Tag Archives: facepaint

Face Painting: 14 Lion Faces — Run For the Lions at the Bronx Zoo

The Lion's Roar

Saturday morning — early — we had a team of artists at the Bronx Zoo painting the runners and supporters for this spring’s Run For The Wild event. There were 6,000 participants, running to support Wildlife Conservation Society efforts. At the event, they announced that over the past few decades the number of lions in the wind have declined by 80%, and even these most iconic of all the big cats are in danger of disappearing from the wild. Please go to Run For The Wild to see what you can do.

All we painted on people were lion faces. Even so, our goal is to be creative and make every face unique. We had a couple of trainees along on the event, and the advice I gave them to encourage freedom in their approach to their face designs was: “we are not trying to make people into lions, we are painting onto them a lion mask. So we are not trying to make the lion realistic, we are creating a work of art that captures the essence of the lion, that feels like a lion, that makes the viewer think ‘lion'”. Facepainting is an art, so nature is not meant to be imitated or reproduced—it is meant to be re-created through the vision of the artist.

The Lion gets Loose

[caption id=”attachment_2448″ align=”alignleft” width=”193″ caption=”Lion Growl  Continue reading →

Hands through Time — Reaching Out for Help: the Meakambut People of Papua New Guinea

“We, the Meakambut people, will give up hunting and always moving and living in the mountain caves if the government will give us a health clinic and a school, and two shovels and two axes so we can build homes.”

Those are the closing words of a poignant article in the February 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine: “Last of the Cave People” by Mark Jenkins. An NGM team had gone up into the mountains of Papua New Guinea to report on one of the last nomadic cave-dwelling people in the world and found the remnants of a people barely surviving. Sickness, hunger, the sparsity of animals to hunt, infant mortality and an understanding that there might not be a future for them led John Aiyo, one of their leaders, to give this message to the NGM reporter to bring out of the forest and relay to the government.

The article is accompanied by beautiful photographs (which I am not allowed to use here) of a jungle we might easily mistake for paradise. One of the photographs was of hand stencils in a cave painting—the ubiquitous image of hands on cave walls, found throughout the world and throughout time. There is also a photograph of one of the tribesmen painted up, walking through the jungle. This surprised me, because books (see Books Page) such as Man as Art by Malcolm  Kirk and Tribes by Art Wolfe report that the people of Papua New Guinea only paint themselves for festivals—today, most of which are at least in part tourist exhibitions. The article suggests that in this case the men painted themselves specifically because they were heading down out of the mountains with the NGM reporter’s team.

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

See all of our videos on our AgostinoArts You Tube channel:  http://www.youtube.com/user/AgostinoArts

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

Related articles

45,000 Views — 2008 Transformations

by Christopher Agostino

I was checking out a colleague’s video on You Tube when I saw one of mine come up in the column of suggested videos, and I was very surprised to see it had 45,811 views, way more than any of the others I’ve posted. [Shortly after this post, it was age restricted on YouTube, so here it is on Vimeo]

2008 was an adventurous year. The impulse to start collecting faces in slideshow videos came in response to a comment by an artist I met while painting at a Parrish Art Museum event. She came in to the gallery where we were painting and told me she had seen our faces all through the village of Southampton on her way to the museum (there’s a few photos in this video from a Parrish Art Museum event.) What she wanted to tell me was that we were creating a “kinetic art form”—particularly, that the style of our facepainting, with very colorful faces and every one different, made her look for them as she saw the painted people moving through the village, wanting to see each face. “kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer.” (from Wikipedia)

Facepainting at an event is a collective art. It is the sum total of the faces we paint that is the art form, rather than each individual face. Her description of this as a kinetic art had me thinking about this collection of faces in motion, and how to try to document that. That led to creating  “Every Face” videos, in which I photograph every face I paint at an event and put them in to a slideshow in the order painted, and that led to taking a selection to put a year together in 2008.

The music is “I am An Animal” by Pete Townshend. I felt ok using it because he gave it away as a free download on his web site, on an album of odds and ends and some unreleased “Scoop” tracks, which are the demo versions he recorded of his songs as he wrote them before bringing them into the studio to be done by The Who.

See more of our  Videos.

Related articles