“Facepainting” or “Face Painting”? The Medium is the Message

by Christopher Agostino

“Facepainting” or “face painting”? “Bodypainting” or “body painting”? I tend towards the former term in both cases, making it one word rather than two — to the consistent consternation of spell check and search engines — because I believe that within this field what we paint on is as intrinsically important as the act of painting. Without the body there is no bodypainting, so, truly, the medium is the message. It is the face, the body, that gives the painting its value, its reason for being.

If the face is removed from the facepainting the result changes. I got to thinking about this as we began to use a new Dega-inspired promotional postcard design in which the art is more apparent than the face, so at first glance most people see it as just a painting, rather than as a facepainting (despite the text indicating otherwise).

Each year or so I select a new photo for our postcards, emblematic of our current creative explorations. We’ve been focusing on taking inspiration from Modern Art recently, so I looked for one of those images for the postcard. I painted this face at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY http://www.hrm.org/ , where we appear regularly. To suit the venue I was spending the day re-creating famous paintings on museum visitors, surprising each with my choices. The Degas image was painted on one of the museum’s volunteers. Two of their volunteers came to get painted when there was a lull in the line, and I took my time to work more subtly towards the painterly quality of the originals, and not just a copy of the image, as I made one into a Monet waterlily painting and the other into these ballerinas. In working with real paintings as inspiration for face and bodypaintings, my artists and I have all noticed that trying to capture the way a true master works the surface of the canvas is the real challenge (building up layers of color, working with the texture of the paint, etc.), and it’s something I may try to do when taking hours to paint a model in a studio, but not usually while facepainting with a line at a gig.

At the event, on their faces, the finished waterlilies face looked better than the ballerinas, and when I decided I wanted a modern art face image for the newest postcard I remembered that facepainting and thought I’d use the photo I took that day. But, cropped to postcard size, with the face less apparent, it didn’t work as well. It lost its identity as a copy of a recognizable painting, and looked more decorative, less transformational. It is something we have noticed when painting these modern art faces at events: they don’t always look like facepaintings in the same way that turning someone into a tiger will, they don’t always look like a face transformed. And they don’t always photograph as well as they look live, for I had a number of faces I had remembered painting that I thought might work for the postcard but didn’t, when cropped, because they lost their identity as a face.

Conversely, this Degas image worked for me as a postcard, I think, because it does function more as a painting than as a painted face, especially in a close crop like this. Looking at the finished face when I painted it, I felt the Degas painting job was ok enough, but that the image as I placed it didn’t take the best advantage of the curves of her face so it only looked good straight on, which limits the attractiveness of a face design — so the same quality that made me disappointed in this face seen live at the event makes me like it seen flat on 5,000 postcards.

A painted body, a painted face, viewed live is a very different art form than that same painted body in a photograph. They are two distinct works of art, and they carry very different intrinsic values, they function by very different aesthetic rules. In viewing them, the observer brings a very different context to what they are seeing, and so much of the value we accrue to an object depends on context, especially perhaps to objects of art. My understanding of this was enhanced by a recent Ted Talk by psychologist Paul Bloom about how our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, as in why a watch owned by our deceased grandparent is irreplaceable in our mind even though there might be many other watches available of the very same type. Part of his illustration of this was the story of a Vermeer painting, “The Supper at Emmaus”, which, based on its aesthetic quality, was revered as one of his greatest accomplishments and worth millions, until it was revealed to have been painted in 1936 by the master forger Han van Meegeren and not even the copy of a real Vermeer, at which point it lost all of its value. Very much the case of “the story behind the painting”. http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure.html

So for me it is “facepainting” and “bodypainting”, especially when viewed live on the person that is painted, for the living person carries that intrinsic value that gives the painting meaning. They are the story behind the face. Seeing the painted face looking back at you, talking to you — seeing the painted body move, change. On a postcard, in a photograph, maybe then it is a “face painting” or a “body painting”, but viewed alive the person can not be separated from the art.

: The Monet waterlilies face, which looked very nice on this young lady as she walked around the museum, but didn’t work as well as a foto cropped for the postcard.

: Usually I prefer photos with the subject’s eyes open — I refer to them as canvases with eyes — but in this case it worked better for me when it was more like a painting, with the eyes closed, and less like a face.

: Another Monet inspired face from the same day, and probably my favorite face of the that day’s painting, because I painted it very quickly but still managed to get the Monet-esque colors right, but cropped tight the image was not something that most people would recognize.

: This was another favorite from that day’s painting. An image inspired by a Paul Klee painting. He’s an artist whose work relates very directly to face and body art — but, again, no one would recognize this as inspired by a famous artist, in the way people might recognize Degas’ ballerinas or Monet’s waterlilies.

: This postcard from a couple of years ago was the first one in which I chose an image that specifically said “art on faces”, with a painting inspired by a Picasso cubist portrait in combination with a Nuba inspired tribal image. I don’t think I have ever painted a better face design than this one.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Why Body Painting? – 4: Radical Act – The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Face Painting Gallery – 2011 Holiday and Christmas Faces (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
The Kinetic Art of Face Painting – Pt.1: Sending Art off into the World (thestorybehindthefaces.com)

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

May4

More 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

The Kinetic Art of Face Painting – Pt.1: Sending Art off into the World (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
First Night Hartford – Face Painting Adults and the Final Faces of 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Face Painting – Kids for Kids Event – Inspirations from Africa and India, including Rangoli (thestorybehindthefaces.com)

Facepainting Event: Modern Art Faces in Philly – Pt.1: Britt

May3

We had a wonderful day on Saturday at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. The weather was perfect, the streets crowded with people and the event was extraordinary. While I was performing my storytelling show, we had a team of facepainters transforming the crowd with faces to suit the theme of Paris of 1910-1920 — faces based on the Modern Artists that themselves transformed what painting and sculpture looked like in that fertile, creative time in Paris. Our company was hired for the event by The Kimmel Center and the facepainting was free for the public, so the lines were long. The crowd, though, was in a great mood all day, despite the wait, and people were very receptive and excited about being turned into Modern Art.

Britt painting a face using a detail of fabric patterns from a Matisse painting

Here are a collection of faces from one of our company, Britt. Each of our artists brings their own style and interpretation to the Transformation Facepainting concept. I continue to admire Britt’s use of soft colors and the expressive quality of her brush strokes. I feature her today because I feel her approach to this theme captured the spirit of the artists that inspired our faces for this event in a way I can learn from.