Sorry it’s been a while since I posted one of these (click here for the full series) — as always, this series seeks to show people with significant facial modifications, with photos showing where they started and how they got to where they are now. If you’d like to be in a future series, please get in touch with me — I’d like to keep this series going! In any case, here are today’s personal evolutions (click to zoom in):
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Personal Evolution – Part V
Here’s part five in ModBlog’s ongoing series showing the personal evolution and transformation of people with significant facial body modifications, tracking them from before they were modified, to their current states, plus a few steps along the way. As I said, this is ongoing, so if you’d like to be involved (or know someone who should be included), get in touch with me via my facebook page or via email, including the relevant images. Thanks again to everyone who’s taken part — it’s been wonderful watching people take control of their biological destiny and set it on a new course that more closely matches their dreams.
As always click the “evolution” tag for the whole set!, and click the pictures to zoom in. Yesterday we made some changes to the way ModBlog displays pop-up images — they now no longer shrink to the size of your screen if they’re too big to fit, so I hope this will allow people without gargantuan monitors to properly view these very large images.
Personal Evolution – Part IV
I’m happy to release another installment in ModBlog’s series on the transformative journeys of individuals with significant facial modifications! As always, you can hit the “evolution” tag to see the whole series, and if you’d like to take part in a future post, please send me a small collection of headshot photos, starting with before you began modifying yourself, ending with where you’re at now, and a few steps inbetween (I’m easiest to reach at [email protected] or on my Facebook page). If you know someone you think should take part, send them a link to the series and encourage them. Thanks to everyone who has taken part so far. Click to zoom in, and enjoy!
Personal Evolution – Part III
I proudly present part three in a series of entries that at a glance shows individuals with significant facial mods from the beginning of (or before) their transformation to their current state. You can click the “evolution” tag to see the whole set. If you’d like to take part, please get in touch with me along with relevant images, via either email ([email protected]) or Facebook. Enjoy, and click to zoom in!
Personal Evolution – Part II
This entry continues in a series that shows the personal aesthetic evolution of people with facial modifications, tracking them from before they started (or as early as they can document) to where they are now, with a few steps in between. If you’d like to take part by the way, please drop me a line via email ([email protected] just for this project; please use the regular channels for normal BME submissions) or on my Facebook page, including at least three relevant photos. Enjoy!
Oh, and an interesting side comment — for a lot of heavily modified individuals, I’ve noticed it’s hard for them to track down unmodified photos (or even sometimes “less modified” photos), as if they’re making efforts to erase any record of who they were before so that their current state can be eternal.
Remember, you can click the “evolution” tag to see all entries of this type.
Personal Evolution
I’m starting a new series for ModBlog called “Evolution” (so in the future you’ll be able to see all of them by clicking the “evolution” tag). Here are the first eight — more will follow in future entries. The point — as if it’s not obvious — is to show people with prominent facial modifications transitioning from their unmodified form to where they are now, with a picture or two inbetween. Click to zoom them by the way. Without further ado, I bring you…
Rose Adare: Restraint & Revolution
Recently a friend forwarded me a video of an art opening — the one I’ve included below — asking me if I recognized anyone. I watched the video with curiosity, and yes, I did recognize someone, seeing my friend Kala Kaiwi (who was just featured in part III of the “Evolution” series) and a number of other modified and atypical models immortalized in paint. The artwork turned out to be that of Hawaiian artist Rose Adare, who I tracked down and interviewed about her current Restraint & Revolution gallery show.
“I set out to paint nontraditional people in a traditional medium.”
I should also mention that you can find out more about Rose and her art at her website RoseAdare.com, where you can also get in touch with her about both originals and prints (which are very reasonably priced by the way, starting at $20). Her current show will be at Holualoa’s J+ Gallery until March 10, 2013.
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* Are you a modified person yourself, or more of a fan?
I don’t have any hardcore bodymods yet, though I do have a fiery tattoo on my lower back I drew while learning to fire spin in Ireland, and I have four spike piercings crowning the top of my ear. All of my piercings were done by Kala Kaiwi, our resident specialist on the Big Island of Hawaii — he’s also the model in Primal Buddha.
* How did you get into piercing and tattoos?
A lot of things drew me to bodymod. I was a San Francisco goth while studying at the Academy of Art University — another shadow in the Deathguild scene, dancing on coffins at Spike’s Vampire Bar at Burning Man! In 2005 I was in a collision with a municipal train and wound up in ten body braces. With the overall body-pain I had to escape the cold of San Francisco so I moved to Hawaii. I wound up living with the wonderful John Corbin — R.I.P., fondly remembered as Burning Man’s flaming bagpipes. He used to have a flamethrower which would set off a huge jet of fire when he wailed! His house was covered in surreal murals, and my room was a bright pink girly-girl room with a mural of Pudge the Fish (the sandwich eating fish from Lilo and Stitch). Here’s me, lying in black, in a bright pink room with Pudge the Fish. Aloha!
