Category Archives: Colleagues & Friends

Why Body Painting? — 1B: Collaboration in Action — UV Action Painting with Emma Cammack and Carolyn Roper

by Christopher Agostino

Hey, I’ve got a barn, let’s put on a show! I was in the 4th or 5th grade the first time I got the neighborhood kids to put on a  show in my backyard. For me, there’s really nothing else like the excitement of being on a stage creating and feeling an audience move with you. Sharing that adventure with colleagues makes it more fun. And when the performance itself is like kids playing in a backyard, that has to make it the most fun thing I’ve done yet as a bodypainting performer.

From Bodies Alive! at FABAIC 2008, UV Action Painting with Emma Cammack, Carolyn Roper and me:

A convention audience at the grand finale party is really ready to have a good time, and our audience was very responsive throughout the whole Bodies Alive! show, which made it a pleasure to be on stage.

Even more fun than the UV Action performance was the rehearsal, which was true playtime, like kids having a paint fight. I’d never done a backlight show before, though I’d seen them and knew we weren’t inventing anything here — in fact the idea for making the models appear as we painted them came from Raphaelle Fieldhouse (another world class bodypainter) who had previously described to me a performance she’d seen at the World Bodypainting Festival. So I was confident it would work. In the rehearsal we just had to learn how. Putting a full show together over three days around everyone’s schedule at a convention is a tough task (and I’m really grateful it was my wife Lorraine in charge of the whole production, and not me) so we only had one shot at trying the scene on stage under backlight the day before the show.

Emma, Carolyn and I got ready to rehearse in our all black “ninja ant” outfits, so we wouldn’t be seen under the backlight. We got the models (Jacki, Nick and Emily) onstage with us, talked through a rough choreography, turned on the backlights and started painting — and we had just so much fun using this glowing paint to make the bodies take form: we streaked them with brushes, splattered them, painted with our hands on the models (and each other), sprayed them with Dayglo hairspray — and it all looked so cool. Watching this might be fun, but doing this is really, really fun.

It was also a relief, and very satisfying, to discover we could do it. Lorraine was working so hard to pull the show together I was glad to be able to tell her that I was sure this scene would succeed, and she didn’t have to trouble herself about it. We also learned some stuff in the rehearsal, like just how much of a mess three painters can make fooling around, and that we’d have to take some time to pull the plastic drop cloth carefully off the stage before the next scene. Thus was born Carolyn’s ninja ant dance to entertain the audience as the models withdrew and we cleared the drop cloth.

A big part of the success was the makeup. Kryolan’s UV Makeups are so bright under blacklight, and so easy to apply, that we didn’t have to think much about technique at all. We could just paint. Kryolan, and my friend Joe Korts, have been very supportive of my bodyart career, and in this case Joe really came through by supplying all the UV makeup we could possibly need for the show. He sent it to me in NY before the convention, so I was able to try some application ideas, figure out which brushes we’d use and work the makeup into the right consistency so it could go on quickly and have the maximum glow — I wound up working it into a much thicker liquid than I usually would for regular painting, almost like a thin paste.

A word about what it meant for me to do this with Emma and Carolyn — and that word is “confirmation”. When I came to the agreement with Marcela Murad (the producer of the FABAIC convention) for Lorraine and me to stage a show for their banquet using the talents of the instructors and other artists at the convention, I was concerned about whether the other artists would like the idea and, given that I am not an award-winning artist or working at that level, whether the big name artists would want to commit their time to a show I was in charge of. As soon as we made the agreement, the first two artists I contacted were Emma and Carolyn. I had met them both but didn’t know them well, and I was absolutely thrilled to get enthusiastic replies from both of them. At that point I felt confident that if these two talented and top-notch professionals were willing to join in that others would follow and the show was sure to succeed  — it confirmed for me that I wasn’t out of line to ask my colleagues to collaborate with me on this project. In the end many of the convention instructors joined in, contributing original designs as well as their painting time. On the day of the performance, there was so much painting and preparation to be done we had a cast and crew totaling about 70 people, and it was wonderful to see a number of additional artist and volunteers coming on to lend a hand with the painting.

Body painting affords these opportunities for collaboration because it stands in the confluence of visual and performing arts — so this is one of my personal answers to “why body painting?” An even stronger answer is that I keep body painting because I am still waiting for a chance to do another UV Action Painting with the ninja ants.

Three great artists:

Emma Cammack   http://www.emmacammack.com/

Carolyn Roper  http://www.getmadeup.com/

Raphaelle Fieldhouse  http://www.bodycanvas.co.uk/

And a great makeup:

Kryolan UV Aquacolors   http://www.kryolan.com/en/index.php

For some insight on how to use them, see my instructors notes from FABAIC 2011:

https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/06/02/how-to-use-uv-dayglo-metallic-and-interferenze-makeups-fabaic-2011-class/

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

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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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Why Body Paint? — 1: Collaboration — Painting the Mangbetu Queen

From 1910, Queen Mutubani of the Mangbetu people being body painted by serving girls — it's good to be the Queen.

