Tag Archives: facepainting

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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Modern Primitive: Why Look Back? – Part 1: To see their eyes…

Inspired by the photographs of Hans Silvester of the new styles of face art from the peoples of the Omo River area of Africa

by Christopher Agostino

While doing research yesterday for a new bodypainting project I read a passage that struck a chord, giving me a sharper insight into a theme that runs through my work. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art is a “comprehensive scholarly treatment” published in 1984 to accompany an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art which broke new ground by exhibiting Modern Art masterpieces side-by-side with the tribal art from Africa and Oceania that was a significant source of inspiration for those early modern artists, presenting the art objects of both the “primitive” and the “modern” on equal footing. At the culmination of his opening essay in the book, exhibit director William Rubin makes this statement of his most profound, or personal, goal for the exhibit:

“In the realm of my hopes, however, there is something less explicit, more difficult to verbalize. It is that the particular confrontation involved in our exhibition [between tribal objects and modern masterpieces] will not only help us better to understand our art, but in a very unique way, our humanity — if that is not saying the same thing. The vestiges of a discredited evolutionary myth still live in the recesses of our psyches. The vanguard modernists told us decades ago that the tribal peoples produced an art that often distilled great complexity into seemingly simple solutions. We should not therefore be surprised that anthropology has revealed a comparable complexity in their cultures. I hope our effort will demonstrate that at least insofar as it pertains to works of the human spirit, the evolutionary prejudice is clearly absurd.”

My visual and performing arts have become increasingly connected to cultures distant in time, space and tradition. This research into other cultures is fascinating to me, rich in ideas and images for the artist sponge in me to absorb, but that isn’t what drives this process.

When I tell an audience a 2,000 year old tale from China of a heroic young girl as I did this afternoon, modern white guy that I am I still feel a resonance of the common humanity at the heart of the story. I feel it… and will judge my performance in large part on my perception of how well I have been able to let my audience feel it. I’ve come to see how it is the qualities in a story that touch upon the universal question of what it means to be human that make some stories survive.

The juxtaposition of the very tribal Papua New Guinea design with the New York street scene and a bag of potato chips makes this a favorite foto of mine.

When I paint a New Yorker’s face in a design from some exotic culture, that also makes a connection to our common humanity. As I have grown more aware of this, with kids I’ll talk about a more concrete, though metaphoric, connection to their unusual new face — for example, that the Kabuki Samurai design they’re wearing is like becoming a superhero; or that the wildly colorful face from Papua New Guinea is like being painted for a birthday party, it just happens to be a party on the other side of the world. This is an understanding of the effect of my work that has grown gradually, and not a political or “new age” sensibility that led me to my explorations of the primitive. I started “looking backward” to the tribal and the ancient to become a better facepainter, as a way to understand the possibilities for painting a face that had already been discovered by cultures that have done it for generations.

Now, it seems that the lesson of a couple hundred thousand painted faces over 30 years is unavoidable, for whatever culturally alien or bizarre design I paint on someone, once I am finished I always see a pair of human eyes looking back at me from within the mask. This is my visceral understanding of the common humanity we share.

Writing as he was about famous artists and art objects with a power to change perception far beyond anything I could approach, William Rubin’s statement is a stronger, more militant sentiment about the necessity and potential of this joining of the primitive and the modern to open our world view, but I can’t be the first facepainter to wonder what effect it would have on cultural/racial prejudices if we all wore painted faces, and all we could see was each other’s eyes?

Picasso's revolutionary sculpture, Guitar 1912, and a Grebo mask (Ivory Coast, Africa) that he owned. Picasso stated that in creating this sculpture he studied the mask for its use of projections for eyes, nose and mouth from a flat plane, for how those projections implied another invisible plane ( a device he used for creating the sound hole of the guitar via a cylinder) and especially the quality in such tribal art that it is not illustrating a face but "re-presenting" it — a concept that concurs with a pivotal change between the art of the 19th century and the new art of the early modernists, i.e. their use of symbols and imagery to represent subject matter and thereby add greater conceptual depth.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

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Facepainting Event: Modern Art Faces in Philly – Pt.2

The team at work at PIFAMore fotos from The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts street fair, produced by The Kimmel Center, April 30, 2011.

To suit the theme of “Paris 1910-1920” we chose to paint faces based on the artists associated with Paris of that era, ranging from the Impressionists forward to the origins of Modern Art. And we invited the pubic to just sit down and “we will turn you into a work of art” — no requests, every face a surprise.

Dimitrea painting a Picasso inspired image

We have found that people generally like the idea of being surprised by the face we paint on them, and people this time were even more enthusiastic, excited about becoming a work of art. Excited, it seemed, about becoming something exotic and unfamiliar. Over the course of the day, several people engaged me in conversations about how different the facepainting was from what they (or their kids) were used to, and how much they enjoyed this. Our artists enjoyed themselves as well.

Monet Waterlilies

Painting like this, borrowing some of the cache of famous artists like Monet and Matisse, gives a facepainter a greater sense of freedom to be creative, in large part because the people you are painting have given you that permission and have joined you in the creative adventure.  Our team for PIFA included Britt, Dimitrea, Jennifer, Miguel and Roberta, and I couldn’t resist doing a little painting too after my storytelling shows were done.

See the previous post for fotos of the faces painted by Britt.

To learn about our company:

http://www.agostinoarts.com

here's the display we used for this event

By Jennfer, from Matisse papercut "Icarus"

from a Gauguin painting (see Britt's version in yesterday's post)

Sharks, in a modern Art/Cubist style

We also included some African and tribal images, as they were an influence on artists in Paris 1910

Roberta painting image from a Gauguin painting

By Roberta

By Britt

Picasso inspired, from Dimitrea

from Picasso - Dora Marr

from Matisse papercut: "monkey"

Dimitrea painting

One of the last faces I painted that day, in which I tried to use the colors of his shirt to work the surface of the face in imitation of the complexity Picasso brought to the surface of the canvas in some of his Cubist portraits, such as "Ambroise Vollard, 1910"

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Paris, Spring 1910

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