Years later my partner, Alex Stitt, the fire dancer in Pyro Paramour, moved into a new place with Robert Bennett, the model in the painting Ardens. I adore Robert. He’s family, and the one who painted all the murals in my old house. He’s one of the best tattoo artists on the Big Island, and unlike many tattoo artists he’s also a painter, which gives him an eye for detail and form, and his professionalism is next to known.
* What were you “trying to say” with this series of paintings?
When I was dreaming of Restraint & Revolution I was imagining all the different kinds of corsetry. The painting series is about how people push social boundaries, and corsets are amazing because they have transformed from a symbol of chastity worn under the clothes, to sexy, naughty lingerie worn over top. A complete 180! Everyone in the series pushes those boundaries. Kimberly Dark (Mysterium) is one of the top six LGBT speakers in the country, Carol Queen (Queen 2B4) founded GAYouth and the Center For Sex and Culture — the woman added words to the sexual dictionary! — Jason Webley (Eleventh Hour) is an underground musical genius, Buffy Saint-Marie (Sky Dance) is a Native American musical powerhouse, Ariellah Darker Still (Bring Me My Ghosts) created Dark Fusion belly dance, and Master Obsidian and slave Namaste (Genuflect) are award-winning sex positive role models. They’re all amazing because they change the world by expressing who they are. I mean, if we’re talking about body-mods and self actualization, let’s talk about Billy Castro (Bonnie is Clyde). He’s a transgender porn star. He even spoke at Stanford at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
* But beyond corsets of the traditional body-reshaping clothing type, you’ve also painted the play piercing sort?
Naturally, I wanted to paint a corset piercing. At the time Robert was dating the fetish model Stembot (who’s in the painting Acceptance). She leapt off the couch and said “Let’s do it!” Next thing I know, we’re at Kala Kaiwi’s mod-shop lancing eighteen hoops into her back. That’s how I met Kala. His work is brilliant. Scarification, implants, subdermals — he can do it all and he has it all. Implants in his forehead, spikes drilled into the top of his head, tattooed eyes, knotwork patterns in his skin. Everything. About a year later Stembot moved back to the mainland and Robert met Jesi Collins (Venus Unbound). She’s also an amazing tattoo artist and a wonderful mom (Robert tattooed a lot of the work on her left leg). She and her daughter came to live with us. She has a starfish implant in the back of her hand (which you can’t see in the painting because of her pose), as well as a magnet embedded in her finger to perform magic tricks like picking up paper clips and making them spin on tables. She also has a puffer-fish tattooed on her right leg so when she bends her knee it puffs up! I guess we were one fantastic, freaky family after that. We used to go down to the cliffs in the jungle and Kala would pierce Jesi’s back with these huge meat hooks then Robert would suspend her from a tree and swing her out across the water.
* How literal are you with your portraits?
I paint people as they are — though Koyote (in the painting Koyote) is wearing costume horns because he’s a fire performer, and I think they suit him. Sexy devil! However, people are motion, and paintings are still. What I mean by that is people, in life, transform from second to second. Every smile and frown and twitch creases the face, so the idea you have of them is an amalgam of these images — the serene, the troubled, the beautiful, the fear; all mashed together. A painting is like picking one character out of the play that is you. My painting of Kala, for example, is undoubtedly him, though only one or two aspects. Unlike photographs, paintings are more than a mere snapshot. They’re archetypes, like streamlined forms of self.
* What about with their body art? For example, do you try and be literal with their tattoos, or do you take liberties to make their tattoos match your artistic style or commentary?
I love painting tattoos because they are the literal meaning of organic art. When it comes to painting in general, I use sacred geometry like the vesica piscis or the nautilus spiral, blending and softening around the edges before bringing it in for detail. This means that certain tattoos come into focus, just as your eye would focus, while others phase out into basic shapes and color. People can’t see everything simultaneously, and that’s important to remember in portraiture. It’s one of the key differences between Classical Realism and Photo realism. An excellent tattoo painter is Shawn Barber. He focuses on the detail of tattoos.
* What sort of response have you gotten to this series?
The response to my art has been nothing but excellent. Restraint & Revolution will be visiting the mainland U.S. within the next year before moving on to Europe. Yet we were careful about starting in Hawaii. Hawaii’s art is Hawaiiana. Dolphins and orchids and sunset “plein air” landscapes. Hawaii is so vibrant and colorful artists have to compete with nature herself to capture anything half as brilliant. My art, because it evolves out of Classical Realism, takes on more somber tones, and there’s nothing quite like these portraits out here. Our opening at the East Hawaii Cultural Center drew more people than they’d ever had at a single event! People came out in droves, and it was a mixed house. The classic Hawiianna art scene, the local island vibe, the hippies from the jungle, the fetishists from the off grid dungeons, the college students from UH Hilo, the vacationers fresh off the cruise ship — everyone wanted to see! And the truth is, people are often afraid to ask, especially about bodymods. They want to know “does it hurt?” or “why did you do that?’ or “how does that work?” or “is her hand really magnetic?” But at the same time that little voice says “don’t stare, don’t be rude.” At the art show we posted bios of each model so people could read all about these different intersecting, counterculture, underground, subculture lifestyles.
