Category Archives: Modern Primitive

explorations of the connections between traditional and modern art

Facepainting Event: Modern Art Faces in Philly – Pt.2

The team at work at PIFAMore fotos from The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts street fair, produced by The Kimmel Center, April 30, 2011.

To suit the theme of “Paris 1910-1920” we chose to paint faces based on the artists associated with Paris of that era, ranging from the Impressionists forward to the origins of Modern Art. And we invited the pubic to just sit down and “we will turn you into a work of art” — no requests, every face a surprise.

Dimitrea painting a Picasso inspired image

We have found that people generally like the idea of being surprised by the face we paint on them, and people this time were even more enthusiastic, excited about becoming a work of art. Excited, it seemed, about becoming something exotic and unfamiliar. Over the course of the day, several people engaged me in conversations about how different the facepainting was from what they (or their kids) were used to, and how much they enjoyed this. Our artists enjoyed themselves as well.

Monet Waterlilies

Painting like this, borrowing some of the cache of famous artists like Monet and Matisse, gives a facepainter a greater sense of freedom to be creative, in large part because the people you are painting have given you that permission and have joined you in the creative adventure.  Our team for PIFA included Britt, Dimitrea, Jennifer, Miguel and Roberta, and I couldn’t resist doing a little painting too after my storytelling shows were done.

See the previous post for fotos of the faces painted by Britt.

To learn about our company:

http://www.agostinoarts.com

here's the display we used for this event

By Jennfer, from Matisse papercut "Icarus"

from a Gauguin painting (see Britt's version in yesterday's post)

Sharks, in a modern Art/Cubist style

We also included some African and tribal images, as they were an influence on artists in Paris 1910

Roberta painting image from a Gauguin painting

By Roberta

By Britt

Picasso inspired, from Dimitrea

from Picasso - Dora Marr

from Matisse papercut: "monkey"

Dimitrea painting

One of the last faces I painted that day, in which I tried to use the colors of his shirt to work the surface of the face in imitation of the complexity Picasso brought to the surface of the canvas in some of his Cubist portraits, such as "Ambroise Vollard, 1910"

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Paris, Spring 1910

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Facepainting Event: Modern Art Faces in Philly – Pt.1: Britt

We had a wonderful day on Saturday at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. The weather was perfect, the streets crowded with people and the event was extraordinary. While I was performing my storytelling show, we had a team of facepainters transforming the crowd with faces to suit the theme of Paris of 1910-1920 — faces based on the Modern Artists that themselves transformed what painting and sculpture looked like in that fertile, creative time in Paris. Our company was hired for the event by The Kimmel Center and the facepainting was free for the public, so the lines were long. The crowd, though, was in a great mood all day, despite the wait, and people were very receptive and excited about being turned into Modern Art.

Britt painting a face using a detail of fabric patterns from a Matisse painting

Here are a collection of faces from one of our company, Britt. Each of our artists brings their own style and interpretation to the Transformation Facepainting concept. I continue to admire Britt’s use of soft colors and the expressive  quality of her brush strokes. I feature her today because I feel her approach to this theme captured the spirit of the artists that inspired our faces for this event in a way I can learn from.

from Picass Head 1961

Picasso inspired bird face

from Monet's Women with Parasol

Monet waterlilies - an idea that inspired several faces

Monet's painting of a sunset in Venice

Monet inspired Paris scene - Eiffel Tower

Another of Britt's take on Monet-esque Eiffel Tower

Monet's garden, with footbridge

from a Max Ernst painting

from one of Matisse's gold fish paintings, again Britt used a detail of a famous painting to craft the face design

from Paul Klee painting

from a Gauguin painting

from an Andre Derain painting: "The Dance"

taking other elements from an Andre Derain painting: "The Dance"

Thank you, Britt, for such an expressive contribution to our collective art at PIFA.

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Traditional Bodyart – Nuba; Sudan; Africa – 1: changing my perceptions

by Christopher Agostino

In the ’80s as I began to seek out cultural sources to better understand this art of transformation that I was engaged in I found “The Painted Body” by Michel Thévoz in the Strand bookstore. One photograph in the book stood out. The design was black and white, the gaze of the subject so direct. Most striking, it was strongly asymmetrical. Yet, still, balanced and beautiful in a way so different than any faces I was painting, or the Chinese Opera and Kabuki designs I had been studying. I wanted to learn how to paint a face like this.

Thévoz’s book remains unique in its focus more on the sociological significance and psychological underpinnings of transformational art than on its methods and practices. This photograph was only identified as “Nuba face painting, Sudan”, with no information about it in the text. It was at a place in the book exploring a subject that drew my attention because it related to what I was trying to achieve by painting people in designs from other cultures — the question of why our modern response to a painted face is fear and discomfort. He discusses Freud’s reasoning that we have “a reaction of dread at what we are nevertheless obliged to recognize as intimately our own, a reaction which in fact signals ‘the return of what we have driven back.'” Freud’s succinct phrase for this modern response to the primitive transformation: “disturbing strangeness”. To this day, I make it a point of painting at least a few faces that are disturbingly strange at even the nicest of events — it keeps people on their toes. I am glad that Michel Thévoz and Freud have given me an insight into this impulse, and I connect this photograph to that understanding.

When I first saw it, this black and white Nuba face reverberated with many connections to concepts I was trying to work out. It’s the same colors as the hundreds of KISS faces I had painted over and over on Friday and Saturday nights at Adventureland Amusement Park in the late ’70s, but it’s a KISS face as painted by Picasso. It was 30 years before I fully realized that particular connection in a design blending these two influences, but even at the time I saw that this “primitive” “tribal” face was very “modern”. As I began to do educational programs in High Schools on the history of masks and makeup, I found that these Nuba faces got a great reaction from the teens, just as the KISS faces did a decade before.

That black and white Nuba face is also so bold and so simple, another push in a direction I would pursue throughout my endeavors. And just the fact that it stood out as so very different in a book full of bizarre looking humans helped me to see that anything is possible in a facepainting design, there are no rules. That lesson has been pivotal for me.

My fascination with the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba of the Sudan only increased as I began to learn the story behind their faces, and from the initial inspiration of this one image a lot of work has flowed. The photograph in Thévoz’s, for example, was taken by Leni Riefenstahl, and there certainly is a story in that.

Search “Nuba” on this site for additional posts about this subject.

It only occurred to me as I was writing this that transforming hundreds of teens into KISS faces at an Amusement Park in 1977 may have been my first experience of tribal facepainting.

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