Tag Archives: christopher agostino

Body Painting Fashion Show: The Odd Ball at Real Art Ways

In April of 2009 Agostino Arts had a chance to try something new at The Odd Ball, the annual benefit party for Real Art Ways, an arts center in Hartford, CT. We brought a team of our Transformation bodypainters and a mountain of Aquacolors and got a group of their visual artists to join with us in creating a painted body fashion show.

The goal was two-fold: to create an unusual and fun performance art event for the benefit as entertainment for the guests, and to generate some excitement within the community of artists associated with Real Art Ways by giving them this opportunity to explore a new, living medium. Real Art Ways recruited the artists and volunteer models. Prior to the event I sent the artists some information about what kind of makeup we’d be bringing and the basics of how it applies, plus some blank body forms and the like that we use when designing new bodypaintings. The design process was left completely up to each individual artist. I also sent some information along for the models as to what they could expect.

We began the evening with a short workshop session to demonstrate the basic application techniques and some of the tricks of the trade, so that each artist could realize their own concept without feeling limited by any lack of previous experience. Aquacolors go on so easily that in the hands of painters it didn’t require much instruction to get them all going. Some of them had painted people before, and we had a number of our artists there to paint our own designs and help if needed. Bodypainting is fun, especially when it is being done just for its own sake like this. It is such a tactile and ephemeral process, and so collaborative between you and the model, that I think most artists experience a visceral sense of the creative act as they paint — and with a bunch of artists all together in one tight room painting away at a party it makes for a real good time. For me, it was especially exciting to see how artists used to painting on canvas and other medium brought their own style to the bodypainting.

We brought along a videographer, Ann Orrin, to document the process, and Real Art Ways had a studio photographer (Steven Laschever) shooting the finished results and a second photographer (G. Russell) also recording the process.

See the video:

or watch it on You Tube on the Agostinoarts channel at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih8LOWiX0ac.

Find Real Art Ways at http://www.realartways.org/

Real Art Ways foto gallery for 2009 Odd Ball:  .: View pictures from The Oddball 2009

Agostino Arts

Transformation Bodypainters

Christopher Agostino

Britt Lower

Laura Metzinger

Naoko Oshima

Jennifer Wade

with

Ezia Leach

Robbie Pack

Real Art Ways Artists

Joe Dinunzio

Heather Groenstein

Karen Higgins

Sam McKinniss

Victor Pacheco

Kyle Phillips

Alicia Purty

Bryan Stryeski

Jamie Wyld

See my fine art bodypainting at  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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Facepainting Event – NCAA Basketball Hoop Fest

Painting faces for a family event celebrating the NCAA Basketball Playoffs gave me a chance to do a few more face designs working with putting human figures onto the face, something I’ve been focusing on this past couple of years. Two of us were at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ on March 26, 2011. We were outside, during the day, and it was unseasonably cold – really, really cold – but they still got a good crowd and we stayed busy. The Prudential Center was hosting a playoff game the next day, so we offered everyone the chance to get a face for their favorite team – however most of the kids didn’t know any college teams. So if they didn’t want a basketball face we just asked if they’d like to be nice or spooky and surprised them.

Of the few basketball faces I got to paint, these 3 were my favorites, more for the direction I went in regarding placement on the face than for the execution. At 45 degrees or so, I was just happy my makeup didn’t freeze and had to accept that it wasn’t going on the way it might have under better conditions.

 

The Prudential Center is home to the NJ Devils, so we got some hockey fans, too.

One of our "logo" designs, which I painted on this kid early at the event to draw attention and get more kids interested in coming over.

Moon and Stars is a favorite motif of mine.

This girl asked to be "very spooky" - the Vampire Night Queen

We'll be painting a whole day of penguins soon for the Bronx Zoo, so I am looking for new variations. This one came from a foto of a few standing on the edge of an ice flow, with one looking over the edge.

