I started looking at ways I could use my body to actually create art. I was looking at Yves Klein and most his Anthropometries project. In this work, he used naked women as human paintbrushes and put on a performance piece in front of a live audience. While fully clothed, he conducted the women to cover themselves in paint and make prints of their bodies. While the women were performing there musicians playing Klein’s monotone symphony, a single note that was played for twenty minutes which was them followed by twenty minutes of silence.
This got me very interested and I wanted to look into creating something using this as influence. So, I booked out the project room out at the art school and had a play around. The first hurdle was finding paint that would be safe to use on my body, I ordered body paint that ended up being tiny bottles that would not go very far, but I ended up finding water based, non toxic paint that was enough to use and have much left over.
I spent the first hour building up the courage to actually take my clothes off in that room, the panic in case someone walked in or something. But once I did I was pretty care free and it was a hell of a lot of fun just being covered in paint and having fun.
For a first attempt I am quite happy with how they look. I wish the paint was a bit thinker and didn’t look so faded but other than that I am very happy with how they look. Being care free in that room was such a fun experience and creating art while doing it just added to the experience and made it so much better.
I am definitely going to book the room out again and create more pieces, hopefully with some thicker paint and i want to try it with monochrome colours instead of having a load of different colours on the go, hopefully will make it look not too much like a blur.
I had a playlist on while I was doing this to help try calm me down a bit, it made it more flowy and helped me loosen up quite a bit and stopped me being panicked.
