Tag Archives: FABAIC

NY Makeup Show Body Painting – Animal Body – Pt.1 animal silhouettes

From my book "Transformations! The Story Behind the Painted Faces"

by Christopher Agostino

How to use Animal Silhouttes for Face & Body Painting

photograph by Rich Johnson

At the New York Makeup Show this weekend I’ll be painting a body as a demonstration for Kryolan Professional Makeup. With the opportunity of full day for the painting and an excellent model to paint I’ve decided to re-visit a design I’ve never yet quite realized as intended, the “Animal Body”.  In 2006, I painted the design above for my book as a reference image for the pages about using silhouettes —  really more of a cheat sheet than a body design. At the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) a few weeks later I tried wrapping the animals around the body when an unexpected opportunity to paint a model came up — a more effective design, but we didn’t have enough time to complete it. I did get some nice foots of the torso, including one from Rich Johnson we’ve used as a logo image. Since then, I’ve done pieces  of it and some variations, and for the Makeup Show I’ve got a plan for the full body.

http://www.themakeupshow.com/makeupshow/NY/index.html

www.kryolan.com    http://www.fabaic.com/

Where does an idea come from? I’d done a parade of realistic animals on someone at the St. Francis Day Fair to capture the march of the animals into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan for the annual blessing of the animals.

I also used them in black silhouettes on the side of a bowl I made to commemorate my wedding with Lorraine in 1991. Later they walked around Lorraine’s belly to celebrate the coming birth of our son. Putting the animal silhouettes against a sunset came afterwards.   I’d seen a wonderful painted face with a black pterodactyl against a red sky, sent to me on a greeting card from England, and also an image of shadowy giraffes in an African sunset. So my animal parade became silhouettes against the sunset , the first time I painted it was on myself in the foto from 1992 that’s in the banner at the top of this webpage.

For a facepainter, these simplified pictures, or icons, can be used to add an animal to a scenic design. You can find source images in pictographs, pottery and painted decorations on all sorts of traditional art objects —or you can invent your own icons.

Click here for a pdf cheat sheet of animal pictographs:  AnimalSilhouettes_facepainting_agostinoarts

To simplify an animal down to an iconic symbol, use a design incorporating or exaggerating a significant feature of the animal or use a silhouette of the full animal’s shape. Most animals can be recognized by their shape: for example, a snake can be drawn as a simple S-curve line with a forked tongue, and pretty much any four legged animal shape with a long neck reads as a giraffe.

You can paint the shape of an animal in one solid color. It’s an easier, faster and often more effective way to represent an animal for a face design than a full-color, detailed approach. Most often I place animal silhouettes in black against a brightly colored background, but you can also use white animals on dark backgrounds (like dolphins in a blue ocean) or make your animal shapes in colors (like sky blue geese flying across a sunset). The body at the top of this post, the “Iconography Body” done for my book, was intended to show many of these ways I’ve been using for silhouettes on faces.

Once you can paint the silhouette you can add selected details to emphasize the significant features of an animal (like the teeth of a dinosaur), or add elements for more purely decorative effects (like putting yellow spots on a black gecko). Remember that an image doesn’t need to be realistic to communicate meaning,  you can adjust it or distort it to better fit the features and make a better design.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

From FABAIC 2006. Bodies painted by (from left to right) Nathalie Simrad, Raphaelle Fieldhouse, me and Jinny.

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The Nuba Bird Dance at Bodies Alive! – Nao Dance Collective

The Nuba Bird Dance, performed by the Nao Dance Collective as part of our Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) in Orlando, 2008 — in black and white bodypaint designs based on the analytical sketches of James C. Faris in his book "Nuba Personal Art"

by Christopher Agostino

The underlying creative intention behind Bodies Alive! was to explore how movement and performance can bring bodyart to life, so we sought to create a modern dance piece inspired by bodypainting. In any previous opportunities I’d had to bodypaint dancers for performance my task was to create designs to support an existing theme and concept. For this dance the makeup design came first.

Nao Dance Collective  http://www.naodance.com/  is a structured improvisational company under the direction of Linda Eve Elchak — just the kind of group we were looking for to create a brand new piece for a single performance. We discussed the project and I sent the music, sketches for the bodypainting and some insight about the functional effect of this type of tribal bodyart: that the use of hard-edged  geometric designs is intended to break the human form and destroy recognizable individual identity, and thereby create a new unified tribal identity. I suggested the dancers could take advantage of this visual confusion by contrasting movement as a group with movement as individuals. From that, they created the piece. It was thrilling for me to see what these elements had led to in the rehearsal before the Orlando show. We didn’t paint them for the rehearsal, so they had some concerns about what performing in bodypaint would be like, particularly if they had to be careful not to smudge it by touching each other — and I reassured them that I wanted the paint to be alive, to change and to smear and to transfer from one dancer to another as it would in a tribal dance.

The dancers were painted by a group of experienced bodypainters following my designs (see their foto below, and the video of the bodypainting room). Bodies Alive! required the participation of dozens of models and performers, along with teams of designers, painters and assistants — a resource we might only have found at an event like the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) http://www.fabaic.com/ , celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year, and I will be there again.

