Category Archives: Transformation Theory

my philosophy of face and body painting

Ancient Derain Dancer Pt.1 -Bodypainting Concept

I’ve done  a couple of bodypaintings using the colorful lines on the body in Andre Derain’s painting “The Dance”. In the painting those lines seem as much bodyart as clothing. Derain is another early modern artist that looked to primitive art for inspiration, and I am engaged in returning that inspiration to the primitive act of bodypainting. These lines echo the lines found on ancient female figurines. The one here is from Europe, around 4,000 BC. There are similar examples from many ancient times and sites of stylized female figurines, sometimes called Venus Figures, though that name is falling away it seems because it carries too much implied meaning.

From a bodypainter’s perspective, these lines look like bodypainting – no surprise. At the exhibit that included this figure, the text accompanying such an example stated that the incised patterns on figurines may be “stylized representations of tattoos, body ornament, pieces of clothing or accessories”, and offered also the alternate idea that the lines represent funeral shrouds wrapped around the deceased.

The exhibit also included many examples of anthropomorphic pottery, most of which had painted or incised markings covering the whole form. Mostly symmetrical patterns.

The only note in the exhibit text about this was the suggestion that they may be depicting someone “wearing brightly colored clothing”. For me, this all looks like bodyart. But, Europe would probably have been cold enough that clothing textures make more sense.

One figurine seemed to add something to this question of painted bodies or painted clothing because it appeared to depict both bodyart and ornaments of clothing. The depictions of nipples and pubis indicating this stripping is on the skin, and she is wearing a belt and sash over it. But I always see bodyart. It’s what I look for.

This exhibit also had the treat of several examples of “pintaderas” – small clay stamps used for making repeatable designs on all sorts of things: textiles, ceramics and presumably the skin. The stamps themselves were also works of art, as one almost always finds in all the truly ancient objects. We surrounded ourselves with art back then. My favorite pintadera was for a spiral.

I saw the exhibit in Manhattan, it’s now on tour.  http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/exhibitions/oldeurope/

The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5000-3500 BC. First US Exhibition, November 11th 2009 - April 25th 2010

David Brooks’ advice for facepainters: Blending

In a recent Ted Talk, David Brooks tossed off Picasso as the exemplar for a quality of the mind he called “blending”—being able to take two disparate concepts and combine them into something new—referring to how Picasso revolutionized art by blending European painting with African masks. It was a reference Brooks was able to use easily, without much explanation, because it is well understood as a pivotal moment in art history, primitivism in Modern Art. The other example David Brooks used for blending was a child pretending to be tiger. Cue the facepainter.

Have I been “blending” all this time as I turn people into something other?As a facepainter am I a “blending facilitator”?

As David Brooks ticked off the five or six qualities of mind we should be cultivating in ourselves, and by implication (I think) looking for in our politicians, I did feel that being able to blend was within my range. Over the 30 odd years of transforming people I have become a pack-rat of visual inspirations for what I can paint on the next face. And I will look at peoples’ faces on the subway and imagine them painted as I work out a new idea based on current inspirations.

Taking a painting of a face by Picasso and painting it onto someone’s face is another sort of transformation than turning someone into a tiger. It feels more ironic. Their face is still a face, a human face, so I haven’t changed their identity from human being to a wild animal or such. And I feel some irony in taking the images of an artist who so famously transformed the human face into something unhuman and startling and in some measure re-humanizing these images by applying them back onto a face. Though the final effect does remain startling, judging by the typical reaction of people when you paint something like this on someone at a party.

Speaking of startling, what about hearing David Brooks pushing a humanist approach to politics, and saying that the most important element in education is that people learn from people they love?

To find David Brooks’ Ted Talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html

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From the Beginning

celebration of the animals- facepainting 1992

We were our own first works of art. That is a profound way for a facepainter to view what he does: it was here from the very beginning. Anthropologists say that we humans painted and marked ourselves before we ever began to alter the world around us.

Transforming ourselves is a fundamental human art. We take control of ourselves, we differentiate ourselves from being merely animals, when we mark ourselves. We prove that we are aware of our place in the world and that we can affect it when we transform ourselves. It is part of being human.

Face and body art is a universal art. Every culture uses makeup, body art, masks or costumes to change human appearance.  The reasons for the transformations in different cultures are as varied as the images they create. In traditional cultures, tattoo and scarification can mark an individual’s place in their society and their accomplishments. They can signify a change in status such as an initiation completed or a marriage. Face and body painting are more transient and can convey a wide range of meanings, from ritual and celebratory to the purely aesthetic. Facepainting can disguise the wearer and allow an individual to create a new identity. Theatrical makeup and masks allow a performer to become anything, even living gods that bring a mythical world to life in a physical form. In tribal rituals gods and spirits are also brought to life by masked dancers so bizarrely disguised they are unrecognizable as human. The possibilities for transformation are as limitless as the human imagination.

This is the way I approach a face when I paint it. I can do anything. The person I paint can become anything. There is an endless wealth of imagery from thousands of years of human history. There are the thousands of faces I have painted through my own history. And there is the face before me. Each face is very new and very old.

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