Every woman who gets her body painted at Fantasy Fest owes
a debt of gratitude to Joanne Gair, the New Zealand makeup
artist whose brush has turned everyone from Demi Moore
to Heidi Klum into living, breathing works of art.
IT WAS A SUMMER DAY IN 1992, and makeup artist Joanne Gair was carefully applying a line of dark grey bodypaint to Demi Moore's left nipple. Gair was working on an image that was scheduled to appear on the cover of the August issue of "Vanity Fair," exactly a year after Annie Leibovitz's iconic photo of Moore, naked and seven months pregnant, had graced the cover of the same magazine, and the editors were hoping to top it. (The movie Moore was promoting at the time, "The Butcher's Wife," has since been completely forgotten, but her "Vanity Fair" photo recently came in second on a list of the greatest magazine covers of all time.) Gair had done Moore's makeup on that earlier shoot, but it was Moore and Leibovitz whose work people had talked about. Gair's contributions were essentially invisible.
THIS TIME, however, Gair and her makeup were to be the center of attention. Demi Moore would once again be posing naked, except now she would be beneath a layer of highly detailed bodypaint that would make it appear as if she were actually wearing an unusually form-fitting three-piece Richard Tyler suit, vest, dress shirt and necktie. Even with a team of assistants helping Gair out, creating the illusion was a long, painstaking, muscle-wearying process. At one point late in the day, however, Moore quietly made a prediction.
"This," she told Gair, "is going to put you on the map."
Today, Gair still claims she had no idea the resulting cover, which Vanity Fair dubbed "Demi's Birthday Suit," would make such an impact, but she can't deny that Moore's prediction has come true. Already a successful makeup-artist-to-the-stars, having done Madonna's makeup on the videos for "Vogue" and "Express Yourself," the then-34-year-old New Zealander soon found she had become a celebrity herself.
Well, maybe not quite a celebrity, but certainly the woman every magazine photo editor was now calling to bring some flashy visual novelty to a celebrity portrait or fashion shoot. Since 1999, Gair has done five spreads for Sports Illustrated alone, drawing bikinis on the likes of Elle MacPherson and Heidi Klum. She's worked for Playboy, Vogue and Rolling Stone. Her brush has turned Goldie Hawn gold and Gillian Anderson silver. Body Painting: Masterpieces by Joanne Gair, a coffee-table book collection of some of her most distinctive images, is being published this month by Universe Books. "She's the queen!" says Craig Tracy, winner of the 2005 World Bodypainting Championship and owner of the PaintedAlive Gallery in New Orleans, the world's first fine art gallery devoted to bodypainting. And it's true: every attention-seeking college co-ed who gets painted up in tiger stripes during Fantasy Fest has been influenced, whether they know it or not, by Gair's body (bodies?) of work.
Gair didn't set out to become a pioneer. When she took her first makeup course in the early 1980s, Key West bodypainters like Tioti, Joe Carter and Tony Gregory had already been in business for years. [See "Adventures in the Skin Trade," page 38.] "I didn't even know the phrase ‘bodypainting' back then," Gair says. "But with the very first face I worked on, I instinctively just utilized all the colors in front of me and applied them all over the person's entire face in a fantasy type of way. Being a Kiwi, I've never thought of the head as separate from the body. And I don't think of the hair and the backdrop as separate, either. It's all one image. Typical New Zealander—I just took the ball and ran with it."
And the playing field was nearly empty. Gair's only real predecessor as a bodypainter in the fashion world was the statuesque 1960s supermodel Veruschka, who had collaborated with the photographer Holger Trulzsch on a remarkable (and expensive!) 1986 art book called Transfigurations. The book, in which Veruschka used painstakingly applied makeup to transform herself variously into animals, statues and movie starlets like Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth, was considered groundbreaking enough to merit a foreword by Susan Sontag, but as far as the general public was concerned, bodypaint was something hippies wore, not fashion models.
