painted on the final day of this year's Face and Body Art International Convention, Sunday, May 27 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
painted with Kryolan Aquacolors
With the Sunday session open to the public it seemed right to do something really Pop while demonstrating Kryolan’s Aquacolors at their booth. Starry Night is so instantly recognizable that even folks unfamiliar with bodypainting would recognize it as “art” — and it is also very enjoyable (and inspiring) to spend a few hours learning from a masterpiece like this through imitation. I learn a lot while trying to copy a master, including a profound respect for just how brilliant Van Gogh’s vision was.
If you are a facepainter and you never got a chance to meet Deva, you have really missed something special. Deva Prem was one of the first people to befriend me at the FABAIC convention when I felt like a stranger in a strange land, introducing herself to me as “Glitterbug” from New York (her facepainting name), and making me feel like I belonged. I can’t imagine a more supportive and enthusiastic person about this art that we do. Our community lost a loving, shining star with the passing of Deva, one year ago this month. Her very good friend Derrick Little often organized efforts to help her deal with the financial burden of her treatments for breast cancer.
"Angel" by Derrick Little
Derrick is a remarkable artist and one of the most successful bodypainters working in New York, and in homage to his friend he has created a series of bodypaintings titled “Shield Your Heart”—and I can not imagine a more fitting tribute to beautiful Deva than this beautiful art created by her friend. His series of 12 paintings is available for purchase as postcards for just $20, with 50% of all sales going to support You Can Thrive. Please go to: http://www.shieldyourheart.org
from Derrick’s site:
“This project is as “grassroots” as it gets. I am not an organization, a non-profit, nor a corporation. I am an artist who has created and self-funded the art presented here and now I offer it as a gift to raise awareness and money for YOU CAN THRIVE, an organization that helps individuals with breast cancer to access holistic care.
My name is Derrick Little. I am a visual artist and body painter. I started this “Shield Your Heart” postcard project with photographer Liz Liguori in October 2010 when my dear friend, Deva Prem, was in treatments for her breast cancer. This project became a method for me to cope with Deva’s death from Breast Cancer on March 22, 2011. For this campaign, I created a body of work that celebrates both the inherent sexuality of the breast/chest and the fact that the breast/chest serves as a physical “shield” over every person’s heart. I’ve painted 12 traditional symbols of strength on 6 male chests and 6 women’s breasts as metaphoric “shields”. As we approach the one-year anniversary of Deva’s death, I proudly present this body of art in the form of 12 POSTCARDS, available for PURCHASE via DONATION. (With proceeds from every set sold directly benefiting You Can Thrive). I dedicate this art to Deva Prem and every person who has ever been affected by any form of cancer.”
"Knot" by Derrick Little
Derrick has made a remarkable career as a bodypainter in New York, not an easy thing to do. Check out his work: www.BodyArtbyDerrick.com
On the day of the Superbowl it seems appropriate to write about nipples. I’ve been reading a bit on the habit Facebook has of censoring body painting images, and the surmise that Facebook measures the level of offense based on the relative visibility of a female model’s nipples in the final image. One blog referred to it as “Facebook’s war against nipples”. Well, I have a relevant quote, too: “Everyone has nipples.”
One of the first discussions I had about all this was with a European body painter back in 2006 on the conflicted duality of the American cultural fascination with female breasts (in Playboy, advertising, Superbowls, etc.) versus the fear of the exposed female nipple. The subject came up because of the restrictions imposed about just how much of the model we could paint at the convention we were teaching at. The quote above is from Carolyn Roper, another European body painter, at a different convention in 2008. That convention had one of the strictest modesty requirements. Not even pasties or nipple covers were enough, the female models had to wear tube tops or bras to get painted for the classes and competitions. I’ve written before how poorly I think it works to paint over someone’s underwear, and at this convention I found it very awkward—and I’m an American, how much more so for the Europeans teaching there, like Carolyn. So she arranged to have a male model for her demonstration class to avoid the problem, and as she painted the salient portion of his chest she remarked about how everyone has nipples and so she didn’t see what all the fuss was about painting a woman’s as opposed to a man’s.
