Science On Your Face — World Science Festival 2014

Transformations_GridLOGO-Science

We were back at one of our favorite New York events this past weekend: The Ultimate Science Street Fair of the World Science Festival. I mean, where else would you ever get the opportunity to turn someone into a Higgs Boson? Or a Bunson Burner? For an adventurous artist like me, this is facepainting at it’s most fun. Here are some of my favorite faces from this year’s event:

: Higgs Boson

: Bunson Burner

: Einstein

: Newton and the Big Apple

: Earth Science Teacher

: Evolution

: Atom

: Our Galaxy on her Face

: Mars Rover landing

: Robotics

: Synthetic Human

: Climate Change

: Solar Eclipse

: Curved Space Time

: First Woman on the Moon

: Cave Art – painted by Phil

: Pollination

: Pollination

: Milky Way Galaxy

: Nebula and Octopus

: Nebula

: She’s flying Ben Franklin’s Kite

: Mars Rover

: StoryFace: Li Chi Slays the Dragon

: Chemistry

: Particle Accelerator

: Atom on a Science Teacher

: Turtles All the Way Down

This year the festival was focusing on robotics, weather and astronomy. I’m enough of a science geek that I love collecting the stories and images for new science faces each year.

learn more about all we do at: agostinoarts.com

Transformation Facepainting Company — Jennifer’s Faces 2011

Jul15

Here are a collection of faces painted by one of our artists at a few recent events. Jennifer Wade has been painting her own uniquely creative faces with my company for more than 15 years. She brings to our Transformation approach a refined color sense and a method of stippling and layering colors to quickly achieve a complex background and create her original scenic designs. In our method, all of our artists are encouraged to develop their own designs and style, and Jennifer is an accomplished designer, bringing a great deal of enthusiasm to the challenge of creating new faces for special theme events like the World Science Festival or the NBA Draft Fan Zone. She is a fine art painter and an accomplished craft artist — a future post will showcase the work she does creating Ceramic Tile Murals with seniors and children. Jennifer is also a highly skilled art therapist and absolutely wonderful dealing with the public and getting kids and adults to join us in the sense of creative adventure that is at the heart of Transformations.

I first brought together a company of artists because I wanted to have the ability to impact large events by filling them with painted faces, and I couldn’t do that alone. Working with this group of artists all these years, however, has been the source of so many additional benefits as we have come to share this adventure together. Encouraging and inspiring each other, supporting each other’s non-facepainting endeavors, playing together, and commiserating with each other about that one rotten customer who wants to ruin a beautiful day of painting. I believe it is this sense of camaraderie that keeps our company together today through all these years.

painted at our Bronx Zoo concession

From the Science Festival: the extinct Golden Toad of Costa Rica's cloud rainforest

Science Festival: Albatross

Science Festival: an anthropological design based on an ancient piece of pottery from Guanajuato, Mexico

At the NBA Draft Day Fan Zone

NBA - Chicago Bulls logo

At the Coney Island Aquarium

A "Day of the Dead" design painted at a school's Mexican Fiesta

another Mexican Fiesta design

Jennifer's foto of me painting the school's Vice Principal at the Fiesta

for examples of another of our artists’ faces see: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/05/03/facepainting-event-modern-art-faces-in-philly-pt-1-britt/

http://www.agostinoarts.com

4 Years of Faces at the World Science Festival

Jun17

by Christopher Agostino

The World Science Festival has been a great adventure for me as a facepainter over these past four years. Working with new and unusual themes is a wonderful way to expand design concepts — plus I am a bit of a science geek and fully appreciate this opportunity to share my enthusiasm with kids and families.

I chose to go from being a lone facepainter to the director of a company of artists because I wanted to be able to have an artistic impact on large events, with dynamic face designs in sufficient number to visually alter the event. This is facepainting as a visual performance art.

Because our Transformation Facepainting concept is a constantly creative exploration of design principles rather than the repetition of specific designs, our company can create new and unique designs to suit the theme of each specific event, and thereby bring that theme to life in a fully participatory way on each guest we paint.

Our work in arts-in-education and family theater also gives us the tools to support a promotional or educational concept with contextual interactions with the people we paint as we transform them with thematic designs.

In the case of the World Science Festival, I’ve had as much fun talking with people about these things we are turning them in to as in coming up with these unique designs — telling stories about moments of science such as the 1919 solar eclipse that generated worldwide headlines proclaiming that “Einstein Was Right!”. Plus, we’ve occasionally had the privilege of painting scientists in designs that fit their field of science, as in the time that a molecular biologist doing research on the brain gave me insight into how to depict neurons firing.

I’ve also had the opportunity to present my performance/lecture on the cultural significance of masks and painted faces for some wonderful audiences in their Discovery Theater.