Tag Archives: Christopher Agostino’s Transformations

From a Mask to a Painted Face — Face Painting from Cultural Sources

Geo Magazine, 1980, contained a few dozen photographs of Chinese Opera faces

Painted in 1983. In addition to learning to blend from copying a design like this, these Chinese Opera faces gave me an understanding that facepainting can be a true art, truly transformational, and not just a decorative art.

By Christopher Agostino

Taking a mask image from a cultural source and painting it onto a face is a primary methodology I use for expanding my understanding of what is possible on a painted face. My first steps in that direction were 30 years ago with Chinese Opera faces I saw in an issue of Geo magazine. When I start with images like these that are already makeup designs and re-create them on a face the lessons I am learning are primarily about finding new ways to fit designs to the structure of a face, a new range of imagery, and exploring different application techniques — for example, it was as I tried to imitate the way the red over the eyes fades into the white on the check in this Chinese Opera image that I first learned how to blend — and from Chinese Opera designs I moved onto similar explorations with other cultural sources of painted faces such as those from the Amazon and Papua New Guinea.

Paul Kirk's book "Man as Art" is an inspirational and definitive statement about he remarkable possibilities of bodyart in world cultures.

One of the earliest truly tribal designs I painted on a person (an adult) in a regular party setting - at a corporate family picnic in 1996

A different process is required — and different lessons learned — when the traditional image I start from is a physical mask rather than face or bodyart. Re-creating a physical/sculptural mask as a facepainting brings different challenges because you have to somehow transfer onto the organic shape of a human face the plastic form of the mask, such as the exaggerated geometric shapes on certain African masks, or the extended beak of a wooden Haida thunderbird mask. Here are lessons to be learned about how to place hard shapes on a softly curved face, and to create illusions that seem to alter the structure of the face. I think that the most useful lesson I’ve gleaned from trying to re-create a sculptural mask design, however, is in learning how to boil a mask down to its essence. Since I can’t really duplicate the full mask on a face, what can I achieve with facepainting that has the same impact as the physical mask?

“Spirit masks” is a somewhat generic descriptive term applied to masks from a variety of African cultures worn to bring supernatural spirits to life in traditional rituals. Such masks are intentionally bizarre in appearance with the features of faces and animals distorted into geometric shapes and graphic patterns. Since I can’t make eyes that are cylinders sticking 8″ off the face using just makeup, I’ve had to translate that idea into what I can do, so I’ve focused on using strong geometric linework to make the face startling. As I’m about to start a design like this on a kid I may ask them if it’s ok for me to make them look really, really strange — and usually get an enthusiastic “yes”.

An early attempt at a Spirit Mask, from the event at the Bronx Zoo in 1999

Another early attempt at a Spirit Mask

I have found the complexity of the masks of Native American Northwest Coast (NWC) cultures the most challenging to re-create. Part of the struggle is due to the intricacy of the symbolic imagery on the masks. Whereas masks like the African “Spirit Masks” primarily employ geometric signs and patterns to carry symbolic content — patterns which be simplified and imitated to have the same visual affect even if they don’t have the precise cultural content — NWC masks employ recognizable and pictorial animal imagery much more difficult to duplicate simply.  A traditional NWC mask-maker learns very specific forms to symbolize the mythic characters they depict — such as the precise shape the eye must be for Kwikwis, the eagle of the undersea in the Kwakiutl culture. As Franz Boas states in his book Primitive Art, once the proper symbols are included the artist’s concern becomes the unity and aesthetic achievement of the overall design, and they do it with a remarkable finesse of design style, beautifully fitting the complex imagery onto the shapes of the mask. Like African masks, and the masks of so many cultures, the NWC wooden transformation masks are sculptures worthy of the museums where they sit in cases and hang on walls, but their true raison d’être is just the same as the “Spirit Masks” — to be worn in performance at rituals to bring the gods and myths to life.

I had quite a number of examples available of faces painted at events for the article in my book on African “Spirit Masks”. We spent the summer of 1999 at the Bronx Zoo painting faces inspired by traditional African art for the opening of the Congo Gorilla exhibit, and this style of design has been part of my usual bag of tricks ever since. For the article on Northwest Coast masks, however, I had few examples from faces at events, and none that were successful, so I painted a model in my studio for this one. There is a fundamental cosmology the underlies much of NWC mask culture, and it includes the concept that there was an earlier time in which celestial beings lived on earth and then departed to live in the heavens. These celestial/ancestral beings can return to earth in the guise of humans, and they are depicted in these masks both in their celestial form and in their human form, which is dramatically demonstrated in ritual performances in which these wooden transformation masks will open and alter their shape through ingenious devices to show first the ancestral being and then the inner human. In the NWC coast example for my book, I relied on the humanity of my model (as we facepainters do) and her eyes to exemplify this concept of transformation, from celestial eagle to the eagle in human form.

