Tag Archives: body paint

Why Body Painting? — 1A: Collaboration — Meeting Colleagues like Carolyn Roper

Carolyn Roper is a world-class bodypainter and makeup artist. Check out her work in a TV commercial for the Irish National Lottery.
Check out her website for galleries of amazing bodies and a new video of her re-creating the Mystique makeup from X-Men for a movie promotion in the UK. http://www.getmadeup.com/
Meeting, taking classes with, and working beside an artist like Carolyn is the type of “formative experience” I was speaking of in the previous post that helps explain why I bodypaint. Her fantastic work, her professionalism and the career she has carved out for herself are an inspiration.
Carolyn also did me a very nice favor when the Kryolan company brought me to Seeboden, Austria to demonstrate for them at the 2009 World Body Painting Festival. She introduced me to two artists whose work I had long admired, Craig Tracy and Filippo Ioco, who were there as judges for the competition. Filippo’s iconic photographs placing painted bodies in scenic environments were some of the first bodyart images I saw that were undeniably within the canon of “fine art”.  http://iocobodyart.com  Craig Tracy has probably done more to elevate bodypainting as an art form in the U.S. than anyone else, including opening the first art gallery solely devoted to bodypainting http://www.craigtracy.com/ — and he is very encouraging to those of us looking to elevate our own work. The encouragement gained through interactions with other bodypainters is invaluable when you are working in an art form seen as strange or “fringe”, or maybe “emerging” (on a good day). In the U.S., where bodypainting is only now starting to enter more widely into mainstream advertising, commercial promotions and corporate events, it has been especially helpful to see and learn from people like Craig and Filippo, and the body artists from Europe like Carolyn, who have achieved a level of professional success as specialists within the larger fields of makeup artist and fine artist.
Having previously won the World Championship in the “Brush and Sponge” division in 2007, Carolyn Roper became the first artist to win a championship in two different categories when she won in the Special Effects division at that 2009 festival— and I was very happy to be there to see my friend win.
The most fun thing I have ever done in this unusual business was when I got to paint onstage alongside Carolyn and another colleague, Emma — but I’ll leave that to the next post.

Caroyln, with the assistance of Paula Southern, preparing her award winning Special Effects design. She creates her unique sculptural additions by hand

Her model, Barry Bloomfield, presenting the completed design in competition

The completed model on stage.

My favorite photo from the event, seeing Carolyn smile, standing with Paula on the side of the stage, as she watches Barry present her fantastic work of art

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Is a Painted Body Naked? — #3: Ask the Zebras

My friend Kate sent me this image she saw in Communication Arts Magazine and I think it speaks directly to the question I addressed in an earlier post regarding bodypainting and nakedness. In this foto I’d say that the woman is pretty thoroughly painted and very definitely naked. Reading perhaps too much into it, I think that dual impression is part of the intention of the artist here, for they have deliberately left the model’s pubic hair visible when it could have been hidden via the bodypainting, and that seems to me to be intended to make the viewer recognize the nakedness of the model. I can see this image as making a statement that a painted body is naked, just as a zebra is naked, no matter how thoroughly decorated it is. Even if the artist’s intentions were not that specific in regard to this question, I see this image as equating the painted model with the striped zebras, placing them both in the same state of nature/nakedness.

I also think it’s a cool photograph — how cool to have had the chance to do a photo shoot with live zebras — and I think that anyone would see this as a work of art. Although some people have trouble with nakedness in any form, having a naked human appear in a work of art is an established and accepted tradition, from the ancient Greeks and on. So much depends on context.

Check out the previous posts for more on this question:

is a painted body naked?  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/

is a painted body naked ? – Pt.2: Painting Clothing On vs. Painting on Clothing  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/18/is-a-painted-body-naked-pt-2-painting-clothing-on-vs-painting-on-clothing/

Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the Communication Arts Magazine July/August edition that this image was in, and couldn’t find out who was the bodypainter or photographer from their web site http://www.commarts.com/  , so I can’t include proper credits here. If you know who generated this image, please add that information as a comment.

http://www.agostinoarts.com