Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000

Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000 cover, photograph by Bruce Weber

In October of 1999, the photographer Bruce Weber saw me painting animal faces in a mask-like style at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s annual St. Francis Day Fair. He hired me to do bodypainting for a photo shoot for the Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000. Survivor was a hit on TV, so they were going for that, with the models like castaways — he gave me one instruction, “Lord of the Flies”, and when I told him I knew what he meant, he let me paint. I painted 19 models in about 3 hours in a swamp in Florida. He photographed each of the models separately (for the cover and an interior 4 page spread), and then the full group as the sun was starting to set. The foto he chose for the cover was of a model painted in a baboon spirit mask design I had been experimenting with all that summer, as we had been incorporating African mask styles into our faces for the opening of the Congo Gorilla Rain Forest at the Bronx Zoo that year. This gallery includes some of his photos (scanned from the quarterly), and a few of my own snapshots from that session. Return to our main website: agostinoarts.com

Return to our main website: agostinoarts.com

From African Masks to Abercrombie & Fitch

Saraswati shows up at the Cincinnati Art Museum

Jul3

by Christopher Agostino www.agostinoarts.com

In Cincinnati for the National Storytelling Network Conference, I got a chance to go to the Cincinnati Art Museum. A special exhibit on musical instruments included a “Mayuri” from India, a stringed instrument fashioned in the shape of a peacock in reference to the goddess Saraswati — combining two of her iconic representations. Nice to see her again, so soon after painting her.

At the museum, a minor kerfuffle. I had particularly wanted to see the current exhibit “The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art“, displayed in an old-fashioned cabinet style, with lots of unlabeled stuff side by side in jammed glass cabinets. Towards the end I saw a piece of painted pottery from ancient Greece depicting Heracles Continue reading →

Face Painting Gallery— Tribal Approach at NY Restoration Project Family Day

Jun7

Saturday June 2, 2012 at the beautifully restored Swindler Cove Park for New York Restoration Project Family Day. For our third event at this beautiful location we chose to paint faces using a tribal mask approach, based particularly on the cultural use of face painting and masks based in nature images and intended to evoke nature spirits.