I have found that painting a face is my ideal art form. It allows me to be endlessly creative, the workplace environments are festive, my paintings smile back at me, and people pay me to do it. To the envy of my canvas painting friends I can have 50 finished works of art at the end of a day. And I get to exhibit my work in public. Anyone who says the art is too ephemeral should check their fridge to see if there’s a photo on it of someone’s painted face.

I’ve known how much fun this is for 25 years, and enough of my artist friends have discovered this along the way that I formed a company called Transformation Facepainting. We paint thousands of people in and around New York each year.

We take our facepainting seriously. Our goal is to transform each face into a unique work of art. We paint at New York area events where lines can get long. We have to be quick and we have to be good enough to be worth the wait. We also have to grow as artists and to develop our art of facepainting, in order to keep having fun.

Facepainting is not new. It has been around forever. Anthropologists say we people painted ourselves before we ever painted a cave wall. That can be a great inspiration when you go to paint someone’s face. The art and imagery of masks and body art from throughout history, around the world, can also be a great inspiration.

From the beginning I saw facepainting not as a decorative art but as a way to completely change the face, to create a painted mask. In mask and make-up art from other cultures I learned more about what can be done to a face. Our the past few years our company has had a chance to develop these styles in our event facepainting.

Transformation Facepainting has been part of special events for the Bronx Zoo for nearly ten years. With 30,000 visitors on an average weekend, the zoo gives us plenty of faces to paint. In 1999 they opened the Congo Gorilla exhibit and asked us to provide 10 artists for 10 weekends. We chose that summer to research African masks and body art to create a specific style to paint the gorillas and other animals from the Congo exhibit. We collected imagery, swapped books, went to the great collections of African art in NY museums. We learned about the spotted faces of the Karo dancers, Spirit Masks and the awe inspiring body art of the Nuba. I found a wooden snake mask at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a face pattern like the Gaboon Viper at the zoo. We turned thousands of kids and adults into African inspired art that summer.

The foundation of Transformation Facepainting is our ability to quickly and completely transform a face. That comes from an application technique in combination with a certain philosophy. Although we also do bodypainting for parties and private events, for large events we only paint whole faces, because they have the most dramatic effect. We paint anyone over the age of three and encourage the adults. A group of artists working at an event becomes a performance as well, transforming the event by filling it with painted faces. That’s when facepainting really starts to be fun.

Since that Congo summer our company has continued to explore cultural themes and mask-like facepainting. I painted a Congo-styled mask on a model for Bruce Weber and it became the cover of the Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly in 2000. Event themes have led us to the beautiful complexities of Peking Opera and other Asian theater make-ups and the totem imagery of Native Americans. We’ve been very excited to explore Amazon Rain Forest faces for the zoo and some corporate theme events. Amazon Indians create powerful designs with symbolic colors, elemental shapes and lines, believing that it is our ability to transform ourselves through body art that makes us human. Talk about inspiration.

Just looking at that new face in front of you can be an inspiration and knowing you have 100,000 years of tradition behind you can be a great support. Transform the faces you paint. Be bold. Be daring. Have fun!
It washes off.

Some Notes on Our Method for Creating Modern Masks:

From our study of cultural body art and masks we’ve picked up several concepts that relate directly to the simple and dramatic look we favor. Dividing the face vertically or horizontally. Abstracting an animal or other idea into geometric shapes. Using colors and shapes symbolically. Using icons, or simple images, to represent an animal. Using patterns, like spots, swirls and stripes. The examples here (on our Congo, Rainforest and World Mask galleries) by our company artists and myself come from events with specific cultural mask themes. For other themes we paint in different styles.

Our goal at events is to transform the people we paint with fast, bold designs. We like our work to be strong, to look good from a distance. We paint fast both to satisfy as many people as possible and to maximize our visual effect on the whole event. In four hours a team of five Transformation Facepainters can paint 300 faces and that will transform any event. We use water-based make-up, mostly Kryolan Aquacolors, applied with sponges and brushes to paint a face in about 3 1/2 minutes.