Putting the music together for this piece involved some serendipity. Although I wanted something tribal, I was taking these body designs so far out of their original context that I didn’t want anything directly connected to the Nuba or African culture. The chant is listed as “Kecak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant  from Bali” on a cd of Indonesia music from Nonesuch Records‘ Explorer Series  http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/explorer-series-indonesia Once you hear it, it stays with you. I had it stuck in my head for this, but didn’t think it was enough to build the dance around and was looking for alternatives when I heard “Surfer Bird” by The Trashman on Bob Dylan’s radio show. The pieces fit, the rhythm was right and there is that iconic Nuba face design of the ostrich over the eye to seal the deal.

See the previous post, and search “Nuba” on this site for more information.

Nuba Bird Dance Painters: Paola Paredes-Shenk, Leah Reddell, Kerry Ann Smith, Diane and Theresa Spadola, Pam Trent, Jeff Edney, Deidre MacDonald

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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Is a painted body naked?

by Christopher Agostino

Is bodypainting just a way to get naked women out in public? I saw the promotional film for a documentary in the works that’s about bodypainting as a fine art, and in it an artist takes real umbrage when the filmmaker asks him if bodypainting exploits women. Although I sympathize with the artist’s annoyance with the question, since we work in a field that is too often represented by disturbing images from Key West showing up in your emails, or lots of naked painted people on bicycles, I can understand why an interviewer would ask it. In a group discussion a few years back with the genius behind Pro-shields (designed to protect the innocent by thoroughly covering nipples on female models to be bodypainted) the question turned to why such trivial items as whether the outline of a nipple is visible or not under the paint can determine whether people find bodypainting offensive or not. I heard a phrase often repeated that in body art the painting is what is meant to be looked at, not the body, and that folks that are just seeing (or voyeuristically enjoying) the nakedness of the body are missing the art. Speaking as a bodypainter who puts painted people (male and female) into the public view, I think this is disingenuous and it puts too much of the burden on the viewer when it is us, the body artists, who choose to present this as our art. Bodypainting is certainly not clothing, and therefore does not objectively remove or cover the nakedness of the model, however much it transforms their identity (and I do feel that a well painted body looks more fully clothed than, say, a women in bikini at the beach). Clothing protects the body and it changes and disguises the shape of the body. Bodypaint celebrates the body, specifically it celebrates the beautiful form of the human body — or we would be painting on flat canvas instead. So when someone looks at the model we have painted they should be seeing the model, the body, as well as the art.

Painted at the Face and Body Art International Convention, 2009, on a beautiful model.

The idealized human form in Greek and Roman art — naked.

In Western Culture the veneration of the human form is exemplified by the prevalence of the naked body in art and painting, which goes back to the Classical Greek conception of the naked human form as being the symbolic representation of the perfection of Nature. Athletes, we are told, competed naked in the ancient Olympics. In fact, as the influence of the Classical Greek culture spread, body arts declined in Western Cultures because the marking of the body was seen as a disfigurement of the perfect form of the naked body. Perhaps it is a sign of our continuing cultural progression that bodypainting has begun to enter the main stream of public perception again, for this is an art form that reaches beyond the Greeks. The return of body art into Western/European Culture is a world-inspired expansion of our understanding of art.

The tradition of celebrating the human body continues in Western art

The underlying reasons for traditional body art — meaning the use of bodypainting, tattooing and scarification in traditional cultures — are in its social and ritualistic functions. As cultures evolve over time, these ritualistic functions gain aesthetic values as well, they become art. In “Primitive Art”, Franz Boas writes about how, once the symbolic requirements of the mask (or bodyart) are achieved, the mask maker’s goal is to make the object beautiful  — the “artfulness” is always important.  When we look at cultural examples in which body art has progressed past ritual to the point where it is done for more purely aesthetic reasons, when it has become a “fashion”, at the foundation of those acts is a desire to celebrate the innate beauty of the human form. Through art, to pay homage to what God (or Nature) has made when he made man. This is the cultural explanation for what is perhaps the most profound use of body art that can be sited: the body painting of the Southeast Nuba culture of Sudan, a tribal culture in which individuals turned themselves daily into living, painted works of art as a veneration of the wonder of creation, demonstrated in the perfection of the human form. This was done when the individual was in their youth, their prime, their bodies in peak form. The older or the infirm did not paint themselves. 

“Whatever the source of the designs used on the body, the critical factor is that the body must be emphasized, complimented, enhanced. No design or artistic treatment must distract from the presentation of the physical form itself  the chief reason, after all, for the personal art rests in the proper cultural exposure and celebration of the healthy body.” — James Farris, Nuba Personal Art

I compare this to our modern body artists, and suggest we should own up to it. If we are not celebrating the beauty of the human form when we paint bodies, why do we predominantly paint ideally shaped models, female or male?

This is not an exploitation of models, women or men. No more than Alfred Steiglitz was exploiting Georgia O’Keeffe in his photographs. This is a celebration. This is art. This is art painted on naked people, and there is nothing wrong in that, because people are beautiful whether they are naked or not.

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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

follow me for the face of the day:  https://twitter.com/#!/storyfaces

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