousness that makes us human, we marked our new awareness onto our skin to tell the world who we are.  And that is a fine answer to the question “Why Body Painting?”

In The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-Williams  presents a timeline of the development of ancient art and culture. Cave paintings go back about 32,000 years, but art is older than that. The image here of the etched ochre rock from Blombos Cave from 77,000 years ago is considered the “earliest art object” yet discovered, and  there is evidence of ochre colored earths being processed to produce pigment from much earlier. Pigments derived from ochre are still used as traditional body paints. It’s discovery radically reorganized anthropologists’ understanding of the origins of humanity, and the place in our collective history of our ancient  ancestors at Blombos Cave is a truly remarkable story, as depicted in the PBS “Becoming Human” series. See also the links below for more information, including the incredible recent discovery of what might be the earliest facepainting kit ever.

The bodypainting at the top uses imagery from European cave paintings that are 10,000 to 32,000 years old, and I painted it several years ago. Ancient sources, modern inspiration for this bodypainter.

30,000 year old cave painting from the Chauvet Cave

One of the most inspirational art exhibits I have seen in many years was in a movie theater watching Werner Hertzog’s 3D film of the Chauvet Cave in France, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Seeing Hertzog’s film, I experienced art that is as great as anything I have ever seen in a museum, both in the technical quality of the painting (as Picasso said upon seeing similar cave paintings: “we have learned nothing!”) and in the depth of response it requires from the viewer. Through Hertzog’s fantastic use of 3D to bring the physical shapes of the painted cave walls to life, and dramatic flickering “torch-light” effects to recreate the experience of the original audience for these paintings, I could imagine myself there and understand how, at our origins, art was a driving transformational force.

See  Talking Art  to learn about my stage presentations on the origins and history of the art of transformation. See also my Bodypainting gallery .

Why Body Painting? — 1A: Collaboration — Meeting Colleagues like Carolyn Roper

Carolyn Roper is a world-class bodypainter and makeup artist. Check out her work in a TV commercial for the Irish National Lottery.
Check out her website for galleries of amazing bodies and a new video of her re-creating the Mystique makeup from X-Men for a movie promotion in the UK. http://www.getmadeup.com/
Meeting, taking classes with, and working beside an artist like Carolyn is the type of “formative experience” I was speaking of in the previous post that helps explain why I bodypaint. Her fantastic work, her professionalism and the career she has carved out for herself are an inspiration.
Carolyn also did me a very nice favor when the Kryolan company brought me to Seeboden, Austria to demonstrate for them at the 2009 World Body Painting Festival. She introduced me to two artists whose work I had long admired, Craig Tracy and Filippo Ioco, who were there as judges for the competition. Filippo’s iconic photographs placing painted bodies in scenic environments were some of the first bodyart images I saw that were undeniably within the canon of “fine art”.  http://iocobodyart.com  Craig Tracy has probably done more to elevate bodypainting as an art form in the U.S. than anyone else, including opening the first art gallery solely devoted to bodypainting http://www.craigtracy.com/ — and he is very encouraging to those of us looking to elevate our own work. The encouragement gained through interactions with other bodypainters is invaluable when you are working in an art form seen as strange or “fringe”, or maybe “emerging” (on a good day). In the U.S., where bodypainting is only now starting to enter more widely into mainstream advertising, commercial promotions and corporate events, it has been especially helpful to see and learn from people like Craig and Filippo, and the body artists from Europe like Carolyn, who have achieved a level of professional success as specialists within the larger fields of makeup artist and fine artist.
Having previously won the World Championship in the “Brush and Sponge” division in 2007, Carolyn Roper became the first artist to win a championship in two different categories when she won in the Special Effects division at that 2009 festival— and I was very happy to be there to see my friend win.
The most fun thing I have ever done in this unusual business was when I got to paint onstage alongside Carolyn and another colleague, Emma — but I’ll leave that to the next post.

Caroyln, with the assistance of Paula Southern, preparing her award winning Special Effects design. She creates her unique sculptural additions by hand

Her model, Barry Bloomfield, presenting the completed design in competition

The completed model on stage.

My favorite photo from the event, seeing Carolyn smile, standing with Paula on the side of the stage, as she watches Barry present her fantastic work of art

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Werner Herzog – Cave of Forgotten Dreams — he likes the lions, too. –

Cave of Forgotten Dreams — documentary film by Werner Herzog

30,000 year old cave painting from the Chauvet Cave

detail of bodypainting titled "Chauvet Lions Watching"

In an interview on Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross asked Werner Herzog which one painting he had the strongest reaction to as he filmed inside the Chauvet Cave. After saying that it was the overall effect of the cave that moved him the most, he singled out the painting of the lions. Paraphrasing his description, it is of five lions stalking something, intently looking at something but we don’t know what they are looking at — and depicted with such a complete naturalism that we could think we are looking at living lions today. Yet, it is among the single oldest paintings ever made. The earliest pictorial images in all of human art. As moving and complex as any art ever created since. I understand how he feels about the lions.

I’m trying to think of another time when I heard of a project and had such an immediate reaction to just how perfect it is. Werner Herzog, given the chance to bring to us this story of what may be the origin of art, the origin of our humanity. He’s one of the most fascinating artists in the world, and here he is making a movie about this cave that has always fascinated me, and been a continual inspiration for my work since it was first discovered in the 90s and I read about it in my Natural History Magazine.

Go to the article from NPR on the film, and listen to the Fresh Air interview there — in addition to talking about the film, Herzog talks about a lifetime of making films that “stare into the abyss” of humanity ( “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” have both been on TV a bunch lately): http://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135516812/herzog-enters-the-cave-of-forgotten-dreams

Clip of the movie:

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2827853081/

Werner Hertzog speaks of having always been drawn to prehistoric art, fascinated about the idea of paintings being made so long ago and yet we still can feel the connection between the people that made them and ourselves. I share that feeling. I began to explore our earliest art as I sought to find the origins of bodyart. And the connection between painting ourselves and painting cave walls is undeniable, with, for example, in Chauvet Cave — as in so many others —  painted hands being used as stamps to create designs on the cave walls. From the start, though, what caught me most was the constant examples of how these ancient artists expertly used the shape of the cave walls in their paintings, in a way that seems to me the very essence of bodypainting. Speaking only as an artist here, the transference of images on the body to images on the sculptured surface of a cave wall seems a very direct step.

The need to show how the paintings work on the form of the walls explains why Herzog filmed this in 3D: “When I saw photos, it looked almost like flat walls — maybe slightly undulating or so. Thank God, I went in there without any camera a month before shooting. What you see in there is limestone, and you have these wildly undulating walls — you have bulges and niches and pendants of rock, and there’s a real incredible drama of information. The artists utilized it for their paintings. … So it was clear it was imperative to do this in 3-D, in particular, because we were the only ones ever allowed to film.”

There are a lot of videos about Werner and his work, including these two interview segments about this film, particularly fun because he is speaking so off the cuff: 

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