By Christopher Agostino

One of the more remarkable photographs of the cultural use of body art is the image from 1910 of a Mangbetu Queen in the book Body Decoration (see Books page for bibliography). As the queen stands in a regal pose she is being painted by several servants. I was reminded of this image last week during the bodypainting preparation for a video shoot. We had 4 dancers to paint. I was the primary bodypainter and there were two makeup artists doing the hair and eye makeup — as they finished with that they would help me paint the bodies. Towards the end all 3 of us were painting the 4th dancer simultaneously, and she remarked about what it felt like to be the center of that much attention. So I told her she should feel like a queen, a Mangbetu Queen.

Bodypainting is an intrinsically collaborative art. The primary collaboration is between the artist and the model, but it isn’t the only one, and that is not the collaboration I am addressing here, for there are often more people in the bodypainting room: assistants, photographers, multiple models to be painted — and spectators. The theatrical and presentational nature of bodypainting often means there is a crowd present watching the process. The ephemeral nature of the art compels us to maximize the amount of time people have to see our work. Whereas canvas painters work mostly alone in studios, we bodypainters make a spectator sport of it.

The Body Painting room for Bodies Alive!

A formative experience for most novice bodypainters is the first time they are at a convention, festival, performance or competition working in a room full of artists painting models. I’d say that this experience, more than any other, is the reason for the growing number of bodypainters in the U.S. — the fun they had, and the inspiration gained, from the sense of camaraderie in a room full of bodypainters drives them to keep doing it. Speaking personally, I find the bodypainting room much more exciting than the painted body fashion show or competition that follows, and especially when the painting being done in that room is all towards a unified purpose. Jam sessions are fun, and I understand the commercial necessities that make so many bodypainting events into competitions, but the ultimate for me is when the painters are all working in collaboration to achieve a collective vision, such as painting those 4 dancers for the video shoot, or the bodypainting room for the Bodies Alive! show at FABAIC 2008  http://www.fabaic.com/  , which I am very proud to have been a part of. We had about 30 primary painters plus many more additional volunteers working collaboratively — for numerous participants it was the first time they had helped to paint a full body, and I’m sure that experience has been a source of confidence as they have continued bodypainting.

In preparation for the stick fighting competitions, Surma men cover their skin with chalk mixed with water and then make line patterns through the chalk with their fingers

Painting bodies is more like performing music than like a studio art. It is a performance art, you certainly need the audience. I think you also want the fun of being part of a band, you don’t paint a body all alone — at the very least it is you plus the model. In its traditional functions, body painting is a social act, a shared community activity. For one thing, you can’t paint your full body yourself, and I believe that in traditional cultural uses (such as the Surma men painting each other in preparation for the ceremonial stick fights, or the Surma women painting together by a river bank for their part of the festivities) the participants experience the time spent painting each other in a unifying, celebratory way — in much the same way bodypainters enjoy the communal spirit of all painting together in a room at a convention. Any time you see an example of tribal or traditional body art, with full bodypainting or intricate designs on the back or the limbs, it is created communally, with the help of another person, and usually a reciprocal social act, as I paint your back and you paint mine.

Women of the Surma gathered to paint each other with colored earths and ochres.

Getting back to the Mangbetu, I have notes in an old journal about seeing an exhibit called “African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire” in 1990 at the American Museum of Natural History www.amnh.org/  of objects from the Mangbetu culture in the Congo region of Africa from around the time of that photo of the Queen being painted. What has stuck with me through the years since that exhibit is that every object — from household utensils like spoons, to clothing, house poles, drinking vessels — every object was a work of art. Including the people, for the exhibit said they would paint each other in intricate and original patterns with dyes made from the gardenia plant that would last a few days, and then be re-painted in new and unique designs. The exhibit displayed a collaborative, ongoing social act to create a world of art.

Again I am reminded of the practice and function of making live music, particularly in a traditional setting, it’s an experience we visual artists don’t get to have in our process much, except perhaps when doing something like bodypainting, in which the process is intrinsically collaborative and the work of art is alive.

Another Mangbetu bodypainting example, from 1937.

From the African Reflections exhibit I saw in 1990, a figure with body art lines — I have a sketch of this figure in my old notebook and found this image searching the American Museum of Natural History web site.

Not to put too fine a point on the communal, egalitarian nature of tribal arts, the text accompanying this image of a Mangbetu male from "Body Decorations" states "the elaborate painting indicated the social superiority of the Mangbetu elite" — so the body art contained social information as it did in most cultures.

An example from the Amazon Txukahamae culture of communal body painting

The Odd Ball in 2009 was another very fun body painting room — see the link to that page below

See my fine art bodypainting at  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/  Christopher Agostino

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