The Eagle in celestial form, inspired by Northwest Coast Indian culture transformation mask

The Eagle in Human Form

From the Nuxalk culture of the Pacific Northwest, the closed image depicts a celestial bird figure of some sort.

When the mask opens during the ritual performance, revealed inside is the figure in human form (notice how the beak for example is now depicted more like a human nose), and the humanized bird-face is surrounded by a sun-like orb indicting its celestial nature.

Edward Malin's book "A World of Faces: Masks of the Northwest Coast "includes very useful simplified analytical sketches of the traditional mask elements

An early Spirit Mask attempt in which I used this geometric approach to create a specific animal, a baboon face

More recently I have been making Spirit Masks that are more deliberately spooky, and not just strange

The first third of my book, Transformations! The Story Behind the Painted Faces, chronicles my investigation of cultural sources of face and body art, and how I have incorporated those discoveries into my work.

To learn more go to: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/books/

To learn more about our programs and performances:  http://www.agostinoarts.com

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Li Chi Slays the Dragon — LIVE at PIFA — storytelling

Li Chi Slays the Dragon — a Transformation Tale by Christopher Agostino, from an ancient legend of China

One of my favorite tales, Li Chi Slays the Dragon, from a performance on April 30, 2011 at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts street fair, presented by The Kimmel Center. It was a truly beautiful day, the first one after some rainy ones, so the street was packed and a crowd formed instantly as I started up. I painted a couple of people to demonstrate the transformation story-faces concept and to focus the crowd, and then picked a volunteer and launched right in.

The tale of the brave maiden Li Chi who volunteers to be sacrificed to the dragon in order to kill it is an especially fun one to tell. My source is a brief folktale nearly 2,000 years old, written by Gan Bao (or Kan Pao), found in the book “Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies” edited by Moss Roberts, 1979, Pantheon Books. Like most of the stories I perform, it has been gradually re-written through the course of presenting it to modern audiences — though the heroine Li Chi’s chiding of the previous girls sent to the dragon for not taking care of him themselves, that comes right from the original version. 2,000 year old advice: take care of business or you might get eaten.

The source image for my depiction of Li Chi, the female hero from a Peking Opera production

Hero Tales like this are the original motivational speeches, encouraging all of us to take care of business, and this is why they survive (in addition to the pure fun of telling them). I made Li Chi Slays the Dragon a centerpiece of a special show I designed this summer about why we tell stories, for a series of performances at libraries to fit the Summer Reading Club theme of “One World, Many Stories”. Kids need to hear Hero Tales, to know they can defeat a dragon if need be even though they are kids. I especially like to share tales like this one in which the hero is young, or small, or misfit, with no superpowers, fairy godmothers or magic swords (just the faithful family dog.)

Sketch for Li Chi and her faithful dog as a bodypainting design for the back of the performer portraying Li Chi in the Bodies Alive! production.

The tale and the telling of it has also been a source of inspiration for face and body painting designs exploring the Chinese Opera imagery of the female hero and of dragons, particularly as I expanded the visuals from one face to full bodypaintings on a group of performers to create the mountains and the full dragon as well as several changing images of Li Chi for the Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention in 2008. http://www.fabaic.com/

See my “Shows” page with the tab at the top of the post for more information on my Transformation — Storytelling shows

In addition to my performing at PIFA, we also had a team of facepainters there. To see the faces:  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/05/03/facepainting-event-modern-art-faces-in-philly-pt-1-britt/

and https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/05/04/facepainting-event-modern-art-faces-in-philly-pt-2/

to learn about that event: http://www.kimmelcenter.org/events/pifastreetfair.php

Li Chi's figure as a face design

From Bodies Alive!, with Li Chi, as a painted hand-puppet, approaching the temple on the top of the mountain

Prior to the Bodies Alive! production I worked out some of the designs and did color tests on people's faces at our events. I've always preferred doing such explorations for new designs on actual faces and bodies at our regular events, as well as sketching them out in advance.

One of the sources of inspiration for the dragon face. This image came from a book brought back from China by one of our artists, with dozens and dozens of face designs from the Chinese Opera.

The cast of the Bodies Alive! full body production, from 2008 at the Face and Body Art International Convention in Orlando.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

To learn more about Transformations Storytelling Shows see: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/storytelling-show/

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“Facepainting” or “Face Painting”? The Medium is the Message

by Christopher Agostino

“Facepainting” or “face painting”?  “Bodypainting” or “body painting”? I tend towards the former term in both cases, making it one word rather than two — to the consistent consternation of spell check and search engines — because I believe that within this field what we paint on is as intrinsically important as the act of painting. Without the body there is no bodypainting, so, truly, the medium is the message. It is the face, the body, that gives the painting its value, its reason for being.

