Summer Solstice « Agostino Arts

by Christopher Agostino

Just back from an evening of creating art on people’s faces at the annual Summer Solstice Celebration at Socrates Sculpture Park. (what a cool place: http://www.socratessculpturepark.org/about/ )

We are working hard this year to raise the level of creative adventure at our events, and this time we just told the people on line that every face would be a complete surprise, that we would turn everyone into a work of “living art.” We’ve been at Socrates for years now and we are used to the crowd and they are used to us — there are people we’ve painted there and at other NY events many times. It was a wonderful and very gratifying evening. We painted many adults, maybe as many as kids, including adults and twenty-somethings there with no kids at all. And people were enthusiastic abut being surprised, about joining the creative adventure, and that encouraged us to make new and bold choices.

People were remarkably open about what we were painting on them, and the enthusiasm of the adults was contagious to the kids. One of our artists, Christine, remarked that there was even less questioning about what people “wanted to be” than when we do some of our other creative themes such as “just tell me if you want to be ‘nice’ or ‘spooky'”. And I think it is because we used that word: “art” (“Sit down and we’ll turn you into art”). Because if we are turning them in to art, then we must be artists, and if we are artists then we are the experts about what they should look like. Facepainting Freedom! Try it, for the truth will set you free.

Here are my fotos, hot off the presses. To fit the Summer Solstice theme, I was trying to make all my faces connect to the sun, to light, to summer, to nature — and, as I have been for months now, I am continuing to work out how to take influences from modern artists into the faces I paint at any event.