Category Archives: Events

The Kinetic Art of Face Painting — Pt.1: Sending Art off into the World

by Christopher Agostino

 This is the distinctive difference of painting faces as an art, isn’t it, that the art we create moves and is alive—and, once painted, the art we create has a life of its own. Unlike a Calder mobile or other kinetic sculptures, the work of art we create is on an independent, conscious life form who then puts the art into motion following their own determinations. Once painted, we have no control over the art we have created and it just goes off into the world to have its own adventure. Face painting is a kinetic art, an art that moves, with a will of its own.

The thought that my art goes on to its own adventures is a significant part of what keeps face painting exciting for me. As the commercial opportunities of artistic body painting begin to expand in the U.S. I have continued to focus primarily on painting faces because of the greater numbers of people it gives me a chance to transform. A painted body has quite an impact, but not as great, I think, as the dozens or hundreds of faces we can paint at a an event—and, of course, we are giving so many more people the experience being art, kinetic art, as they move through the event. I particularly appreciate painting like this at large public events, and have constructed my Transformations Facepainting company with this type of event in mind, because it affords the greatest opportunity to send a multitude of faces off into the world, leading to the surprising discoveries by passersby of painted people in everyday settings  (like the woman in the previous post telling me of looking for our faces throughout the village of Southampton), and remarkable juxtapositions like in my favorite “face in the Crowd” photo of the man in a face from Papua New Guinea eating potato chips on the roof of the Port Authority Bus Terminal with New York City in the background

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Alice and John at his reception

This past Sunday I was able to send one piece of my day’s kinetic art on a mission. I was painting at the Darwin Dayfestivities of the Long Island Ethical Humanist Society. As a woman sat down to be painted she asked for something appropriate to going to an art gallery, where she was heading to next, and after a few questions we realized  she was going to the opening reception of an exhibit by my friend and mentor, John Fink.

In Professor Fink's class I worked with the same themes that inspire my face and body designs

I had started the day disappointed that my gig prevented me from attending his reception and here came a serendipitous opportunity to be there at least in spirit. Alice was enthusiastic about being a human greeting card and I did a design based on cave paintings, like the work I had been doing in the last ceramics class I took with Professor Fink. Check at John Fink’s very playful sculptures, ceramics and constructions: www.johnfinkart.com

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

When I first started using cultural sources for face designs I recognized that they stand out in modern settings in a way that draws the attention of spectators and enhances the effectiveness of the transformation

Painting adults also draws more attention to the art, because it is more surprising to see a painted adult than to see a painted child

Another way in which a painted face is a kinetic art, as the movement of the face brings the design itself to life...more on this in a future post

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45,000 Views — 2008 Transformations

by Christopher Agostino

I was checking out a colleague’s video on You Tube when I saw one of mine come up in the column of suggested videos, and I was very surprised to see it had 45,811 views, way more than any of the others I’ve posted. [Shortly after this post, it was age restricted on YouTube, so here it is on Vimeo]

2008 was an adventurous year. The impulse to start collecting faces in slideshow videos came in response to a comment by an artist I met while painting at a Parrish Art Museum event. She came in to the gallery where we were painting and told me she had seen our faces all through the village of Southampton on her way to the museum (there’s a few photos in this video from a Parrish Art Museum event.) What she wanted to tell me was that we were creating a “kinetic art form”—particularly, that the style of our facepainting, with very colorful faces and every one different, made her look for them as she saw the painted people moving through the village, wanting to see each face. “kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer.” (from Wikipedia)

Facepainting at an event is a collective art. It is the sum total of the faces we paint that is the art form, rather than each individual face. Her description of this as a kinetic art had me thinking about this collection of faces in motion, and how to try to document that. That led to creating  “Every Face” videos, in which I photograph every face I paint at an event and put them in to a slideshow in the order painted, and that led to taking a selection to put a year together in 2008.

The music is “I am An Animal” by Pete Townshend. I felt ok using it because he gave it away as a free download on his web site, on an album of odds and ends and some unreleased “Scoop” tracks, which are the demo versions he recorded of his songs as he wrote them before bringing them into the studio to be done by The Who.

See more of our  Videos.

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“Everyone Has Nipples”

by ChristopherAgostino – Posted 2/5/2012

Janet and Justin  – Superbowl XXXVIII

On the day of the Superbowl it seems appropriate to write about nipples. I’ve been reading a bit on the habit Facebook has of censoring body painting images, and the surmise that Facebook measures the level of offense based on the relative visibility of a female model’s nipples in the final image. One blog referred to it as “Facebook’s war against nipples”. Well, I have a relevant quote, too: “Everyone has nipples.”

