Category Archives: Artists

Why Body Painting? — 2: Ultimate Collaboration — MODELS, Pt.1 What I have learned from models.

   by Christopher Agostino

For all of my artistic life I have depended on the willing participation of another person. Even the simple act of painting a face requires the acquiesce of the person with the face to be painted. So much more so the body model. I think about this relationship between bodypainter and model a lot, and it is at the essence of the question “why body painting?”

I can’t take a canvas off a shelf and just start bodypainting, and I can’t buy a model at Michael’s. A body model is not an object, not a commodity. They talk, move, think and feel while you are painting them. What would it be like painting a canvas that talked to you? Or that had an opinion of the painting as you were doing it?

We entrust our art to the model, as they trust us when they let us paint them. There is an exchange of intimacy in the collaboration between artist and model: the obvious physical intimacy of the model letting an artist paint their body in exchange for the artist giving them entrance into his vision and the act of creation.

In describing my experience collaborating with models, I can’t speak for all bodypainters, and probably not for most professional bodypainters. I don’t paint in competitions, and don’t take a lot of commercial work. If the painting is for a performance or someone else’s project the process is specific and my role is to support the vision of the director and function like a makeup artist or costumer to make the performer feel confident and look good. Sometimes in teaching settings or painting at the Kryolan booth at a convention the goal is specific and limited, and I may approach that body painting as a sketch or exploration, or repeat something I’d done before because I know it works. In those cases I’m hoping for a model that is professional, comfortable being painted and pleasant to talk to and spend some time with as we work.

It is when I have a strong vision for a realized fine art design I am trying to achieve—whether painting in studio with the goal of generating that one key photograph or painting in public as performance art—that I have come to understand how deep my collaboration with the model is, that I am as dependent on the model as they are on me for success. I need more than the acquiescence of the model, I need their support, their encouragement, to allow me to take chances. I especially need them to let me be vulnerable and to risk failure. It’s not something you have to ask of a canvas off the shelf, and it’s an understanding I’ve only come to learn about my process through the years, and through the failures, as I have tried to find my way forward in this art.

I don’t think this is true of more experienced, professional bodypainters, but I’m not sure.

Behind the question I’ve been addressing in this series of posts, “why body painting?”, is the larger question, “why art?”, and the specific question of why did I choose to be an artist? As a generalization, I think artists are compelled to create art—I couldn’t say why or how, maybe in response to having an awareness of life that seems to them different than the norm, and so the desire to change the norm or at least express their difference. Beyond that original  impetus, I can say for myself that a large part of what keeps me creating art is the excitement of the fight, the struggle to succeed, to “win”. In much the same way I imagine an athlete must feel, setting out to create a painting feels to me like a competition, albeit an internal one between me and the limitations of my abilities to bring that idiosyncratic vision I identify as myself into the world as a physical, undeniable reality, an “object of art”.

Artists strive for the edge, both in the sense of a place they’ve never been and in the sense of a place they are unsure of, walking the razor’s edge, unsure of their footing. I’ve felt that edge most keenly in performance before an audience, especially on stage alone trying new material, unsure of how to perform it and knowing that success or failure is in my hands—and audiences let you know if you fail. I’ve also felt it late at night all alone in my workshop making a sculpture out of a piece of clay, or painting a canvas—though it’s so much harder to assess success or failure in that setting and I’m sure I’m not the only visual artist who sees the things they’ve created over the years and remains uncertain of which category they fall into.

But, speaking strictly from my own experience, there is something about body painting that feels different. Added to the usual angst of creating art is the awareness of its immediacy and ephemeral nature—you get it right or you don’t, like a performance—but it’s also there before you as a physical object. That “object” is a person, a person whose participation I appreciate and whose feelings I care about, and I want to succeed for them as well as for me. They are becoming the art I am making and I feel responsible for that in a way I’d never feel for a lump of clay, and maybe that connection to the human I am working with helps me reach deeper. The model is also invested, showing me confidence by giving me permission to paint them, plus the time and physical sacrifice involved (unless you have been bodypainted or done a bunch of bodypainting I don’t think you can understand quite what a body model is agreeing to when they let you paint them—we artists ask a lot, they work hard). Often the models I paint also help with the design and the process, making suggestions, showing me movement ideas, helping with decisions, in addition to the beauty of who they are that they bring to the painting in a  way beyond any other canvas can. When it’s really working, the model is right there at the edge with me. In a stage performance, you work to energize and engage the audience so that you can soar on their wings to new heights. When bodypainting, it is more of a direct collaboration, if we are to fly we fly together.

And then, there is that magic thing that happens when I finish the painting and now the model takes it, owns it, brings it to life—takes it away from me and makes it more than I had conceived of. This is the pivotal difference between painting a person and painting a canvas. Not only does the art come to life, but as soon as I am done it is no longer mine, it has a life of its own now—how different that feels than seeing a canvas I’ve painted hanging on a wall.

The ultimate lesson I have learned from models is about my own limitations. I don’t believe I can transcend a model’s limitations, whereas I know they can transcend mine. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve seen a model take the limited work of my art and make it into something more. That alone would be answer enough to “why body painting?”