If the face is removed from the facepainting the result changes. I got to thinking about this as we began to use a new Dega-inspired promotional postcard design in which the art is more apparent than the face, so at first glance most people see it as just a painting, rather than as a facepainting (despite the text indicating otherwise).

Each year or so I select a new photo for our postcards, emblematic of our current creative explorations. We’ve been focusing on taking inspiration from Modern Art recently, so I looked for one of those images for the postcard. I painted this face at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY   http://www.hrm.org/  , where we appear regularly. To suit the venue I was spending the day re-creating famous paintings on museum visitors, surprising each with my choices. The Degas image was painted on one of the museum’s volunteers. Two of their volunteers came to get painted when there was a lull in the line, and I took my time to work more subtly towards the painterly quality of the originals, and not just a copy of the image, as I made one into a Monet waterlily painting and the other into these ballerinas. In working with real paintings as inspiration for face and bodypaintings, my artists and I have all noticed that trying to capture the way a true master works the surface of the canvas is the real challenge (building up layers of color, working with the texture of the paint, etc.), and it’s something I may try to do when taking hours to paint a model in a studio, but not usually while facepainting with a line at a gig.

At the event, on their faces, the finished waterlilies face looked better than the ballerinas, and when I decided I wanted a modern art face image for the newest postcard I remembered that facepainting and thought I’d use the photo I took that day. But, cropped to postcard size, with the face less apparent, it didn’t work as well. It lost its identity as a copy of a recognizable painting, and looked more decorative, less transformational. It is something we have noticed when painting these modern art faces at events: they don’t always look like facepaintings in the same way that turning someone into a tiger will, they don’t always look like a face transformed. And they don’t always photograph as well as they look live, for I had a number of faces I had remembered painting that I thought might work for the postcard but didn’t, when cropped, because they lost their identity as a face.

Conversely, this Degas image worked for me as a postcard, I think, because it does function more as a painting than as a painted face, especially in a close crop like this. Looking at the finished face when I painted it, I felt the Degas painting job was ok enough, but that the image as I placed it didn’t take the best advantage of the curves of her face so it only looked good straight on, which limits the attractiveness of a face design — so the same quality that made me disappointed in this face seen live at the event makes me like it seen flat on 5,000 postcards.

A painted body, a painted face, viewed live is a very different art form than that same painted body in a photograph. They are two distinct works of art, and they carry very different intrinsic values, they function by very different aesthetic rules. In viewing them, the observer brings a very different context to what they are seeing, and so much of the value we accrue to an object depends on context, especially perhaps to objects of art. My understanding of this was enhanced by a recent Ted Talk by psychologist Paul Bloom about how our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, as in why a watch owned by our deceased grandparent is irreplaceable in our mind even though there might be many other watches available of the very same type. Part of his illustration of this was the story of a Vermeer painting, “The Supper at Emmaus”, which, based on its aesthetic quality, was revered as one of his greatest accomplishments and worth millions, until it was revealed to have been painted in 1936 by the master forger Han van Meegeren and not even the copy of a real Vermeer, at which point it lost all of its value. Very much the case of “the story behind the painting”.     http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure.html

So for me it is “facepainting” and “bodypainting”, especially when viewed live on the person that is painted, for the living person carries that intrinsic value that gives the painting meaning. They are the story behind the face. Seeing the painted face looking back at you, talking to you — seeing the painted body move, change. On a postcard, in a photograph, maybe then it is a “face painting” or a “body painting”, but viewed alive the person can not be separated from the art.

The Monet waterlilies face, which looked very nice on this young lady as she walked around the museum, but didn’t work as well as a foto cropped for the postcard.
Usually I prefer photos with the subject’s eyes open — I refer to them as canvases with eyes — but in this case it worked better for me when it was more like a painting, with the eyes closed, and less like a face.
Another Monet inspired face from the same day, and probably my favorite face of the that day’s painting, because I painted it very quickly but still managed to get the Monet-esque colors right, but cropped tight the image was not something that most people would recognize.
This was another favorite from that day’s painting. An image inspired by a Paul Klee painting. He’s an artist whose work relates very directly to face and body art — but, again, no one would recognize this as inspired by a famous artist, in the way people might recognize Degas’ ballerinas or Monet’s waterlilies.
This postcard from a couple of years ago was the first one in which I chose an image that specifically said “art on faces”, with a painting inspired by a Picasso cubist portrait in combination with a Nuba inspired tribal image. I don’t think I have ever painted a better face design than this one.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

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