Category Archives: Events

Why Body Painting?—2: Ultimate Collaboration—MODELS, Pt.2: Just how much a model can help, Amber and Kuniyoshi at FABAIC 2011

"Angry Ocean / Waterfall Tears"

by Christopher Agostino

In bodypainting, you kinda know what you paint, what you achieve, as you paint it, but you don’t know how it will survive, what it will be in the end. I have worked to learn to value the process first and understand that, for me, it is the process of painting that is my art. The photograph that results is not my art—it is a new thing, an amalgam of my art, the model’s art and the photographer’s art.

Here’s something else I find about painting people rather than canvas: when I look at my work—the final result, the photograph that makes the ephemeral act permanent—in addition to any self-critique I may make, or understanding of intent or technique, there is also always the memory of the interaction with the model, the story behind the painting. In the case of this particular painting I did with Amber LaValle Morrisey at FABAIC 2011, the story is about just how much I owe this model and a very clear answer to the question “why body painting?”
I believe that Amber is more responsible for this painting than I am. She very consciously worked to bring me to that edge of my abilities in a situation where I would not have gone there on my own. I hardly know Amber. I wish I could say we were friends but I’ve only met her, and painted her, the one time, and so I am stepping out of bounds to be describing her intentions like this, but I am aware of the results and self-aware enough to know how much I relied on her help as I painted. This is not something you could ever say about painting a canvas, that it helped—it is absolutely an example of how bodypainting is a shared act of creation by artist and model.
I painted this on Amber on Saturday night at FABAIC (Face and Body Art International Convention http://www.fabaic.com/). Although I like to paint in public as a performance art, painting at a convention is not the same thing and I will own up to the fact that my ego gets in the way there and I feel like I’m in competition with the other artists, rather than working just to my own goals. There is a fear of failure in front of my peers. Friday night I had failed. I failed to paint anyone, as the model who had asked me to paint her backed out at the last minute, too late for me to find a replacement (see how much we depend on our models?) I also failed my sponsor, as I spent Friday night sitting embarrassed on my little stage at the Kryolan booth rather than painting www.kryolan.com. Very unprofessional, and very pissed off.
So by Saturday night I felt that I did have something to prove. The pissed off part of me wanted to show off, but I also had a need to prove something to myself, that it was the art that mattered and not the praise, not the public response. That’s why I decided to take a shot at this Kuniyoshi design, the serious kind of design I’d usually save for painting at home where I have more control over the circumstances and the final photography. So that’s all on me, the decision to try something difficult for the sake of the challenge, with the awareness that I would have a beautiful woman as a model—on Friday, when I was sitting there stewing, Marcela (trying to make me feel better, I imagine) introduced me to Amber and arranged for her to model Saturday night.
Here, as I understand it, is what Amber brought to the table: she made it her business to put me in the position to succeed. Starting off by being very easy to talk to, opening up about herself and drawing me out, getting me to talk about what I was trying to do with this painting and how frustrated I was about Friday, engaging me so that I was much less concerned about where we were doing this and more fully focused on the painting process between us. And (again, stepping over the line to describe her intentions) I think that Amber is a very savvy person and worked this interaction to encourage me and get me feeling confident, confident enough to take chances. You don’t get that from a blank canvas. She also fully acquiesced to the idea that it would be a long, difficult painting process and might not come off at the end, that there were some parts of the design I was uncertain of, that we could be wasting our time—but she made a point of talking throughout like success was certain. More than that, Amber made me aware that she was fully committed to this painting being a successful work of art, and I therefore felt compelled to get past any baggage I had brought into the process to join her in that effort. So, in this case, I felt that the model led the process, not the painter.
In addition to her being a very professional model, she and her husband Bill are both photographers, so they (and my wife Lorraine) were able to help me work out some of the design questions. At one point we all conferred about how to treat the line of the waterfall at her eyes, just where it should be positioned for maximum effect and I was greatly appreciative of having that supportive collaboration.
One other thing Amber did bears mentioning, because it was unusual, and (I think) very deliberate. She started drawing attention to the painting as I was working, praising it to passersby, telling people they had to stop and look at it, pointing out details—forcing me to confront and get over that ego demon that inhibits me at conventions, giving me permission to show off while embarrassing me enough to keep me in my place.
There is a point in a bodypainting in which I have to release my art—let the model take ownership, let the photographer see it through their vision—and wait for it to return all grown up. In the best case, just like in raising children, the result exceeds the parent.
By the time we finished this painting it was 2:00 am, the convention floor was shutting down and we were rushed through the convention photography studio. Bill tried to get a shot there, but the lighting was too harsh. So Amber and Bill went off to shoot it at their own studio, and I went to bed not knowing what it would survive as, what the final result would be—only knowing how I felt about the process, the collaboration, and how much I enjoyed the challenge of the painting.
What a bonus to work with a model who has her own photography studio. After the convention, when I saw this photograph that Bill had achieved, I was overjoyed. It was much more than a record of the painting. Amber’s pose, the curl of her hand. The way they had cropped it. The colors. And if we are looking to answer the question “why body painting?” we need to look no further than her eyes.
I know that part of the reason I paint people is that I am not good enough to achieve something like this on my own. I can’t make a painting on a canvas with the poignancy of this photograph. I need the model’s help, I need her humanity. The answer to “why body painting?” is right here in Amber’s eyes.
Please check out Bill and Amber’s work at http://www.lmstudios.us/
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About the painting: I had seen an exhibit of work by the Japanese printmaker Kuniyoshi at the Japan Society and was working on a design using several of his images when the Tsunami struck Japan, changing the direction of the piece.  At the top, Hatsuhana stays under a sacred waterfall for 100 days to purify herself so that the Buddha will heal her sick husband—and this was the initiating image for my design concept. Kuniyoshi is considered one of the major masters of Japanese wood block prints, both in his illustration technique and in his subtle manipulation of colors and shading in the printing process to create effects such as the transparency of the water as it falls over Hatsuhana. The figure at the bottom of her torso is the Emperor Sutoku who turned into a demon and ravaged the land in revenge for being disrespected by his successor. The image on her back (below) is from a remarkable triptych print “Miyamoto Musashi kills great whale”.

Kuniyoshi c.1842

Kuniyoshi c.1842

Kuniyoshi - Miyamoto Musashi kills great whale -1847

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

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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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