Tag Archives: christopher agostino

Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts – PIFA – Saturday

A bunch of us are heading to Philly to paint and perform this Saturday for the PIFA street fair produced by The Kimmel Center. From their website:

“Broad Street transforms into a slice of Paris, with street vendors, café tables, a grass-laden park, live music on two Festival stages, and a giant Ferris Wheel. Don’t miss the thrilling climax, as world-renowned French theatrical troupe La Compagnie Transe Express performs 100 feet in the air!”

http://www.kimmelcenter.org/events/pifastreetfair.php

I will be performing my storytelling show street theater style at 11:30 am and 3:00 pm, at the Amphitheater.

Two shows will mean two different sets of stories.

We also have a team of artists there painting faces. The theme of the whole event is Paris 1910-1920, so our artists will be painting faces inspired by artists associated with Paris of that era — Impressionists, Fauvists, early Modern Artists — and other French themed imagery. The participants will be asked to sit down and be turned into a work of art — no requests, every face a surprise. Even though there is nothing that excites me as much as performing, I’m a bit envious that I won’t get to do the painting, it’s just the kind of painting I love to do.

To support my artists in their own explorations of the theme I collected images of artwork from the era and asked them to find additional examples. I also have a lot of examples of faces I’ve painted that fit because I’ve been incorporating modern art into my facepainting since I painted for a Picasso exhibit at the Nassau County Museum of Art in 2006.

 

One of the faces I painted at the Picasso exhibit in the Nassau County Museum of Art, that started me on an exploration of modern art on faces.

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Ancient Origins – Chauvet Lions Watching

© 2004 Christopher Agostino “Chauvet Lions Watching”

“Before we ever painted on a cave wall we painted on ourselves.”

It’s a line I’ve used ever since the book The Painted Body  by Michel Thévoz (1984) introduced me to the idea that painting ourselves was the first human art. He states that it is the fundamental human art: “…there is no body but the painted body, and no painting but body painting.”

In my desire to reach back to that initial impulse to paint ourselves, I collect images of cave wall paintings and other ancient art. Cave paintings bring animals to life in naturalistic and stylized imagery that use the outcroppings and shapes of the rock walls, in much the same way body artists use the contours of the human form. Much of this prehistoric art depicts human/animal transformations associated with what scholars think may be the shamanist beliefs of early human cultures.

In The Mind in the Cave (2002), David Lewis-Williams  presents a timeline of the development of ancient art and culture. Whereas cave paintings go back 30,000+ years and the earliest “object of art” yet discovered is from 77,000 years ago, there is evidence of pigment processing from much earlier, possibly as far back as 250,000 years ago. That reaches back to the very beginnings of human culture on the plains of Africa, before the modern human race began to spread into the rest of the world. Pigments like those ochre earths are still used as traditional body paints.

When the Paleolithic paintings in the Chauvet Cave were discovered in 1994 they revolutionized our perception of prehistoric art. Before then, cave paintings were dated based on a study of style: the simpler the art the earlier it must be from. Modern scientific dating techniques show that some of the Chauvet  paintings are from 32,000 years ago, the earliest pictorial art we’ve ever discovered. Yet they are rendered with subtle shading, employ complex pigment processing, and varied illustrative techniques including using multiple images to depict movement (in almost a cubist fashion). Some have such a developed naturalistic style that they look like they could walk off the cave wall today.

I did this bodypainting called “Chauvet Lions Watching” in 2004, with images from European cave paintings that are 10,000 to 32,000 years old. I could call it my first fine art bodypainting — though I had painted full bodies before this, those were usually on assignments for clients, experiments with technique or imitations of other bodyart I’d seen. I think this was the first time I ever approached a body as a canvas to express and explore a strong concept I was trying to understand, with the specific goal of creating a single photograph that might be seen as a work of art.

The Chauvet Lions are watching from the lower right hand corner and, remarkably, they are the oldest image here.

Check out the related post:  Werner Herzog – he likes the lions, too.      http://wp.me/p1sRkg-6O   4/22/11

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Easter Bunny Breakfast in the Year of the Rabbit

a new idea for today's Breakfast with the Easter Bunny

A couple of us painted at the annual Breakfast with the Easter Bunny at Macy’s Herald Square store this morning. Here’s a few bunny faces from that, and from a Chinese New Year’s event I painted at back in January celebrating the Year of the Rabbit.

basic bunny

a design based on a specific Chinese Opera face, which had that very cute bunny design on the mouth

a hawk, I guess in case there are too many bunnies