The gallery on our company website talks about some of  ways we think of face designs to be able to generate variation within familiar motifs like penguins and vampires: http://www.agostinoarts.com/face.htm

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What Was He to Do? – a folktale — storytelling

a traditional tale retold by Christopher Agostino ©2011

While traveling from one town to another on business, two merchants were stranded when the bus they were on broke down. The bus driver stayed with his vehicle hoping someone would come by to help, but the men knew it was a very lonely road and thought they would walk on to the next town instead. After walking for several hours they hadn’t seen a soul, and they began to feel tired and hungry. They started looking for a good place to bed down for the night and wished they had something to eat. Then they saw a peasant with a pack on his back coming towards them from the other direction.

The two merchants stopped the peasant and asked him if he had any food to sell. All the peasant had was a cup of dried beans he was saving to cook for his breakfast. Really only enough food for one, but he probably would have shared it with the two men except that they asked if they could buy it, so what was he to do?

The peasant asked them how much money they had. The two merchants conferred, and it turned out they only had 10 centavos between them, as they didn’t carry much money when they went out into the countryside for fear of being robbed. Since they were business men dealing with a peasant they only offered 5 centavos for the beans. It wasn’t a lot of money for the peasant’s only meal, but money was money and he could always use a little more of it, so what was he to do? The peasant agreed and they made the exchange.

Since the beans were dry, the merchants needed water to soak them before cooking, and asked the peasant if knew where there was any. He told them he had passed a stream a few miles back, but the merchants were too tired to walk any further. Instead they conferred again and offered the peasant their last 5 centavos if he would go and fetch the water for them. Well, he probably would have gotten them the water anyway, but since they offered to pay him for it, what was he to do? He took their money and set off for the water.

He came back with the water and all the men had a drink, then the merchants wanted to get the beans soaking so they would be ready to cook for their breakfast in the morning. But then they realized they needed a pot in which to soak and cook the beans. Now, the peasant had just such a pot in his pack, as he often had to cook for himself as he made his way through the countryside, and he told the two merchants. With no more money in their pockets, the only thing the merchants could think of doing was offering the peasant a share of the beans in exchange for the use of his pot. So the peasant took the beans back from them and set them to soak, what was he to do?

Later, the peasant went off to get some wood for a fire. Left to talk, the two merchants decided that one cup of beans was not enough to share amongst three, so they devised a way to trick the peasant out of his share. When the peasant came back they said that since there was so little food it would really only be right if the worthiest among them was the one to get to eat. And when the peasant asked how they should decide who was so worthy the two merchants said they should let God decide. They would each go to sleep, and let God come to them in their dreams, and whoever had the holiest of dreams should be the one to eat the beans. Well, since they were two to his one, what was he to do? The peasant agreed.

It wasn’t the best of nights for the merchants sleeping on the hard ground with their stomachs rumbling from hunger, but they looked forward to the meal in the morning and trusted in their plan to fool the peasant out of his share. They woke to see the peasant already up and dressed. The two hungry merchants set about right away to tell of their dreams.

The first merchant said, “I saw the three of us standing by the side of the road when an angel came down and looked at me. He saw how worthy I was and put a silver cloak upon my shoulders, then the angel lifted me up and I rose on silver wings to be with God in heaven.”

The second merchant spoke next and said, “I saw the three of us standing by the side of the road when an angel came down and looked at me. He saw how worthy I was and put a golden cloak upon my shoulders, then the angel lifted me up and I rose on golden wings to be with God in heaven.”

Then the two merchants turned to look at the peasant, who said, “This is most remarkable. It is as if we all had the same dream. For I also dreamed that the three of us were standing by the side of the road. And I could hardly believe it when two angels came down from the sky and put a cloak on each of your shoulders. Then as I watched both of you rose right up into the sky and disappeared. God had decided you both were worthy, and there was I, left all alone by the side of the road. So I cooked the beans and ate them, what was I to do?”

I wrote this after reading “The Three Dreams” in Latin American Folktales, edited by John Bierhorst, Pantheon Press. That version is credited to Luis Arturo Hernandez Castaneda of Guatemala (but the notes don’t say whether it is from a book by him or a story he told that someone else recorded) and has the tale as two students in a city trying to outsmart an Indian, by pooling their money with his to buy some rice with the plan to trick him out of it via a dream. Two upper class people trying to trick a lower class person via a dream is a motif in folktales from various cultures, identified as motif type: “AT 1626 Dream Bread”

I retained only the basic structure for my version here, changing the characters, the setting and the sequence of events.