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Painting Becca at FABAIC 2007

I’ve had quite a number of very positive collaborations with models, here are just a few practical examples of how models have helped me, helped my art.

The first time I painted someone as a recognizable, famous painting, the Picasso “Seated Woman, 1937” image in the previous post, it was because Becca told me to paint something on her I’d always wanted to try but never had the chance, and that I could take as long as needed to work it out as we went. I had a few months earlier painted some kids with Picasso faces, for a museum exhibit of his work, and with her encouragement tried it as a bodypainting. (Recently she flew to New York to let me paint her for a project with no pay, and made me feel like I was doing her the favor.)

Just as I was starting to experiment with modern art imagery, I did several paintings with Emma, who is an art historian as well as a dancer, and it was an education for me as we talked about the concepts behind the imagery. I appreciated how, given her background, she saw that what I was working to achieve was valid as fine art.

You can’t be a bodypainter without a body model. And yet, it feels like we aren’t that kind to them, asking them to stand there, forever, not moving, without any clothes on, and after all that, that’s when we want them to work even harder, bringing the art we just painted to life. I’d spent hours painting Christina at the Kryolan booth at FABAIC 2009. When we were done, it was late. Still, she went on to pose for hours. First for spectators, than for one photographer, and finally for the convention photographer, Lisa Konz. By that point it was maybe 2:00 am and Christina wouldn’t quit until she got the photo right, the photo at the top of the post of her leaping that became my Painted Bodies Living Art logo. Once the body is painted, we depend upon the model to present it at its best, even better than we conceived of it—and also on the photographer to capture it and preserve it. The result is a collective, collaborative art work.

Thank you to all of the models who have joined me in this adventure over the years.

Emma, as Cubist Tiger Pop

Christina also worked hard to get this wonderful action shot, photographed by Lisa Konz

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

Why Body Painting? — 4: Radical Act — The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art

by Christopher Agostino. 11/29/2011

Traditional Significance: in cultures with profound traditions of bodypainting it is a celebration of the beauty of the human form. Among the Southeast Nuba the most elaborate painting is reserved for the young men in their prime health and youthful vigor. In the highlands of Papua New Guinea the brightly colored body-decoration presents a heightened self-image, an idealized form beyond the individuals’s daily persona.

Primal Transformation: anthropologists now point to the use of symbols and the beginnings of art as the igniting evolutionary spark of modern humanity, the defining impetus of the final great leap from animal to human— we are the symbolic species. And, as likely as not, that first act of art was to paint ourselves.

Radical Theory: to paint a body today is a profound expression of that which makes us human, transcending the boundary of our physical, animal form through the act of making ourselves into art, into the essential celebration of our consciousness — reaching back to our origins through the most traditional of all art forms while startling the modern viewer with the acknowledgement of our naked identity as human animals.

Traditional celebratory bodypainting from Papua New Guinea

Why does a painted, naked body evoke such a response? How can the most ancient of art forms be so surprising today?

I venture to say that a painted, naked body would be more disturbing in effect on an unsuspecting viewer than a body merely naked. A naked body is more readily comprehensible and our reaction more easily determined, or perhaps pre-determined, depending on the brand of morality we bring to the occasion. A fully painted body is less easily definable. It is both naked and clothed, both primitive and civilized—evoking the quality of “disturbing strangeness” as described by Freud, an uncomfortable reaction to “the return of what we have driven back” as we moved from tribal to modern culture. As relayed by Michel Thévoz, Freud was talking about why a member of modern society reacts so strongly, so negatively, to the painted faces of “primitive” people. I think there is an additional element of confusion, an additional uncertainty in how to react, when that unsuspecting modern viewer is confronted by a live example of full fine art bodypainting, because in addition to an apparent return to the primitive (a naked painted body) there is also the apparent elevation to higher culture (as that body has become art).

To continue in an overreaching, radical vein, I can make the argument that bodypainting is today an art form which is capable of fulfilling the quest of the artists 100 years ago who threw out the academic conventions to create “Modern Art” in order to re-establish the ability of visual art to challenge society, compel emotional response and shock the viewer into paying attention—in order to return art to it’s original function, the function art has in primitive cultures, of defining our humanity and raising individual and social consciousness.

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So to bring this back to the question “why body painting?”, as in “why do I paint bodies?” The simple answer is because its effective. To think that bodypainting presented in a modern context is capable of functioning in the same revolutionary way as the radical art of the early modern artists is not to say that I paint bodies in order to be the next Picasso. I do however find that artistic bodypainting (and facepainting, for that matter) have an effect on consciousness in a local, immediate sense both for the person you paint and for the people that see them. When you paint someone at an event, it injects a quality of magic, of mystery, into our modern civilized lives. In returning a glimpse of the primitive, it allows for questions about human identity and the permanence of form, and in that way it touches upon the original, transformative power of art.

the real thing

the student work

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

And read the related post:

is a painted body naked?  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/

Related articles

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 .