My friend Kate sent me this image she saw in Communication Arts Magazine and I think it speaks directly to the question I addressed in an earlier post regarding bodypainting and nakedness. In this foto I’d say that the woman is pretty thoroughly painted and very definitely naked. Reading perhaps too much into it, I think that dual impression is part of the intention of the artist here, for they have deliberately left the model’s pubic hair visible when it could have been hidden via the bodypainting, and that seems to me to be intended to make the viewer recognize the nakedness of the model. I can see this image as making a statement that a painted body is naked, just as a zebra is naked, no matter how thoroughly decorated it is. Even if the artist’s intentions were not that specific in regard to this question, I see this image as equating the painted model with the striped zebras, placing them both in the same state of nature/nakedness.
I also think it’s a cool photograph — how cool to have had the chance to do a photo shoot with live zebras — and I think that anyone would see this as a work of art. Although some people have trouble with nakedness in any form, having a naked human appear in a work of art is an established and accepted tradition, from the ancient Greeks and on. So much depends on context.
Check out the previous posts for more on this question:
Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the Communication Arts Magazine July/August edition that this image was in, and couldn’t find out who was the bodypainter or photographer from their web site http://www.commarts.com/ , so I can’t include proper credits here. If you know who generated this image, please add that information as a comment.
Geo Magazine, 1980, contained a few dozen photographs of Chinese Opera faces
Painted in 1983. In addition to learning to blend from copying a design like this, these Chinese Opera faces gave me an understanding that facepainting can be a true art, truly transformational, and not just a decorative art.
By Christopher Agostino
Taking a mask image from a cultural source and painting it onto a face is a primary methodology I use for expanding my understanding of what is possible on a painted face. My first steps in that direction were 30 years ago with Chinese Opera faces I saw in an issue of Geo magazine. When I start with images like these that are already makeup designs and re-create them on a face the lessons I am learning are primarily about finding new ways to fit designs to the structure of a face, a new range of imagery, and exploring different application techniques — for example, it was as I tried to imitate the way the red over the eyes fades into the white on the check in this Chinese Opera image that I first learned how to blend — and from Chinese Opera designs I moved onto similar explorations with other cultural sources of painted faces such as those from the Amazon and Papua New Guinea.
Paul Kirk's book "Man as Art" is an inspirational and definitive statement about he remarkable possibilities of bodyart in world cultures.
One of the earliest truly tribal designs I painted on a person (an adult) in a regular party setting - at a corporate family picnic in 1996
A different process is required — and different lessons learned — when the traditional image I start from is a physical mask rather than face or bodyart. Re-creating a physical/sculptural mask as a facepainting brings different challenges because you have to somehow transfer onto the organic shape of a human face the plastic form of the mask, such as the exaggerated geometric shapes on certain African masks, or the extended beak of a wooden Haida thunderbird mask. Here are lessons to be learned about how to place hard shapes on a softly curved face, and to create illusions that seem to alter the structure of the face. I think that the most useful lesson I’ve gleaned from trying to re-create a sculptural mask design, however, is in learning how to boil a mask down to its essence. Since I can’t really duplicate the full mask on a face, what can I achieve with facepainting that has the same impact as the physical mask?
“Spirit masks” is a somewhat generic descriptive term applied to masks from a variety of African cultures worn to bring supernatural spirits to life in traditional rituals. Such masks are intentionally bizarre in appearance with the features of faces and animals distorted into geometric shapes and graphic patterns. Since I can’t make eyes that are cylinders sticking 8″ off the face using just makeup, I’ve had to translate that idea into what I can do, so I’ve focused on using strong geometric linework to make the face startling. As I’m about to start a design like this on a kid I may ask them if it’s ok for me to make them look really, really strange — and usually get an enthusiastic “yes”.
An early attempt at a Spirit Mask, from the event at the Bronx Zoo in 1999
Another early attempt at a Spirit Mask
I have found the complexity of the masks of Native American Northwest Coast (NWC) cultures the most challenging to re-create. Part of the struggle is due to the intricacy of the symbolic imagery on the masks. Whereas masks like the African “Spirit Masks” primarily employ geometric signs and patterns to carry symbolic content — patterns which be simplified and imitated to have the same visual affect even if they don’t have the precise cultural content — NWC masks employ recognizable and pictorial animal imagery much more difficult to duplicate simply. A traditional NWC mask-maker learns very specific forms to symbolize the mythic characters they depict — such as the precise shape the eye must be for Kwikwis, the eagle of the undersea in the Kwakiutl culture. As Franz Boas states in his book Primitive Art, once the proper symbols are included the artist’s concern becomes the unity and aesthetic achievement of the overall design, and they do it with a remarkable finesse of design style, beautifully fitting the complex imagery onto the shapes of the mask. Like African masks, and the masks of so many cultures, the NWC wooden transformation masks are sculptures worthy of the museums where they sit in cases and hang on walls, but their true raison d’être is just the same as the “Spirit Masks” — to be worn in performance at rituals to bring the gods and myths to life.
