Bodies of Work exhibition at the McGuffey Art Center

Bodypainting is the world’s oldest art form. Long before modern humans arrived on the scene, and hundreds of thousands of years before the first cave paintings, early people were already painting their bodies with clay and other natural pigments, and every culture in history has practiced some kind of bodypainting. Sometimes when creating one of my artworks on a (very patient) naked person, I imagine being part of a long, unbroken timeline of body art-making, going back to the world’s first artists. I’ve tried to express that idea in the piece Origins.

Because bodypaintings are ephemeral, I design them with photography in mind. Bodies of Work is a selection of large-format photos from my ongoing science fiction NSFWar of the Worlds series (that was recently exhibited at the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas), my Flower series, and various other projects.

Many of these photographs are composites of multiple images. Like old-school practical effects in a movie, the “live action” component- a bodypainted model- is photographed in the studio or on location, miniatures and other elements are shot separately, and all of the pieces are carefully assembled in Photoshop to create the resultant artwork. I painted the “graffiti” backgrounds and the models, built the props, monsters, miniature spacecraft and buildings by hand, and photographed and Photoshopped all of it. Generative AI is not used in these images.

Without my wonderful models, these Bodies of Work would not exist. I’m grateful to have found such fun, creative collaborators, who are somehow always willing to do the outlandish things I ask of them.

-RUR

Russell U. Richards