Reply To: Is a painted body naked?

[Anonymous]

The “Yo Sea” and “Alive” videos on the blog both remind me of this topic. In “Yo Sea”, the performer (who looks like the artist Isabel Leon so maybe she’s doing her own modelling) goes from naked to painted and it does, in a way, look a bit like a reverse striptease, as she gradually changes from a naked character to a blue character. The blue character isn’t as naked as the naked character. It’s not that the paint hides anything, but it makes me look at the video differently so – when she’s blue – I’m not focusing on the details of her body. i thought at first she was drawing tears, and then I wondered if she was turning into some sort of water character, a bit like a mermaid.

The “Alive” performer is decorated, not painted, but maybe the effect is similar. Although she was obviously naked apart from the decorations, I realised I wasn’t looking at a naked woman but at a performance. The decorations made her look less naked, or at least made the viewer look at her differently from if she was just naked. Part of that was her shaved and decorated pubis. I wonder if she’d have looked more naked if – like the cyclist in the picture (I think) – she’d kept her hair.

I met a woman a few times a few years ago who told me she’d taken up ballroom dancing. She told me she felt as if she was dancing naked “apart from a few strategically placed sequins”. A number of people warned me not to get too close to her – she was a scary fantasist apparently – so I never sought her out and we never bumped into each other again, but it was interesting that either her reality or her fantasy was to be naked despite the sequins, so maybe (at least in her head) the decorations didn’t take any of her nudity away.

Looking at the cyclist in the picture, with the pubic hair, does that mean the artist had to rub the paint into her hair? I could imagine myself being detached enough to paint someone’s shaved pubis, but rubbing the paint in would be a very different experience!!!!

Ed likes this