Tag Archives: Picasso

“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.

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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.

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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.

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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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