Gair changed all that. "She has inspired more people in bodypainting than anyone except Veruschka," Tracy says. "But Joanne has taken it to the commercial world in a way that Veruschka never did, and she's ignited a lot of brains as a result—including my own. That Vanity Fair cover let me know for the first time that a certain kind of image was even possible."
Like Veruschka, Gair immediately recognized bodypaint's enormous potential as a tool for visual trickery: to give a woman's skin the appearance of stone, wood or metal, for instance, or to seamlessly blend a model, chameleonlike, into a textured background. In some of her most highprofile work—like her 2006 Sports Illustrated photo spread featuring Heidi Klum in a series of 1940s-style "Vargas girl" poses and painted-on costumes—Gair's work barely even registers as paint. As you flip through the pages, you start to wonder whether Gair should properly be classified as a makeup artist or a fashion designer.
"I discovered some of those tricks on my very first assignment as a makeup artist," Gair says. "I was assigned this gorgeous girl—beautiful face, big lips—but she was of Yugoslav descent, so she had that deep undereye and a band of dark color under her eyes. It was too deep and dark to hide just with concealer and foundation. So I wound up deciding to just go ahead and paint a pair of sunglasses onto her face. And in doing that, it registered with me that of course I would need to sort of foreshorten the lens to make it look optically convincing. And to that end, I used a drop shadow as well—that's still one of the biggest tricks I use to make the image appear three-dimensional. There you go: there's a good secret for you."
GAIR'S TECHNIQUE has come a long way since then. In her 2005 photo book "Paint A 'Licious," Gair does some of the most elaborate work of her career.
Most of the pictures are comical, Gair's sense of humor pitched halfway between Norman Rockwell wholesome (a little boy, painted to blend in with the Christmas presents under the tree, waits with a butterfly net, hoping to capture Santa Claus) and Benny Hill bawdy (two middle-aged women, their bodies painted to match the wallpaper, infiltrate the men's changing room at a gym). Key Westers will appreciate the shot of a beachside tiki bar where two shirtless men sit with huge—and hugely deceptive—personal ads painted on their backs.
Gair says she wanted the photos, which she took herself, to show off her silly side, but the book also reflects her conviction that bodypainting should be a freeing medium, one that enables any woman, no matter how "average-looking," to live out her unlikeliest fantasies—the pages are full of images of seniors transformed into ballet dancers and overweight men and women made skinny again with a few strokes of Gair's brush.
In the nearly 15 years since "Demi's Birthday Suit," the bodypainting scene has exploded. (Jeff King, a Vancouver-based artist and the organizer of a traveling, cross-Canada bodypainting festival called "Body Gras!", tells me he had to turn down applications from 100 artists this year alone.) Gair's work still defines bodypainting as far as the public is concerned, but the new group of artists that has sprung up in her wake is eager to emphasize that there's more to the genre than just optical illusions.
"I'm very glad Joanne has started shooting her own stuff," says Leroy Roper, a respected bodypainter who lives and works in Dallas, Texas, "because I don't think she ever got the recognition she deserved for what she does. Behind-the-scenes people tend not to get any credit from the media. The only problem with things like the Vanity Fair cover, from my standpoint, was that it meant all people wanted from then on was to have a suit painted on them."
Some fine-art bodypainters, who can spend an entire day perfecting a single creation, look down on the much more quickly executed body-art jobs that are common at Fantasy Fest with disdain, but Gair thinks they're missing the point. "Bodypainting isn't brain science," she says. "It's not to be taken seriously."
And any event such as Fantasy Fest that actively encourages women to experience bodypainting is all right by her. "As soon as you put any kind of surface on your skin," she says, "even if it's just paint, there's a certain comfortableness that happens. You can forget that you're revealing those parts of yourself that all of us throughout the world are conditioned to think twice about exposing. And it lets you stop worrying about how you look. Bodypaint is very forgiving."
