Tag Archives: Surma

Why Body Paint? — 1: Collaboration — Painting the Mangbetu Queen

From 1910, Queen Mutubani of the Mangbetu people being body painted by serving girls — it's good to be the Queen.

By Christopher Agostino

One of the more remarkable photographs of the cultural use of body art is the image from 1910 of a Mangbetu Queen in the book Body Decoration (see Books page for bibliography). As the queen stands in a regal pose she is being painted by several servants. I was reminded of this image last week during the bodypainting preparation for a video shoot. We had 4 dancers to paint. I was the primary bodypainter and there were two makeup artists doing the hair and eye makeup — as they finished with that they would help me paint the bodies. Towards the end all 3 of us were painting the 4th dancer simultaneously, and she remarked about what it felt like to be the center of that much attention. So I told her she should feel like a queen, a Mangbetu Queen.

Bodypainting is an intrinsically collaborative art. The primary collaboration is between the artist and the model, but it isn’t the only one, and that is not the collaboration I am addressing here, for there are often more people in the bodypainting room: assistants, photographers, multiple models to be painted — and spectators. The theatrical and presentational nature of bodypainting often means there is a crowd present watching the process. The ephemeral nature of the art compels us to maximize the amount of time people have to see our work. Whereas canvas painters work mostly alone in studios, we bodypainters make a spectator sport of it.

The Body Painting room for Bodies Alive!

A formative experience for most novice bodypainters is the first time they are at a convention, festival, performance or competition working in a room full of artists painting models. I’d say that this experience, more than any other, is the reason for the growing number of bodypainters in the U.S. — the fun they had, and the inspiration gained, from the sense of camaraderie in a room full of bodypainters drives them to keep doing it. Speaking personally, I find the bodypainting room much more exciting than the painted body fashion show or competition that follows, and especially when the painting being done in that room is all towards a unified purpose. Jam sessions are fun, and I understand the commercial necessities that make so many bodypainting events into competitions, but the ultimate for me is when the painters are all working in collaboration to achieve a collective vision, such as painting those 4 dancers for the video shoot, or the bodypainting room for the Bodies Alive! show at FABAIC 2008  http://www.fabaic.com/  , which I am very proud to have been a part of. We had about 30 primary painters plus many more additional volunteers working collaboratively — for numerous participants it was the first time they had helped to paint a full body, and I’m sure that experience has been a source of confidence as they have continued bodypainting.

In preparation for the stick fighting competitions, Surma men cover their skin with chalk mixed with water and then make line patterns through the chalk with their fingers

Painting bodies is more like performing music than like a studio art. It is a performance art, you certainly need the audience. I think you also want the fun of being part of a band, you don’t paint a body all alone — at the very least it is you plus the model. In its traditional functions, body painting is a social act, a shared community activity. For one thing, you can’t paint your full body yourself, and I believe that in traditional cultural uses (such as the Surma men painting each other in preparation for the ceremonial stick fights, or the Surma women painting together by a river bank for their part of the festivities) the participants experience the time spent painting each other in a unifying, celebratory way — in much the same way bodypainters enjoy the communal spirit of all painting together in a room at a convention. Any time you see an example of tribal or traditional body art, with full bodypainting or intricate designs on the back or the limbs, it is created communally, with the help of another person, and usually a reciprocal social act, as I paint your back and you paint mine.

Women of the Surma gathered to paint each other with colored earths and ochres.

Getting back to the Mangbetu, I have notes in an old journal about seeing an exhibit called “African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire” in 1990 at the American Museum of Natural History www.amnh.org/  of objects from the Mangbetu culture in the Congo region of Africa from around the time of that photo of the Queen being painted. What has stuck with me through the years since that exhibit is that every object — from household utensils like spoons, to clothing, house poles, drinking vessels — every object was a work of art. Including the people, for the exhibit said they would paint each other in intricate and original patterns with dyes made from the gardenia plant that would last a few days, and then be re-painted in new and unique designs. The exhibit displayed a collaborative, ongoing social act to create a world of art.

Again I am reminded of the practice and function of making live music, particularly in a traditional setting, it’s an experience we visual artists don’t get to have in our process much, except perhaps when doing something like bodypainting, in which the process is intrinsically collaborative and the work of art is alive.

Another Mangbetu bodypainting example, from 1937.

From the African Reflections exhibit I saw in 1990, a figure with body art lines — I have a sketch of this figure in my old notebook and found this image searching the American Museum of Natural History web site.

Not to put too fine a point on the communal, egalitarian nature of tribal arts, the text accompanying this image of a Mangbetu male from "Body Decorations" states "the elaborate painting indicated the social superiority of the Mangbetu elite" — so the body art contained social information as it did in most cultures.

An example from the Amazon Txukahamae culture of communal body painting

The Odd Ball in 2009 was another very fun body painting room — see the link to that page below

See my fine art bodypainting at  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/  Christopher Agostino

Related articles

From African Masks to Abercrombie & Fitch

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 Zoo http://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.

Traditional Maasai bodyart, from a photograph by Art Wolfe in "Tribes"

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/

For a related blog post, see: From a mask to a painted face: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/?s=from+a+mask+to+a+painted+face

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.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Traditional Facepainting – World Masks Workshop

by Christopher Agostino

This week brings an opportunity for teaching a group of High School students how to paint faces. In conjunction with a performance of Before Cave Walls…The Transformation Lecture, I will be doing a hands-on workshop with a group of art students who will then have the pleasure of painting several classes of elementary aged students. We present these programs in schools within a cultural context, and so the face patterns I will be bringing into these workshops are traditional designs from world cultures.

Click on this link for the pdf guide sheet for this World Mask Workshop WorldMasks_facepainting_agostinoarts

From the magazine article that first fired my imagination about painting faces based in cultural traditions

Choosing which cultural examples to present students is always a conundrum. There is an infinite wealth of source materials, and I recognize that the limited selections I present may seem to represent a much larger world than they can. The examples I present in a workshop setting are different than those I might demonstrate in a lecture performance, as I want to give them designs that a novice facepainter can emulate. (For example, in presenting this program to experienced makeup artists I will include the classic female role face from the Chinese Opera which requires a facility with blending colors that is difficult for beginners.) I also use examples with minimal pictorial imagery because I want the students to work free from the idea of trying to create a realistic portrait of an animal or such. The less complicated the design examples, the more they can focus on what it feels like to transform a human face. And that is the primary goal of this workshop, to give these students the experience of being the mask maker.

Here are the 6 faces I am using as the key cultural examples.

Amazon: A Mayoruna matriarch wearing markings and whiskers signifying a powerful cat like a jaguar

Africa: Surma people, from the Omo River area of Ethiopia.

Papua New Guinea: Example of traditional face art from a highlands culture, painted for a festival

Native American: Portrait of “Fast Dancer” of the Iowa culture, by George Catlin, with the hand symbol signifying he is a warrior

Africa: An example of the asymmetrical bodyart of the Southeast Nuba, Sudan.

Japan: The “suji-kuma” pattern to portray a samurai

Related articles

See a video and images from the workshop:  World Masks – Facepainting Workshop