Zombie Princess - this girl wanted to look spooky, and her friend was joking with her that she must be confused, because she was wearing princess jewelry, so I made her a Zombie Princess
After the weather-frustrated weekend I was very glad to finish up this Halloween painting faces in the type of situation I really enjoy, for lots of kids and adults at a New York City Parks Department Recreation Center, with enthusiastic kids who don’t often get the chance for facepainting and adults as likely to sit down as the kids, because they want to have fun too as they accompany their kids trick-or-treating. Just as we were starting to set up some kid in a costume came in to ask what we were doing and when I said we’d be painting faces he yelled out “great!” and ran out of the room to tell the others. And we had just enough of a crowd to keep us busy but not too busy to have to hurry the faces.
It being the actual Halloween night, most of the adults and many of the kids wanted to be spooky. I painted the Zombie Attack idea again, which is what I like to do with new ideas: repeat them several times in a row at different events to make them familiar enough that I can retain the concept in my repertoire. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I like to use Japanese and Asian theater make-up concepts for demons and vampires, particularly on women that want to look scary because these designs can still be exotic and attractive (rather than gory). The “Kabuki Demons” and “Chinese Opera Demon” are those kinds of faces, loosely inspired by traditional makeup designs.
Hope you had a wonderful Halloween!
Kabuki Demon 1
Kabuki Demon 2- she and Kabuki Demon 1 planned on going around together so i gave them related faces. The kids they were with were cute little princesses, one of whom was frightened to see her Mom look scary, so we talked a bit about how looking scary on Halloween is a way to get over being scared of spooky things.
Kabuki Demon 3
Chinese Opera Demon
Tropical Sunset - the type of design we call "personal classics" in our company lingo, meaning a design you do that you know always works
Moon and Stars
Pink Cat - yes, I do occasionally paint cat faces
Matisse Blue Dancer - simple designs like this show the beauty colors can have all on their own
Silver Swirls - she had silver eye makeup and didn't want me to mess with it, so I extended the concept in a decorative design
Zombie Attack, again
Zombie
This staff member wa sone of the last people I painted, as ebverything was starting to close down. He was talking to everyone about how he was going out to a big club Halloween party, and he was talking the whole time I painted him about wanting to be a homeless vampire zombie punk
Our goal is to surprise and delight the people we paint and the people who see the people we paint. To that end we work to keep facepainting an adventure, and because people like to be part of an adventure it puts them in the frame of mind to give us the freedom we need to be as creative as we want to be. After I posted the previous video (“Faces at Play”), a facepainter contacted me to ask if we paint faces like that at regular parties or if I only paint like that for my storytelling shows. The basic answer is “yes”, we paint like this all the time, from small parties to public events. I thought I’d post this current example of the full run of faces at one event as an example of the process. Here is just about every face I painted, in the order painted, at one of my favorite Halloween events — the annual Masked Marvelous Cocktail Party at Materials for the Arts, NYC. http://www.mfta.org/
For me, facepainting is a collective, kinetic art. More important than any one face I paint is the collective effect of all the faces I paint at an event. As important to me as the way a person I paint feels when they look into the mirror is the way they feel as they walk around the event and see how everyone responds to their new identity. This is the reason why the artist should take the creative control in the process of painting someone’s face, choosing the design to paint and surprising them rather than asking them what they want to be, or painting them to match a photo of a previous face design — to give the participants the experience of a real transformation. Their suspension of control, their giving in to an artist’s creativity, moves them further beyond themselves into this sense of adventure, this experience of having a new, surprising identity at the event, in much the same way as the traditional use of mask arts allows a performer to assume a supernatural identity in world theater and ritual (or in our modern special effects movies). My hope is to see the people I paint “inhabiting” the mask, bringing their new face/new identity to life, showing off, performing.
At the MFTA event a woman asked me how I decide what to paint on each person. Much of the process is intuitive, matching colors to their eyes and clothes, working towards the shape of their face, how their hair looks, etc., and I interact with each person, asking them a question or two such as “do you want to be nice or spooky?” As I explained to the woman, though, much of my process is like any artist working on a canvas in their studio: what do I want to work on, what are my current thrills and challenges, what can I paint that people will respond to, and even — just like a “real” artist — what am I trying to say with this painting. In the faces from this event, you can see some examples of what we call “classics” (face designs we know work, like the “Night Queen” and “Moon and Stars”, or something that I know a little girl will like such as the “Zebra Nose”) in combination with explorations of my current creative challenges, the things I have been working on (such as the use of fineart images as source material, like the Picasso and Matisse faces; the continuing effort we are all putting in to adding more figurative imagery, like “Swan Lake” and “Devil Eyes”; and my current attempts to “mash-up” these avenues of exploration into new Halloween designs like the “Zombie Attack” and “Picasso Zombie”). And from face to face I concentrate on creating diversity in style and concept so the faces are a surprise in the progression of designs, as well as individually.
Materials for the Arts is one of the more remarkable organizations we have ever had the privilege of working for. They are a vital part of the arts and arts education communities of New York City, and just one of the venues that makes it so exciting to do what I do in a place so full of creative energy and artistic freedom as New York. Please check out their website: http://www.mfta.org/
From their web site:
Founded in 1978, Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, provides thousands of NYC’s arts and cultural organizations, public schools, and community arts programs with the supplies they need to run and expand their programs. MFTA gathers materials from companies and individuals that no longer need them and makes them available, for free, to the artists and educators that do. In the process, hundreds of tons are removed from the waste stream every year and kept out of landfills, which helps sustain our environment, promotes reuse, and reduces waste. MFTA helps artists realize their visions, provides students with a richer educational experience and furnishes businesses and individuals with a simple and efficient way to enhance the cultural life of their city.
Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000 cover, photograph by Bruce Weber
by Christopher Agostino
From early on I was taking inspiration for face designs from the makeup and mask art of other cultures. During the summer of 1999, I was able to initiate my company of artists in this process as we painted faces in African Mask inspired styles over 8 weekends for the opening of the Congo Gorilla Rainforest exhibit at the Bronx Zoohttp://www.wcs.org/. None of the culturally inspired faces we paint can really be “authentic,” removed as they are from the culture that gives them meaning, so taking a traditional art as source material needs to be done with an understanding that we are artists finding inspiration in a visual image and we can claim no ownership of the intrinsic cultural content of that image. During the “Congo Summer” of 1999, I sometimes questioned the propriety of my being a white American in New York painting these wonderful African images, especially on the beautiful black faces they might be said to really belong to. It’s a tricky question I frequently confront as an artist and storyteller whose work includes cultural sources, and I try to be open about it. I was very gratified once when a woman trusted me enough to ask me to paint a Maasai design on her son’s face, telling me that this was his heritage but he knew nothing about it, so she wanted me to paint him and tell him the significance of the design.
Photo from Art Wolfe's tribes of a decorated Maasai.
Part of the profound beauty of a painted face is that you can’t see the color of the skin beneath. All you see are the eyes — the very human eyes. My explorations into the earliest human art and cultures convince me that we all truly are one people, sharing a universal view of life and our core aspirations, originating in a single fundamental culture — which anthropologists today tell us began with a small group of modern humans in Africa and subsequently spread around the world and diversified. By using cultural images, I believe we remind our public audiences of the unity of the family of humanity.
Whereas all of modern humanity may have sprung from that one, small unified group of humans in prehistoric Africa (perhaps, scientists say, a group of as few as 600 individuals), to use the term today “African Masks” or “African Art” is an inaccurate shorthand at best. Africa is a continent of many diverse countries and ethnic groups, and the mask and body arts of these cultures vary greatly. We found a wealth of images, styles and conceptual approaches to transforming a human face in our search for inspiration as we painted faces at the zoo that summer of 1999, from the rock paintings of the San bushmen of Southern Africa through the abstract spirit masks of equatorial Africa and north to the henna designs of the Berber. I have come to see that the experimentation that summer gave my company of artists a new overall perspective on facepainting as a larger art, including a foundation in stylizing and abstracting designs that take the artist beyond realist imagery.
My photo of the Abercrombie & Fitch model before they costumed him
In October of that year, the photographer Bruce Weber saw me working in this stylized “tribal” approach as I was painting at another New York event, and he hired me to paint a group of models in Florida for the Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000. The foto he chose for the cover was of a model painted in a spirit mask inspired baboon design I had been experimenting with all that summer.
And it was while I was researching the mask and sculptural arts of Africa that summer that I read about how in 1905 Africa again became a source of inspiration for world culture as traditional sculptures and masks made their way to Paris and changed the approach of a whole generation of Western artists at the dawn of the Modern Art movement. As Frank Willet states in African Art: An Introduction (Thames & Hudson,1993), when masks from Africa were seen by Picasso and Matisse, “the revolution of twentieth-century art was underway.”
"Spirit Mask" inspired baboon design from that Congo Summer, 1999.
That was a spark that set me into an ongoing exploration of this linkage between traditional and modern art, primarily through a series of fine art bodypaintings in which I blend iconic modern art images with the tribal bodyart and mask images that inspired them: the “Modern Primitive” series.
The first third of my book is about the lessons I’ve learned from cultural sources. To learn about my book, and about the other books mentioned here, go to: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/books/
The Omo River region in Ethiopia holds several cultures that still maintain some bodyart traditions. These geometric patterns in earth tones may be so different than the facepainting most people are used to, yet they make for very pleasant looking finished faces, and I find people are very receptive to being painted in this way.
This Surma photo from the wonderful book "African Ceremonies" has proven to be a style of design that adult women enjoy wearing. In the photo on the right, I copied the pattern of the original design while altering the colors because I was painting it on a caucasian face.
The designs of Surma males are different, in this example the men have covered their whole bodies in a white clay, then scrape the design into that white base so that their dark skin shows through to make the geometric patterns. In a regular facepainting setting I can't really imitate the scraping technique, so I imitate the pattern instead.
This face painting was for a demonstration on African bodyart for a student group at Columbia University, based on a sketch of Lobi facepainting from the book "Body Decoration".
Combining imagery with a simplified "Tribal" style
Spending 8 weekends working in one style allowed for a lot of possible areas of exploration, including trying faces using just pieces of designs or patterns from African cloth and masks.
Another design from a cultural source that makes a pleasant face for an adult. The original came from one photo I saw of bodypainting among the Loma people for a girl's coming of age ceremony, in which she will be painted in plant dyes that slowly fade over a few weeks, and once they have faded she will be eligible for courtship. Again, though, I have to approach this image primarily as visual inspiration for I have no full understanding of the cultural context.
We have also had the chance to bring an "African style" to theme events at other venues, including the Coney Island Aquarium where I painted these two stylized Starfish faces.
here's my friend Kate painting during the Congo Summer event. Having 10 artists at the zoo for 8 weekends gave me the chance to invite in some guest artists like Kate to work with us and try our Transformation approach.
