It dawned on me that I really couldn't mention the talented work of Joanne Gair in the context of a post about body painting without showing you some of her amazing work, so now I've decided to do just that.
Joanne's work is especially sexy in addition to being impressively detailed. She's done the body painting on many famous models for issues of Sports Illustrated over the years, including painted on swimsuits and sports jerseys.
Joanne Gair is an artist and image maker who has emerged as the premiere make-up artist/body painter in the world. Originally from New Zealand, Gair had a keen interest in art photography and exploring different mediums, which is what eventually led her down the path as an illusionist and to the United States.
As a make-up artist and body painter, Gair has worked worldwide with the top photographers, directors, super models and celebrities. Her work spans all media, with many memorable editorial covers and layouts, fashion campaigns, advertising, music videos, commercials and motion pictures to her credit.
Gair’s extensive work with editorial (Vogue, W, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Black Book, Harper's Bazaar), fashion campaigns (Donna Karan, Versace, Victoria’s Secret, Guess, bebe) and cosmetic companies (L’Oreal, Maybelline, Revlon, Oil of Olay, Rimmel), has established her as a fixture in the Fashion Industry. Her editorial work spilled over to a two year stint as beauty editor for New York based Black Book magazine.
Almost everyone has seen the August 1992 issue of Vanity Fair, featuring Demi Moore wearing nothing but a suit of body paint. This cover earned Gair worldwide recognition and put her at the pinnacle of the body art genre. The brilliantly painted swimsuits in the 1999 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, featured a twelve page layout using six models as the canvases for Gair’s art. The bathing suits (replicas of original designs) exemplify Gair’s close attention to detail and sense of realism that have made her the master of the art of illusion. Her work has now become a yearly fixture in the SI Swimsuit Issue.
Under the title of "Women's image and imagery" the painter Sumera Jawad has undergone the pain of discovering bitter realities buried since long ago. She has excavated with her brush, the buried history by unveiling the "image" of women through her imagery, that is why the myth, legends and literary characters of influential women are seen creeping through the scraped and scratched lines out of thick and thin layers of paint and printing ink.
Woman has been there, breathing in Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads and Gospels, carved in and out of the solid rocks. The lusty hands of the craftsmen for all time, slipped over the curves and contours of female body whenever she was encaged in the schist, sandstone or marble or her passionate looks enriched the colours to be dragged upon a surface in search of eternity. She has been under gaze since ages which has stretched her image on psychological, as well as concrete canvass to entitle the artist's imagery.
Man's life has never been complete without woman's image but in the way, he had wanted her to be, with some exceptions of a few sacred relationships and social bounds. Women's image developed mainly through man's imagery so, not to the surprise, sometime she was sited as a sacred and divine goddess or demigod under the ultimate intimacy, while sometime, contrary to that, she worn the title of witch, prostitute and the perpetual sinner.
Woman's image is as old as her association with Eve, she was first being dreamt by Adam as his counterpart; a well accepted religious doctrine. In a social context her image has always been there among all the civilizations and societies right from the Paleolithic Age, with the passage of time, which was excavated to the modern lifestyle of cyber life.
