Rebirth revisited — Ukrainian Eggs and Ancient Eggs

Apr12

In response to my post about the spring and how I choose to experience the season of rebirth, one of our company artists, Laura Metzinger, sent in this post:

From Laura: I had long been interested in learning how to do the traditional Ukrainian (pysanky) wax-resist method of egg decorating and my library offered a workshop in 1990. I left with enough of the basics to continue to explore it on my own, and discovered that supplies could be found in NYC at Surma, a little Ukrainian shop, est. 1918, on East 7th St. They have a wide selection of books and tools and are always more than happy to offer suggestions and advice. SURMA – The Ukrainian Shop

The samples of my work here include some traditional and original designs, and all were created between 1990 and 2000. While pysanky eggs are associated with Easter, the practice of decorating eggs pre-dates Christianity, and hearkens back to the celebration of seasonal changes.

kistka (tool for applying the wax) and beeswax cake, with an egg showing an original design of Laura's

The tool for applying wax to the eggs is called a kistka. Although there are sleek, electric versions available, I like to use the more primitive, copper wire wrapped tool. It’s used by heating the copper cone at the end of the tool in a candle flame, and then pushing the point into a cake of beeswax. The heat draws up the wax into the cone, and then is used to draw designs on the egg. I use a darkened beeswax, as it’s easier to see when applied to the white egg and lighter colors. It’s especially nice to be doing this in a group, as the candles burning and the pleasant smell of beeswax create a very special atmosphere.

The process calls for working the design colors going from light to dark. Anything that you want to be white must be drawn with wax first. The wax prevents those sections from taking on any subsequent colors. Working from light to dark, wax is applied and the egg is dipped into progressively darker shades. After the design is completed, the egg is held closely alongside the candle flame. This is the best part; as the wax melts and is wiped off, the brilliant colors come into view.

Eggs with Trypillion designs

I love the symbolic meanings given to the imagery, which vary according to the source. And the use of eggs as a symbol of rebirth is timeless. All the colors have specific meanings, as do the designs. Most obvious is the use of plant and animal images. Earlier meanings were associated with the seasons, farming and harvest. Later on, many of the images were associated with Christianity. I have incorporated designs from other cultures, such as Native American symbols, which are very close to the Eastern European designs. I’ve also done a number of Trypillion designs on brown eggs. The predominantly black & red swirling designs come from artifacts discovered in the Ukraine, and are believed to symbolize the female, from whom new life comes. There are a number of ways of approaching the design elements. There are repeating border designs, end-cap designs and pictures. Traditionally, the repeating border designs are stylized plant elements. I like to incorporate Native American wave symbols in my borders and end-cap designs.

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Thank you, Laura. With my perspective I can’t help but make a connection between this tradition of decorating eggs to the discovery of etched ostrich eggs from 60,000 years ago — some of the oldest objects yet to show the use of symbolism by early humans. From the online article in Science News: “The unusually large sample of 270 engraved eggshell fragments, mostly excavated over the past several years at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, displays two standard design patterns…. Each pattern enjoyed its own heyday between approximately 65,000 and 55,000 years ago…. Researchers already knew that the Howiesons Poort culture, which engraved the eggshells, engaged in other symbolic practices, such as engraving designs into pieces of pigment, that were considered to have been crucial advances in human behavioral evolution. But the Diepkloof finds represent the first archaeological sample large enough to demonstrate that Stone Age people created design traditions, at least in their engravings.

See the article: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/stone-age-eggshells.html?print=true and another http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8544332.stm

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

Apr11

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.

Why Body Painting? – 4: Radical Act – The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Face Painting – Kids for Kids Event – Inspirations from Africa and India, including Rangoli (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Kumadori – Japanese Kabuki Theatre Makeup (thestorybehindthefaces.com)

Facepainting — Tiger Variations

Apr8

From the simplified formula of the direct mask-like transformation of a human face into a tiger face, an endless stream of variations can be generated by altering colors, styles and decorative elements without changing the basic tiger design —in which the human eyes become the tiger eyes, the nose the tiger nose, etc. (For the basic instructions, see the previous post “How to paint a tiger face”) In the working process, as I am facepainting a succession of tiger faces, I will approach each face with a stylistic change (such as “bolder lines” or “asymmetrical”) or a cultural inspiration (such as the swirling lines of Maori tattoo) and use that change in approach to create a new variation on the spot.

Tigers are the most popular request at our Bronx Zoo concession, and for some of the zoo’s special event weekends we have done entire days when all we paint are tigers, so we’re often exploring new ways to paint this iconic animal. In 2010, the zoo hosted a Run For the Wild event to raise awareness of the critical issue of declining tiger populations. Here’s the video of the faces I painted that day: