Transformation Facepainting Company — Jennifer’s Faces 2011

Jul15

Here are a collection of faces painted by one of our artists at a few recent events. Jennifer Wade has been painting her own uniquely creative faces with my company for more than 15 years. She brings to our Transformation approach a refined color sense and a method of stippling and layering colors to quickly achieve a complex background and create her original scenic designs. In our method, all of our artists are encouraged to develop their own designs and style, and Jennifer is an accomplished designer, bringing a great deal of enthusiasm to the challenge of creating new faces for special theme events like the World Science Festival or the NBA Draft Fan Zone. She is a fine art painter and an accomplished craft artist — a future post will showcase the work she does creating Ceramic Tile Murals with seniors and children. Jennifer is also a highly skilled art therapist and absolutely wonderful dealing with the public and getting kids and adults to join us in the sense of creative adventure that is at the heart of Transformations.

I first brought together a company of artists because I wanted to have the ability to impact large events by filling them with painted faces, and I couldn’t do that alone. Working with this group of artists all these years, however, has been the source of so many additional benefits as we have come to share this adventure together. Encouraging and inspiring each other, supporting each other’s non-facepainting endeavors, playing together, and commiserating with each other about that one rotten customer who wants to ruin a beautiful day of painting. I believe it is this sense of camaraderie that keeps our company together today through all these years.

painted at our Bronx Zoo concession

From the Science Festival: the extinct Golden Toad of Costa Rica's cloud rainforest

Science Festival: Albatross

Science Festival: an anthropological design based on an ancient piece of pottery from Guanajuato, Mexico

At the NBA Draft Day Fan Zone

NBA - Chicago Bulls logo

At the Coney Island Aquarium

A "Day of the Dead" design painted at a school's Mexican Fiesta

another Mexican Fiesta design

Jennifer's foto of me painting the school's Vice Principal at the Fiesta

for examples of another of our artists’ faces see: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/05/03/facepainting-event-modern-art-faces-in-philly-pt-1-britt/

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Happy 4th of July

Jul4

Happy 4th of July

Finding Facepainting Freedom — “Sit down and we will turn you into a work of art”

Jun22

by Christopher Agostino

Just back from an evening of creating art on people’s faces at the annual Summer Solstice Celebration at Socrates Sculpture Park. (what a cool place: http://www.socratessculpturepark.org/about/ )

We are working hard this year to raise the level of creative adventure at our events, and this time we just told the people on line that every face would be a complete surprise, that we would turn everyone into a work of “living art.” We’ve been at Socrates for years now and we are used to the crowd and they are used to us — there are people we’ve painted there and at other NY events many times. It was a wonderful and very gratifying evening. We painted many adults, maybe as many as kids, including adults and twenty-somethings there with no kids at all. And people were enthusiastic abut being surprised, about joining the creative adventure, and that encouraged us to make new and bold choices.

People were remarkably open about what we were painting on them, and the enthusiasm of the adults was contagious to the kids. One of our artists, Christine, remarked that there was even less questioning about what people “wanted to be” than when we do some of our other creative themes such as “just tell me if you want to be ‘nice’ or ‘spooky'”. And I think it is because we used that word: “art” (“Sit down and we’ll turn you into art”). Because if we are turning them in to art, then we must be artists, and if we are artists then we are the experts about what they should look like. Facepainting Freedom! Try it, for the truth will set you free.

Here are my fotos, hot off the presses. To fit the Summer Solstice theme, I was trying to make all my faces connect to the sun, to light, to summer, to nature — and, as I have been for months now, I am continuing to work out how to take influences from modern artists into the faces I paint at any event.