A visiting artist is taking body painting to a whole new level as he transforms a woman into a canvass of breathtaking beauty at Direct Art Gallery Saturday.
World renowned body painting artist Craig Tracy creates his latest Painted Alive piece from 5 to 11 p.m. Fans are invited to meet and talk to the artist Friday from 7 to 10 p.m.
During the performance Tracy, who has a degenerative eye disease that threatens blindness, paints directly on a woman's body as he creates his unique artwork.
"As far as being the best, I'm the one that promotes it and represents it as a fine art more than anyone else," said Tracy, won the 2005 World Body Painting Festival championship in Austria and has been a judge there and for other body painting contests around the world. "I've dedicated myself to it full time and I have my own gallery for it and I have other galleries represent me. I do nothing else but fine art body painting. But I'm definitely not the best."
The artist began his career with a conventional medium, but, he said, it seemed that all artists were doing the same thing, which he did not find especially inspiring.
"Through my art career I was unfulfilled, unsatisfied, looking for something that might really be different and yet beautiful," he said. "Then I found body painting through face painting because it is part of our culture."
Tracy was inspired into his new medium after seeing Demi Moore's "birthday suit," the business suit painted on Moore's naked body on the August, 1992 Vanity Fair magazine cover.
"That was when I saw a painting on a human body and it was sort of taken seriously," he said. "The big thing for me was taking body painting seriously instead of seeing it as something you do in a night club or at a carnival."
Body painting has to be done in one waking period, Tracy explained.
"Some happen very quickly and some I do backdrops that take a day or two in advance and then the body paint can take anywhere from eight to 10 hours," said Tracy.
During Painting Alive Craig Tracy's work and limited editions will be on display and available.
Direct Art Gallery is at 1650 Queensway St. For more information call 250-561-7172.