* Beyond capturing a sense of breaking sociopersonal boundaries, is there any other theme to your artwork?
I set out to paint nontraditional people in a traditional medium. Fine art can be so stiff and traditional. Masterfully skilled but thematic. Contemporary art, especially abstract art, can be so expressive that in the end there’s more message than talent or skill. I love the traditionalists, but we can’t all be Da Vinci. I love the innovators, but we can’t all be Duchamp. Fine art needs to evolve, in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood broke the mold, and the Impressionists blurred the boundaries, and the Surrealists escaped reality. But there is a magic to fine art, an alchemy in oil paint, and a soul in composition that we’re losing to Photoshop and instantaneous art. Each portrait takes well over one hundred hours, and is infused with gold leaf, and santo paolo, and whiskey, and peyote — and in the portrait of Koyote even some of my own blood. Blood, sweat and tears. That’s Fine Art. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in instantaneous art, I believe in instantaneous expression, and I believe everyone is an artist, and everyone has a message, and that’s the truth. But which iconic images survive the test of time? Some changed the very way we saw the world. Look at Picasso and Georges Braque and Cubism. But others survived because they captured time and place. Toulouse-Lautrec immortalized Montmartre, as did Modigliani. I love to celebrate people. I love to celebrate our time, and the bodymod scene is a huge part of that. Blood, sweat and tears. That’s love. That’s dedication. And that’s art.
Facial Evolution
This facial flesh removal done By Lestyn at Divine Canvas in London, looks bold and striking when fresh and quite subtle when healed. I really dig the healed look on the right side personally.
To see both sides in their freshly cut glory, keep on keeping on.
Evolution is Beautiful — BME/News [Publisher’s Ring]
– George Sheehan
Like Toph who I also recently interviewed, G.C. (iam:G.C.) is one of a growing handful of people choosing to stretch their lip piercings out to dramatic sizes, defining an entirely new aesthetic code, unique in Western history. As well as other stretched piercings, he currently wears a 41.5mm plate in his lip, and took some time out to talk to us about his successul life — which you may be surprised to hear is full of fishing trips and a cadre of unpierced friends.
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ModBlog News of the Week: April 22nd, 2011
This week’s news is coming to you from a hotel in Dallas, TX. This weekend is the annual Dallas Suscon, and I’m here for those of you who weren’t able to make it this year. Over the weekend I’ll be posting up photos and stories from Suscon, as well as getting some interviews for later in the week. But enough about that, lets get to the news.
Today’s lead story is about a tattoo that the owner should have thought twice about getting.
When Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was routinely looking through snapshots of tattooed gang members, he saw something that caught his eye – a crime scene he was familiar with. Anthony Garcia, a member of the Rivera-13 gang, had a tattoo that resembled the scene of the liquor store killing of 23-year-old John Juarez in Pico Rivera on Jan. 23, 2004, reports the Los Angeles Times.
There were numerous details the murder inked on the gang member. The paper reports that the tattoo included the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where Juarez was shot and killed, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign. Above everything read the title, “RIVERA KILLS”, a reference to the gang. A helicopter was also placed above the scene raining down bullets, a nod to Garcia’s alias “Chopper.”
I suppose it’s good to be proud of your accomplishments. Although tattooing a crime scene on your chest probably isn’t the best idea if there’s a chance you’ll ever have your photo taken by the police.
There’s still more news to come, so keep on reading.
Last week I featured a story from New Zealand where a school has lightened up their dress code to allow minimal facial piercings. Now that it’s been a week, the “voices of reason” have come out of the woodwork to pronounce that the sky is falling.
EVERYONE KNOWS that teenagers are insane. At some early point within their pubertal experience, the cute kid metamorphoses into an irrational chemical dump and we wave them goodbye forever. If we’re lucky, the transformation presents a fully fledged adult. But, as with monarch chrysalises caught by a frost, you can get the misshapen beasties too. Their wings twisted, they can’t fly, can’t forage for themselves, and eventually you euthanise them in the freezer.
I must say, though, that today’s teens, perhaps as a direct result of the televisual, are streets ahead of their parents in this regard. Like commercial radio, they have split into a bewildering array of sub-sets. As a general rule, everyone has some sort of niche in 2011 – their parents had few. So you can be a sports jock, one of the popular kids, a nerd, an arty, a Glee gay, a gangsta or a Jesus/Mohammed/Hare Krishna freak. We never had that array in our time – you either played team sport or you didn’t.
