First Night Hartford — Face Painting Adults and the Final Faces of 2011

From a Monet painting of a Venice sunset

by Christopher Agostino

This is the only photo I have from the final gig of 2011, First Night in Hartford, CT. We were just too busy for taking photos. It was our first time at this event and we expected that with First Night falling on a Saturday and the weather so mild the place would be crowded. When we arrived the on-site staff warned us to brace for a long line. They were right. The moment they opened the doors we had a line filling the room we were in.

Facepainting for free at a well attended public event means the line will be an issue. We want to paint as many people as possible, we want to keep it all manageable so the people waiting aren’t getting annoyed and the client/venue remain happy. We had our sound system so we played music and I could occasionally talk to the crowd, tell them what to expect (that we would surprise everyone with the face we paint on them) and our two simple rules: we paint anyone over 3 (but no babies or toddlers) and we only paint full faces. We also had great help from the site staff, who managed the line so we could focus on the painting. A few hours into the event, the site manager came to me and said that line was so long they were going to tell the adults in line that they couldn’t get painted, so we could paint more kids. I told her that isn’t what we do, and I was glad that she was willing to discuss it with me. We feel that adults have as much right to be painted as kids, and we know how excited kids get when their parents join in—it makes it a memorable family experience. I suggested instead to place someone at the end of the line to tell people how long the wait was and let them make the choice to join the line or not. We wound up painting almost as many adults as kids, including some teens and adults that were there on their own without any kids to be painted.  Facepainting is not just for kids. Once the line was closed it took us an hour to finish everyone waiting. I painted about 30 people in that hour. Towards the end people were thanking us for staying longer than scheduled and many were saying it was worth the wait. It felt good to work that hard, paint that fast and transform so many people. So we went out of 2011 with a bang, not a bad way to end a year.

Here’s the sign we used for this event. Click on this link, it will open in a window than click on it again: agostinoarts_WorkOfArtSurpriseSIGN

From our years of very large events at the Bronx Zoo we developed a methodology for painting faces quickly, focusing more on the graphic design than on the details. Even working as quickly as we did at Hartford, each face is unique, and a bold, colorful design that people respond to. For an idea on how to simplify a full face design to paint it more quickly, see the post on a fast tiger face:  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/08/facepainting-how-to-paint-a-tiger-face/

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Related articles

Holiday Face Painting

Holiday Faces from Transformations

Painted Faces. Living Art.

Holiday Facepainting that will amaze your guests and decorate your events, from New York’s premier facepainting company.

Call us today for your event: 516-771-8086
 
Or email for more information: info@agostinoarts.com

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