One of the first discussions I had about all this was with a European body painter back in 2006 on the conflicted duality of the American cultural fascination with female breasts (in Playboy, advertising, Superbowls, etc.) versus the fear of the exposed female nipple. The subject came up because of the restrictions imposed about just how much of the model we could paint at the convention we were teaching at. The quote above is from Carolyn Roper, another European body painter, at a different convention in 2008. That convention had one of the strictest modesty requirements. Not even pasties or nipple covers were enough, the female models had to wear tube tops or bras to get painted for the classes and competitions. I’ve written before how poorly I think it works to paint over someone’s underwear, and at this convention I found it very awkward—and I’m an American, how much more so for the Europeans teaching there, like Carolyn. So she arranged to have a male model for her demonstration class to avoid the problem, and as she painted the salient portion of his chest she remarked about how everyone has nipples and so she didn’t see what all the fuss was about painting a woman’s as opposed to a man’s.

You really can’t got much more naked than this, can you?

If Ingres’s Venus, fully naked, hangs as a treasured masterpiece in a museum, if it is acceptable for an artist to paint nipples on a canvas portrait of a naked model, why should I have to hide a model’s nipples in a body painting? We already had Demi Moore‘s nipples on the cover of Vanity Fair on newsstands twenty years ago (see http://wp.me/p1sRkg-6v), so why all the fuss still today?

There was a funny sequence in the U.S. Supreme Court just recently as they adjudicated the case regarding decency standards on prime time TV when the question turned towards the offensive nature of a bare buttocks being seen (from the side) in an episode of NYPD Blue some years ago and the lawyer arguing against that interpretation pointed out that the US Supreme Court building was full of classic art images that included bare butts, many bare butts. Looking back at the most famous “nipple slip”, Janet Jackson’s at the Superbowl, which is also a topic of the larger case the Supreme Court is considering, it’s hard to decide which part of that half time show all about sex was the most offensive. I’m pretty prudish, or, rather, I have real trouble with what I perceive as sexism and the objectification of women, so the part that troubled me most was when the dancers dressed as cheerleaders chose to “take off all their clothes” because “it’s getting hot in here.” Janet’s breast was anticlimactic after that. You can review the show and form your own opinion:  http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x45h8i_super-bowl-xxxviii-halftime-show-fu_music

I believe that we each should have the freedom to control how we use or decorate our own bodies. And in regard to the freedom to display our bodies, I go along the lines of the way it’s handled on New York State beaches: “nude but not lewd”. In New York State a women can go topless any where that a man can, otherwise it is considered sexual discrimination. Just to know that this is the law is a good thing. It’s not overly taken advantage of. There is topless sunbathing sometimes on some NY beaches, even fully naked men and women on some, but that tends to be in generally understood areas of certain beaches (“nude but not lewd” is said to be the New York State Parks guideline on that.) I have thought that the more that American women are given the opportunity to be topless (at the beach, for example) the less power there will be in the cultural insistence on women’s breasts as indecent sex objects (and it is that  implication of indecency that bothers me, not the sexuality.), but I am less certain of that than I was.  Occasionally you’ll see a topless woman on a NY city street, usually for a political cause, like the topless women holding signs at the start of Occupy Wall Street that pundits used to ridicule the nascent movement and which John Stewart made fun of (he didn’t show them naked on TV, because even though he’s on a cable channel without any relevant FCC restrictions about that it’s just not done in the U.S. for fear of public outrage—but my local Comedy Central channel airs ads for a strip club just about every night during his show.)

Regarding the public acceptance of nudity in body painting, the best advocate for that acceptance is to expose the public to beautifully painted bodies, male and female in all shapes and sizes. Significantly, I think, there will be a step in the right direction at this year’s Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC http://www.fabaic.com/) in Fort Lauderdale as they have invited the general public to attend the body painting competition for the first time, on May 27 (2012). That’s gotta be a good thing and I am looking forward to being there—though I expect nipple covers will still be required for the female models, we are not in Austria yet.

Painting at the World Bodypainting Festival

The Horned Goddess, topless rock art from before 2000 BC, about as old as a painting can get….

Yet when I painted her onto a model’s face for my book, I felt compelled to remove the breasts so as not to offend anyone. Silly, right?

As I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that all I got out of that class with World-Champion body painter Carolyn Roper in 2008 was a better understanding of nipples, from my notes on that class here is one great insight into painting technique and a pro hint about caring for your model:

1- All water based makeup colors sink in to the color beneath, so every color you paint on top of another will pick up a tint from the underlying color. It is especially true of white going on top of colors. So plan for this in how you lay down your background colors, and leave extra time to go over white highlights again at the end of the painting.

2- Keep the model’s butt, hands and mouth clear until the last stages of the painting, so they can sit, eat, drink and hold things as needed during the long hours you are working together.

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Enjoy the Superbowl! GO GIANTS!

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