The principal has decided to allow self-mutilation as part of the school uniform. From this week, teenage girls who stick pins through their tongues, lips, ears, noses and eyebrows will be allowed to keep the fellmongery that makes up their face. One presumes that tattoos are next – the tramp stamps beloved of this generation of teen girls who wish to be seen as uniformly rebelling against uniformity. Presumably, this desire also drives the wish to revert to the stone age, or at least the bronze.
Forgive me, but it has always seemed that those who do self-mutilate are either not that attractive, or on some internal and angsty ride to irrelevance. Possibly both. If it is an adornment designed to attract males then it may have some point. Just as a tattoo is a suggestion of sauce, so is the pierced tongue or the ring through the lip. Sluts have always been attractive to men.
Forgive the extended quoting, but there was no way I could leave out some of these ignorant quips. First, if you’re trying to appear knowledgable of youth culture, don’t use a phrase from a sitcom that was created by the old man who is completely clueless. I’m looking at you Pierce Hawthorne. Second, proclaiming that teenage girls are sluts because they get a facial piercing tells me that you may be the one with the fixation on sexualizing children. You better watch out though these “Glee-Gays” and other deviants are only a couple years away from becoming adults, which means they’ll be the ones determining what’s acceptable, and narrow-minded tools like yourself will be forced to sit on the sidelines wondering why they don’t like you.
For many in North America, Spring means tax season. Of course with tax season comes stress and financial worries, but for some, tax season means tax refunds. Not surprisingly if one were to head to a tattoo studio around this time they’ll find that a number of people are using their refunds to get a tattoo.
Now that the deadline for filing income taxes has passed, taxpayers can breath a sigh of relief, and tattoo artists can celebrate. As tax refunds come in, so do their customers. “It’s pretty much like clockwork,” says Marshall Brown, a tattoo artist at Revolution Tattoo in Bucktown. “You see an influx of people.” Brown estimates that business goes up by 5 percent to 10 percent in April.
According to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Center, a quarter of Americans are tattooed, up from 16 percent in 2003, according to Harris Poll. The Pew study said one-fifth of tattooed Americans have six or more works of body art. Mills spent $300 on his tattoo, and if that seems like a lot of money, it shouldn’t. Of 102 people surveyed by this reporter in an unofficial online poll in February, two-thirds said they have spent more than $500 on their tattoos. Nine percent said they had spent more than $5,000.
I can’t say I’m really surprised. I know I’m guilty of paying a visit to a studio just after getting a tax refund.
Up in Alaska, Native American artist Yaari Kingeekuk is hosting a number of lectures explaining the meanings behind her traditional tattoos.
Yaari Kingeekuk’s face, hands and arms make a direct connection with her Siberian Yupik ancestors, and not just through DNA. Kingeekuk is a walking canvas of traditional tattoos that follow designs reaching back for centuries or more.
This week the topic will be those tattoos. Until the early 20th century, most Alaska Native women bore tattoos. The intricate designs of St. Lawrence Island, where the practice continued longer than on the mainland, were considered to be particularly complex and artistic. “Tattoo artists were only women,” Kingeekuk says, “because they took the precise time and they were very graceful with their hands. That’s why they didn’t allow men to do tattoos.”
Historically the designs were sewn into the skin using a needle with sooted thread. But for her tattoos, Kingeekuk went to a parlor. It was a necessary concession to life in the big city in modern times. But she balked at referring to the electric tattoo gun-wielding technician as an artist. “To my mind, he wasn’t a professional professional,” she says. “The art was already planned.” Planned long before she was born. The tattoos present a kind of landscape involving culture, nature, time, family, community, personal accomplishments and world view.Those chin stripes, for example. “They mean I’m a mature woman. I have children.” The single mom has six children of her own, in fact, plus one whom she’s adopted. The seven fluke shapes on her arms count the number of whales that her father caught during his lifetime.
It’s a fascinating article, and definitely worth a good read.
Today’s final story is sort of a celebrity related story, but because I’m Canadian I can chalk it up to being more of a political/cultural story. As you may or may not know, next week marks the first royal wedding in England in a number of years, so of course people are making a big deal of it.
Shop manager Steve White decided to commemorate Wills and Kate’s Royal Wedding by getting the couple’s silhouetted faces tattooed on his leg. Steve, who isn’t even a fan of the royal family, decided to get the unusual tattoo after “a couple of beers’. The 29-year-old said: “I don’t think I’m really marriage material myself, so I thought it would be a good way to celebrate someone else’s wedding.”
So that’s it for this weeks news. Keep an eye out over the weekend for some Suscon posts. As always if you find a story you think would be a great fit for the weekly news post, just send it in.
Have a fantastic weekend everyone.