You really can’t got much more naked than this, can you?
If Ingres’s Venus, fully naked, hangs as a treasured masterpiece in a museum, if it is acceptable for an artist to paint nipples on a canvas portrait of a naked model, why should I have to hide a model’s nipples in a body painting? We already had Demi Moore‘s nipples on the cover of Vanity Fair on newsstands twenty years ago (see http://wp.me/p1sRkg-6v), so why all the fuss still today?
There was a funny sequence in the U.S. Supreme Court just recently as they adjudicated the case regarding decency standards on prime time TV when the question turned towards the offensive nature of a bare buttocks being seen (from the side) in an episode of NYPD Blue some years ago and the lawyer arguing against that interpretation pointed out that the US Supreme Court building was full of classic art images that included bare butts, many bare butts. Looking back at the most famous “nipple slip”, Janet Jackson’s at the Superbowl, which is also a topic of the larger case the Supreme Court is considering, it’s hard to decide which part of that half time show all about sex was the most offensive. I’m pretty prudish, or, rather, I have real trouble with what I perceive as sexism and the objectification of women, so the part that troubled me most was when the dancers dressed as cheerleaders chose to “take off all their clothes” because “it’s getting hot in here.” Janet’s breast was anticlimactic after that. You can review the show and form your own opinion: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x45h8i_super-bowl-xxxviii-halftime-show-fu_music
I believe that we each should have the freedom to control how we use or decorate our own bodies. And in regard to the freedom to display our bodies, I go along the lines of the way it’s handled on New York State beaches: “nude but not lewd”. In New York State a women can go topless any where that a man can, otherwise it is considered sexual discrimination. Just to know that this is the law is a good thing. It’s not overly taken advantage of. There is topless sunbathing sometimes on some NY beaches, even fully naked men and women on some, but that tends to be in generally understood areas of certain beaches (“nude but not lewd” is said to be the New York State Parks guideline on that.) I have thought that the more that American women are given the opportunity to be topless (at the beach, for example) the less power there will be in the cultural insistence on women’s breasts as indecent sex objects (and it is that implication of indecency that bothers me, not the sexuality.), but I am less certain of that than I was. Occasionally you’ll see a topless woman on a NY city street, usually for a political cause, like the topless women holding signs at the start of Occupy Wall Street that pundits used to ridicule the nascent movement and which John Stewart made fun of (he didn’t show them naked on TV, because even though he’s on a cable channel without any relevant FCC restrictions about that it’s just not done in the U.S. for fear of public outrage—but my local Comedy Central channel airs ads for a strip club just about every night during his show.)
Regarding the public acceptance of nudity in body painting, the best advocate for that acceptance is to expose the public to beautifully painted bodies, male and female in all shapes and sizes. Significantly, I think, there will be a step in the right direction at this year’s Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC http://www.fabaic.com/) in Fort Lauderdale as they have invited the general public to attend the body painting competition for the first time, on May 27 (2012). That’s gotta be a good thing and I am looking forward to being there—though I expect nipple covers will still be required for the female models, we are not in Austria yet.
Painting at the World Bodypainting Festival
The Horned Goddess, topless rock art from before 2000 BC, about as old as a painting can get….
Yet when I painted her onto a model’s face for my book, I felt compelled to remove the breasts so as not to offend anyone. Silly, right?
As I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that all I got out of that class with World-Champion body painter Carolyn Roper in 2008 was a better understanding of nipples, from my notes on that class here is one great insight into painting technique and a pro hint about caring for your model:
1- All water based makeup colors sink in to the color beneath, so every color you paint on top of another will pick up a tint from the underlying color. It is especially true of white going on top of colors. So plan for this in how you lay down your background colors, and leave extra time to go over white highlights again at the end of the painting.
2- Keep the model’s butt, hands and mouth clear until the last stages of the painting, so they can sit, eat, drink and hold things as needed during the long hours you are working together.