I had quite a number of examples available of faces painted at events for the article in my book on African “Spirit Masks”. We spent the summer of 1999 at the Bronx Zoopainting faces inspired by traditional African art for the opening of the Congo Gorilla exhibit, and this style of design has been part of my usual bag of tricks ever since. For the article on Northwest Coast masks, however, I had few examples from faces at events, and none that were successful, so I painted a model in my studio for this one. There is a fundamental cosmology the underlies much of NWC mask culture, and it includes the concept that there was an earlier time in which celestial beings lived on earth and then departed to live in the heavens. These celestial/ancestral beings can return to earth in the guise of humans, and they are depicted in these masks both in their celestial form and in their human form, which is dramatically demonstrated in ritual performances in which these wooden transformation masks will open and alter their shape through ingenious devices to show first the ancestral being and then the inner human. In the NWC coast example for my book, I relied on the humanity of my model (as we facepainters do) and her eyes to exemplify this concept of transformation, from celestial eagle to the eagle in human form.
The Eagle in celestial form, inspired by Northwest Coast Indian culture transformation mask
The Eagle in Human Form
From the Nuxalk culture of the Pacific Northwest, the closed image depicts a celestial bird figure of some sort.
When the mask opens during the ritual performance, revealed inside is the figure in human form (notice how the beak for example is now depicted more like a human nose), and the humanized bird-face is surrounded by a sun-like orb indicting its celestial nature.
Edward Malin's book "A World of Faces: Masks of the Northwest Coast "includes very useful simplified analytical sketches of the traditional mask elements
An early Spirit Mask attempt in which I used this geometric approach to create a specific animal, a baboon face
More recently I have been making Spirit Masks that are more deliberately spooky, and not just strange
The first third of my book, Transformations! The Story Behind the Painted Faces, chronicles my investigation of cultural sources of face and body art, and how I have incorporated those discoveries into my work.
Li Chi Slays the Dragon — a Transformation Tale by Christopher Agostino, from an ancient legend of China
One of my favorite tales, Li Chi Slays the Dragon, from a performance on April 30, 2011 at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts street fair, presented by The Kimmel Center. It was a truly beautiful day, the first one after some rainy ones, so the street was packed and a crowd formed instantly as I started up. I painted a couple of people to demonstrate the transformation story-faces concept and to focus the crowd, and then picked a volunteer and launched right in.
The tale of the brave maiden Li Chi who volunteers to be sacrificed to the dragon in order to kill it is an especially fun one to tell. My source is a brief folktale nearly 2,000 years old, written by Gan Bao (or Kan Pao), found in the book “Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies” edited by Moss Roberts, 1979, Pantheon Books. Like most of the stories I perform, it has been gradually re-written through the course of presenting it to modern audiences — though the heroine Li Chi’s chiding of the previous girls sent to the dragon for not taking care of him themselves, that comes right from the original version. 2,000 year old advice: take care of business or you might get eaten.
The source image for my depiction of Li Chi, the female hero from a Peking Opera production
Hero Tales like this are the original motivational speeches, encouraging all of us to take care of business, and this is why they survive (in addition to the pure fun of telling them). I made Li Chi Slays the Dragon a centerpiece of a special show I designed this summer about why we tell stories, for a series of performances at libraries to fit the Summer Reading Club theme of “One World, Many Stories”. Kids need to hear Hero Tales, to know they can defeat a dragon if need be even though they are kids. I especially like to share tales like this one in which the hero is young, or small, or misfit, with no superpowers, fairy godmothers or magic swords (just the faithful family dog.)
Sketch for Li Chi and her faithful dog as a bodypainting design for the back of the performer portraying Li Chi in the Bodies Alive! production.
The tale and the telling of it has also been a source of inspiration for face and body painting designs exploring the Chinese Opera imagery of the female hero and of dragons, particularly as I expanded the visuals from one face to full bodypaintings on a group of performers to create the mountains and the full dragon as well as several changing images of Li Chi for the Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention in 2008. http://www.fabaic.com/
See my “Shows” page with the tab at the top of the post for more information on my Transformation — Storytelling shows
From Bodies Alive!, with Li Chi, as a painted hand-puppet, approaching the temple on the top of the mountain
Prior to the Bodies Alive! production I worked out some of the designs and did color tests on people's faces at our events. I've always preferred doing such explorations for new designs on actual faces and bodies at our regular events, as well as sketching them out in advance.
One of the sources of inspiration for the dragon face. This image came from a book brought back from China by one of our artists, with dozens and dozens of face designs from the Chinese Opera.
The cast of the Bodies Alive! full body production, from 2008 at the Face and Body Art International Convention in Orlando.
