Burning Man Festival

Originally held in 1986 at San Francisco’s Baker Beach, the week-long Burning Man Festival now takes place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The festival is a week-long event that starts on the last Monday in August, and ends on the first Monday in September. Up to 68,000 people from around the world gather at the festival and spend a week in the remote desert isolated from the outside world.

The festival gets its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy, which is set ablaze on Saturday evening. The event is considered an experiment in self-expression, art, and self-reliance. It’s become a gathering for hippies, artists, musicians and dancers who can for a week explore artistic expression. Money is never exchanged at the event, instead the participants gift each other to get what they need. The main attractions of Burning Man include massive art installations, all-night dance parties, marathon kite-flying sessions, unconventional fashion shows, and classes where festival goers can learn things like Hula Hooping.

They head off one week later, having left no mark whatsoever and wait for the next Burning Man.

http://www.burningman.com/

 

 

Trina Merry – BodyPainting

Trina Merry has the ability to turn human beings into living canvases with her finely detailed paint works. If you ever get to San Francisco, stop and examine the street art and graffiti murals. There is a chance there might be an almost naked person hiding there.

Merry got started when she was asked to get on stage at a concert and get body painted in her underwear. She then apprenticed under the well known body painter Craig Tracy in New Orleans.  She uses non-toxic hypoallergenic paint applied with a brush or airbrush. The painting is temporary, and begins to change texture as soon as she stops painting. For this reason photography is necessary to document the work.

Merry chose the structure of a temple in order to bring awareness to the social business venture “Beyond the Four Walls” in order to empower women in Nepal.

Fine Art of Body Painting

You might not see it right away, but is this really a frog, or something more? The brightly colored image is actually five naked women decorated by body painter Johannes Stoetter to look like a tree frog. With the models perfectly positioned it’s hard to see where there is a separation of their bodies.

Stoetter, started body painting in the year 2000, creating  scenes turning human models into objects found in the natural world, including rocks, trees and animals. The artist is a fine-art body painter from Italy who uses his talent of blending his subjects into their surroundings so well that they disappear.

These works of art, which can take eight hours to complete, have earned Stoetter the world body painting title.

http://www.johannesstoetterart.com/

Fairy Tale Palm Paintings

Based on the fairy tales of famous writers like Hans Christian Andersen, Russian artist Svetlana Kolosova paints works of art on the palm of her hand.

Svetlana Kolosova has always has always appreciated the arts, but taking care of her children and running a household  left her little time to concentrate on her passion. Without the time to work on detailed oil paintings, she replaced oil paint for watercolors and inspired by the stories she had read to her children, she started painting fairy tale-inspired artworks on the most convenient canvas she could think of – her left palm. Except through photography these images are short lived. As of yet no original palm paintings have been sold.

Car Sculpture Made Out of Posing Humans

Austrialian-based artist Emma Hack makes awesome works of art using an unusual medium – human bodies. Don’t panic, all the humans are still alive and well. Hack is a diverse multimedia artist specializing in Skin Illustration, Photography and Sculpture. We love this sculpture of a crashed car entitled “Body Crash” that she made by positioning human models in various poses and painting them as a whole. We cannot help but be mesmerized by the visuals – trying to spot a limb is fun…go ahead, give it a whirl! This particular work of art required the participation of 17 people – each person played an integral role in the creation of this sculpture, and each model had to remain perfectly still while Hack painted the facade of his/her body that was showing in order to produce the illusion of a visual.

Pretty cool art, right? But wait, there’s more. Hack’s involvement in this sculpture is in support of the Motor Accident Commission of South Australia – a company whose goal it is to outline the dangers (and in this case, the consequences) of speeding.

http://www.emmahackartist.com.au/