40 Years of #FunOnFaces

My Anniversary Gallery of 2016

Christopher Agostino     updated 1/12/17 

2016 was my 40th year of painting faces, from a start as an apprentice with a theatre company painting volunteers as clowns for a bi-centennial parade in 1976, and it’s taken that long for me to begin to figure out how to really have some #funonfaces by incorporating cartooning and pictures of people on their own faces. The recent cartoon explorations have been driven by my need to add comedy to my StoryFaces performances (see  The Amazing Face Video ), and also to develop new design tools for creating theme-specific faces, which we do to keep the facepainting an adventure while giving clients a reason to hire us for interesting events (see galleries: Science On Your Face and Winter Olympics ). Here’s 2016 in faces, starting with a group of some of the more playful, #funonfaces ones, plus groups of new StoryFaces images, continuing explorations of  Art On Your Face and other types of faces. Fotos first, at the bottom some more text.

Learn more about StoryFaces and all we do at: agostinoarts.com

 

Faces from StoryFaces performances 2016:

Art On Your Face and other themes 2016:

This year included more fun on faces than usual, as I experiment with cartooning to make faces people can play with at events, and to animate faces in my StoryFaces shows. We surprise people with what we paint on them at events, usually just asking the participant if they want to be “nice or spooky” and then surprising them. To accommodate these kind of faces we are offering a new, third option of becoming funny-looking, and then put a cartoon of them on their face. We also had a few Art On Your Face events this year, including painting faces for a Red Grooms exhibit at the Hudson River Museum and at the Sculpture Center’s LIC Block Party, plus a number of circus themed promotional events.

The animation of the face designs is entering my new StoryFaces pieces also, both in the faces I paint on stage and in the performance style. I started the year working on “Monkey King, Yo!” for performance at the StoryCrossroads festival in Utah, and ended the year premiering a new story called “The Storyteller and the Magic Fish” in which I paint a picture of myself onto an audience volunteer.

Special thanks to the participant/victim who let me use his face for the general amusement of the crowd at First Night Morristown, to create the Happy New Year “FaceCard” ™ at our final gig of the year for the gallery’s final image.

See also galleries by theme:   Christopher’s Faces Gallery;   Christopher’s BodyPainting Gallery;  Art On Your Face — Gallery;  The Amazing Face GalleryDia De Los Muertos ; Science On Your Face ; Halloween 2015 ; Christmas in New York ;  Winter Olympics 2014

Learn more about StoryFaces and all we do at: agostinoarts.com

 

 

The Amazing Face Gallery

You are amazing — and so is your face.

You can be anything — and so can your face.

AmazingFaceShow_balloonLogo_video

see The Amazing Face Video on YouTube

My explorations of this “face on a face” imagery came as we started incorporating cartooning techniques into the faces we paint at events — particularly for clients for which it was helpful to be able to put characters and action scenes on faces (see  Knicks,   Citibank’s Winter Olympics event  The World Science Festival galleries). For the Summit Wellness Fair, for example, I would ask a kid questions about what they like to do, or want to be, and then put them into a picture of that activity on their face. Eventually I used the technique to tell this story about how I learned to facepaint, which I present as part of my StoryFaces performances and in arts-in-education workshops. Given that the idea of putting a face onto someone’s mouth is not a new one in facepainting (I have a traditional Chinese Opera design which uses this trick for a frog face that I’ve been imitating for years), I’m kinda annoyed with myself that it took me this long to start having so much fun with it.

These are some examples of the Amazing Faces I’ve painted.

Learn about all we do at:  agostinoarts.com

Learn about The Amazing Face Show