I recently read about 40 artists painting 60 nudes in Union Square Park in New York City. They weren’t painting canvases but people, from head to toe.
I asked myself how they got to that point; not from moral aversion, but from practical curiosity. Did the first instance happen when an artist run out of canvas and kept transferring his/her creative vision directly onto the model in a frenzy of brush strokes.
Then, walking past the Fish Hoek Life Saving Club the other day I discovered what I am almost certain is the genesis of this fascinating artistic expression.
You start off signing the registrar, then you scrawl on the bursar, and you end up graffitiing the head of Human Resources.
From there it’s just a hop, skip and a jump (or a splash, dab and a stroke) to covering 60 naked bodies in paint in public in the open air.
