Category Archives: Transformation Theory

my philosophy of face and body painting

Hands through Time — Reaching Out for Help: the Meakambut People of Papua New Guinea

“We, the Meakambut people, will give up hunting and always moving and living in the mountain caves if the government will give us a health clinic and a school, and two shovels and two axes so we can build homes.”

Those are the closing words of a poignant article in the February 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine: “Last of the Cave People” by Mark Jenkins. An NGM team had gone up into the mountains of Papua New Guinea to report on one of the last nomadic cave-dwelling people in the world and found the remnants of a people barely surviving. Sickness, hunger, the sparsity of animals to hunt, infant mortality and an understanding that there might not be a future for them led John Aiyo, one of their leaders, to give this message to the NGM reporter to bring out of the forest and relay to the government.

The article is accompanied by beautiful photographs (which I am not allowed to use here) of a jungle we might easily mistake for paradise. One of the photographs was of hand stencils in a cave painting—the ubiquitous image of hands on cave walls, found throughout the world and throughout time. There is also a photograph of one of the tribesmen painted up, walking through the jungle. This surprised me, because books (see Books Page) such as Man as Art by Malcolm  Kirk and Tribes by Art Wolfe report that the people of Papua New Guinea only paint themselves for festivals—today, most of which are at least in part tourist exhibitions. The article suggests that in this case the men painted themselves specifically because they were heading down out of the mountains with the NGM reporter’s team.

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Destroying the Traditional Nuba People—George Clooney Brings Attention to the Nuba Mountains

Southeast Nuba traditional body painting

George Clooney had himself arrested to bring attention to the one-sided warfare being inflicted by the northern Sudanese government on the people of the Nuba Mountains—and he has done much more than that, he has set up the Sudan Sentinel Project to monitor the ongoing human-rights abuses. The crux of the problem is that the Nuba Mountains are located north of the newly created border with Southern Sudan, though the people there are aligned with the southern Sudanese. New Yorker online: FREEING SUDAN—AND GEORGE CLOONEY

The traditional body arts of the Nuba have been a major inspiration for my work (see related articles below). In addition to the destructive actions of years of civil war and government aggression, their traditions have long been under cultural attack. In my research for the article on the Nuba for my book in 2005, I read in a National Geographic Magazine that the body art traditions have pretty much vanished from their culture. The religiously conservative Sudanese government was against traditional nakedness and bodypainting, and were working to eradicate those traditions—a primary method they were using was to put satellite TVs into community centers, to lure younger members of the tribal groups into a fascination with modern culture and away from their traditions. Continue reading →

Moche Warrior Pottery — Today’s History of the World in 100 Objects

Warrior, ceramic vessel, Moche culture, Peru

Another fascinating episode from the BBC/British Museum History of the World in 100 Objects series today on WNYC radio: Moche Warrior Pot —fascinating being defined as connecting to the images and art that have informed my work.

Moche vessels

The Moche were a large, complex civilization in Peru 100-800 ad (pre-Inca), which had established cities with architecture and facilities that the Romans would have been envious of (according to the radio episode). Hearing they’d be talking about a Moche object my ears perked up. Moche masks have inspired faces I paint, and their ceramic portrait vessels, with spouts coming out of the tops of people’s heads, were some of the first objects I imitated, way back in High School ceramics class. In the BBC episode they spoke to a contemporary potter who analyzed the warrior pot and said they made hundreds and hundreds of these types of vessels, combining the use of molds and hand-building to mass produce them but give them individual qualities. Continue reading →