The freakish weather is turning this into the Halloween That Almost Wasn’t, with power outages and downed trees closing public events, so instead of painting hundreds with a team of artists at a zoo I shifted over to painting a few dozen at a Country Club. It’s a party we’ve done annually, so the staff are friendly, egging each other on to get painted, and the kids talk about what they were painted as in previous years.
Here are some of the photos of my work at the party, including some new takes on face designs I’ve been exploring throughout this Halloween season, like the Zombie Attack, and Saturday’s Zombie Eating Brains. While painting an alien onto a little kid a couple days ago I had the idea for the one here called Alien Belly Mouth — and for those of you new to painting face note that this design is essentially the same design as the Vampire Attack face, the same placement position on the face of a cartoonish figure, with just some details changed to make this basic concept into different characters.
My company artists have started to send me photos of their work over the weekend, so a gallery of their faces will be coming soon.
Vampire Attack
Zombie Attack
Demon - Goblin - Troll
Zombie Eating Brains
Zombie, on one of the waiters
Not everyone asked to be spooky...Fairies and Flowers
Sliding Home
What do you paint on a girl dressed like a hot dog?
Vampire Attack - With the bad weather it was a slow enough day that I had time to think of new designs to try like this variation on a figure placement we've used for other themes like aliens and sports figures.
Ice and Snow falling from the sky on a New York Halloween weekend, very unusual. And bad enough that outdoor events canceled and indoor events were under-attended. The one good thing about days like these are that with less people to paint we can take more time with the faces and, especially, with the interaction with the people we paint. We have time for more playfulness and for working out new ideas. I was painting at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklynhttp://www.prospectparkzoo.com/ , and as the snow began to fall very few families showed up for Boo at the Zoo — so we got to paint the zoo staff and volunteers that don’t always get a chance. Even on a bad day, facepainting is a fun job (well on most bad days, at least).
Here’s a few from today.
Werewolf Moon variation - We were using our "nice or Spooky" theme and this staff volunteer said he wanted a face that was a little of both.
Turning a Georgia Okeeffe abstract painting into a bird
Another example of our current thread of working from fine art images, taking a Paul Klee abstract landscape painting and giving it a zoo-appropriate animal theme
Sunflower, a favorite subject
A playful squirrel face to suit this volunteer's wonderful smile
Zombie Eating Brains was another idea I had while waiting for more faces to paint, and I was glad to ahve a chance to try it. I'm sure I'll paint it again tomorrow and work to fit the idea to the face better. When I painted this face, the sweet little girl who was next in lines covered her eyes, and she wouldn't take her hands down (even as Jennifer tried to paint her face) until this young man left the room.
When it was time to paint that young girl's Dad we decided his "spooky" face shouldn't be too spooky, so I left out the eyes on the eyelids trick and gave him flying ghosts instead
I paint a lot of demon faces this time of year, many inspired by Japanese imagery and folktales. In 2008 particularly, I put an effort into exploring new face designs based on Japanese masks and kabuki makeup. That year I was painting at the Transworld Halloween Showhttp://www.haashow.com/ for Kryolan Professional Makeupwww.kryolan.com and took the approach at the event to paint horror faces based on world mask designs, as a contrast to the traditional zombies and skulls, so most of the examples here are from around that time.
This mask is a contemporary example of a Namahage Demon from the Akita Prefecture. It is worn for a traditional Lunar New Year celebration which sounds like Halloween in reverse, as young men wear the masks and visit people’s houses to scare their children and admonish them to listen to their parents—or the demons will come back! The parents reward the young men with sake and food. Although frightening, Namahage are said to be gods who bring good fortune, an example of the beliefs connected to spirit worship traditions in which powerful demonic spirits can become protective when they are appeased. Check out the Japanese movies Onmyoji and Onmyoji 2 for a fun depiction of demonic possession and the Ying-Yang master that has to restore the balance.
In folktales, Japanese demons come with various descriptions. Some may be red or blue faced, with fangs, horns and one, two or three eyes. In the tale of the famous samurai Raiko and his battle with the Goblin Earth Spider, he is attacked by an army that drops out of the storm clouds, including animals that walk like men, beings with three claws and three eyes—one with eyes in its hands—and long serpents with human heads. There’s a few ideas for facepainting. At an exhibit of prints by the artist Kuniyoshi last year at the Japan Society I was very jazzed to see two illustrations of Raiko vs. the Earth Spider with imagery that has re-invigorated the way I tell and depict that tale through faces.
Example of Kabuki makeup, from the book “Body Decoration” (see the book page for info)
The prevalence of such beliefs within the medieval Japanese culture allowed for the growth in Edo province of “Aragato,” the style of Kabuki theater which produced the famous makeup for its samurai hero and for the ghosts and demons he would battle. The origin of Kabuki and other Japanese theater in shamanic ritual and spirit worship is evident in the hero’s ability to do the impossible because they have allowed themselves to be possessed by a powerful kami (“supernatural deity”) and thus have become hitokami (“man-gods”).
In the book Japanese Tales, edited by Royall Tyler, from Pantheon Books http://pantheon.knopfdoubleday.com/ I found a scary tale called “The Bridge”, which included a description of the face of the demon that haunts the bridge in the story: “a red face with one amber-yellow eye as huge and round as a cushion.” A folktale that comes with its own special face design included is like finding gold for a storytelling facepainter, and it has become the tale I tell called “The Demon on Omi Bridge”, here in a performance I did for NYC Parks Department a few years ago — a tale that is now substantially different than the original in the book, as all tales evolve and change in the telling, especially as I work to choreograph the facepainting into the tale in performance.
I did a “how to paint a demon segment” on The CBS Early Show last Halloween
I find these multi-eyed demon faces are fun to paint on Dads at family events, their kids get a kick out of Dad looking so weird
I don’t know much about it, but I have heard that Japanese tattoo traditions can include using a demon image to “watch your back”
In addition to masks, I have looked for inspiration in theatrical makeup designs in Japanese horror and fantasy movies, and this idea was from a rougher sort of depiction of a demon I saw in a film.
Turning a demon concept into a vampire on a little girl
Ghost makeup from the Kabuki theatre. Color symbology is key, with reds being the colors for heroes – depicting their positive use of energy – and blues and greys signifying the stunted and misdirected energies of the evil, villains and ghosts
Painted at the Transworld Halloween Show, for a photographer from Hour 13 magazine — a blend of the Kabuki samurai pattern with the demon imagery
From the master printmaker Kuniyoshi, a detail from “The Earth Spider conjures up demons…” 1843. His work is full of imagery I have used to conjure new designs. The story behind the print, however, is that Kuniyoshi frequently used traditional subject matter like this to tweak the powers that be, and this print was read by the pubic at the time as a satiric attack on the government, with various of the demons being identified as caricatures of public officials.
