Category Archives: Storytelling

4 Years of Faces at the World Science Festival

by Christopher Agostino

The World Science Festival has been a great adventure for me as a facepainter over these past four years. Working with new and unusual themes is a wonderful way to expand design concepts — plus I am a bit of a science geek and fully appreciate this opportunity to share my enthusiasm with kids and families.

I chose to go from being a lone facepainter to the director of a company of artists because I wanted to be able to have an artistic impact on large events, with dynamic face designs in sufficient number to visually alter the event. This is facepainting as a visual performance art.

Because our Transformation Facepainting concept is a constantly creative exploration of design principles rather than the repetition of specific designs, our company can create new and unique designs to suit the theme of each specific event, and thereby bring that theme to life in a fully participatory way on each guest we paint.

Our work in arts-in-education and family theater also gives us the tools to support a promotional or educational concept with contextual interactions with the people we paint as we transform them with thematic designs.

In the case of the World Science Festival, I’ve had as much fun talking with people about these things we are turning them in to as in coming up with these unique designs — telling stories about moments of science such as the 1919 solar eclipse that generated worldwide headlines proclaiming that “Einstein Was Right!”. Plus, we’ve occasionally had the privilege of painting scientists in designs that fit their field of science, as in the time that a molecular biologist doing research on the brain gave me insight into how to depict neurons firing.

I’ve also had the opportunity to present my performance/lecture on the cultural significance of masks and painted faces for some wonderful audiences in their Discovery Theater.

For more information on the lecture: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/lecture/

Some things I might never think to paint turn out to be the inspiration for wonderful faces.  http://worldsciencefestival.com/ http://worldsciencefestival.com/blog/face_painting

     

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Modern Primitive: Why Look Back? – Part 1: To see their eyes…

Inspired by the photographs of Hans Silvester of the new styles of face art from the peoples of the Omo River area of Africa

by Christopher Agostino

While doing research yesterday for a new bodypainting project I read a passage that struck a chord, giving me a sharper insight into a theme that runs through my work. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art is a “comprehensive scholarly treatment” published in 1984 to accompany an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art which broke new ground by exhibiting Modern Art masterpieces side-by-side with the tribal art from Africa and Oceania that was a significant source of inspiration for those early modern artists, presenting the art objects of both the “primitive” and the “modern” on equal footing. At the culmination of his opening essay in the book, exhibit director William Rubin makes this statement of his most profound, or personal, goal for the exhibit:

“In the realm of my hopes, however, there is something less explicit, more difficult to verbalize. It is that the particular confrontation involved in our exhibition [between tribal objects and modern masterpieces] will not only help us better to understand our art, but in a very unique way, our humanity — if that is not saying the same thing. The vestiges of a discredited evolutionary myth still live in the recesses of our psyches. The vanguard modernists told us decades ago that the tribal peoples produced an art that often distilled great complexity into seemingly simple solutions. We should not therefore be surprised that anthropology has revealed a comparable complexity in their cultures. I hope our effort will demonstrate that at least insofar as it pertains to works of the human spirit, the evolutionary prejudice is clearly absurd.”

My visual and performing arts have become increasingly connected to cultures distant in time, space and tradition. This research into other cultures is fascinating to me, rich in ideas and images for the artist sponge in me to absorb, but that isn’t what drives this process.

When I tell an audience a 2,000 year old tale from China of a heroic young girl as I did this afternoon, modern white guy that I am I still feel a resonance of the common humanity at the heart of the story. I feel it… and will judge my performance in large part on my perception of how well I have been able to let my audience feel it. I’ve come to see how it is the qualities in a story that touch upon the universal question of what it means to be human that make some stories survive.

The juxtaposition of the very tribal Papua New Guinea design with the New York street scene and a bag of potato chips makes this a favorite foto of mine.

When I paint a New Yorker’s face in a design from some exotic culture, that also makes a connection to our common humanity. As I have grown more aware of this, with kids I’ll talk about a more concrete, though metaphoric, connection to their unusual new face — for example, that the Kabuki Samurai design they’re wearing is like becoming a superhero; or that the wildly colorful face from Papua New Guinea is like being painted for a birthday party, it just happens to be a party on the other side of the world. This is an understanding of the effect of my work that has grown gradually, and not a political or “new age” sensibility that led me to my explorations of the primitive. I started “looking backward” to the tribal and the ancient to become a better facepainter, as a way to understand the possibilities for painting a face that had already been discovered by cultures that have done it for generations.

Now, it seems that the lesson of a couple hundred thousand painted faces over 30 years is unavoidable, for whatever culturally alien or bizarre design I paint on someone, once I am finished I always see a pair of human eyes looking back at me from within the mask. This is my visceral understanding of the common humanity we share.

Writing as he was about famous artists and art objects with a power to change perception far beyond anything I could approach, William Rubin’s statement is a stronger, more militant sentiment about the necessity and potential of this joining of the primitive and the modern to open our world view, but I can’t be the first facepainter to wonder what effect it would have on cultural/racial prejudices if we all wore painted faces, and all we could see was each other’s eyes?

Picasso's revolutionary sculpture, Guitar 1912, and a Grebo mask (Ivory Coast, Africa) that he owned. Picasso stated that in creating this sculpture he studied the mask for its use of projections for eyes, nose and mouth from a flat plane, for how those projections implied another invisible plane ( a device he used for creating the sound hole of the guitar via a cylinder) and especially the quality in such tribal art that it is not illustrating a face but "re-presenting" it — a concept that concurs with a pivotal change between the art of the 19th century and the new art of the early modernists, i.e. their use of symbols and imagery to represent subject matter and thereby add greater conceptual depth.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

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Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts – PIFA – Saturday

A bunch of us are heading to Philly to paint and perform this Saturday for the PIFA street fair produced by The Kimmel Center. From their website:

“Broad Street transforms into a slice of Paris, with street vendors, café tables, a grass-laden park, live music on two Festival stages, and a giant Ferris Wheel. Don’t miss the thrilling climax, as world-renowned French theatrical troupe La Compagnie Transe Express performs 100 feet in the air!”

http://www.kimmelcenter.org/events/pifastreetfair.php

I will be performing my storytelling show street theater style at 11:30 am and 3:00 pm, at the Amphitheater.

Two shows will mean two different sets of stories.

We also have a team of artists there painting faces. The theme of the whole event is Paris 1910-1920, so our artists will be painting faces inspired by artists associated with Paris of that era — Impressionists, Fauvists, early Modern Artists — and other French themed imagery. The participants will be asked to sit down and be turned into a work of art — no requests, every face a surprise. Even though there is nothing that excites me as much as performing, I’m a bit envious that I won’t get to do the painting, it’s just the kind of painting I love to do.

To support my artists in their own explorations of the theme I collected images of artwork from the era and asked them to find additional examples. I also have a lot of examples of faces I’ve painted that fit because I’ve been incorporating modern art into my facepainting since I painted for a Picasso exhibit at the Nassau County Museum of Art in 2006.

 

One of the faces I painted at the Picasso exhibit in the Nassau County Museum of Art, that started me on an exploration of modern art on faces.

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