Painted People

Here are two amazing artists that paint people. I have always been interested in body paint (talk about completely re-working the relationship between figure and ground, the body and the portrait...) but this is really crazy.

First up: Liu Bolin- A Chinese painter who paints himself into his surroundings.

 Imagine the precision that goes into creating these photographs...the scale and measuring of the camera position and angle, the lighting has to be perfect...how does he take a specific perspective and then copy it onto himself?



I think my favorites are the forest, grocery store, and security guard. I got these images from google images--he doesn't seem to have an artist website yet, but he is featured on many blogs and art websites.

Next up and a great subject for compare/contrast: Alexa Meade. She paints other people (and sometimes herself) as portraits of themselves. That's right, she paints a portrait of their own body onto their body, but she paints them in a two-dimensional way that is more suggestive of their appearance than representative of it. The result is a freaky invasion of artistic representation into 3D reality...just look at the guy's face on the subway.

 Self portrait of the artist--check out the hair--the only aspect that can't be painted.

Creepy, no? Where can I sign up?