Moving pictures

An artist faces certain hazards when her canvas is living, breathing, sweating skin.

Her paint can slide off. Her spray-on glitter can itch. In the long hours it takes to create a painting from head to toe, her model can simply walk out.

"It's all about making the model comfortable," says Lawren Alice, a 24-year-old graduate of Norwich Free Academy.

Alice has only been body painting for about a year, but she's already participated in two competitions, recently placing seventh in the North American Body Painting Championships in Las Vegas. Her next venture is to open a gallery dedicated to the art in Philadelphia, where she now lives. And it is art, she says.

"We want to remove (the stereotypes) about it being sexy; being breasts and all these knobby bits being exposed," Alice says. "You see it in Playboy, and on go-go dancers;?that's not what we're trying to do at all."

Working with Musher Lovelund Photography, Alice says the gallery will be called Gallery ML and modeled after the Craig Tracy Gallery in New Orleans, the first of its kind to be dedicated exclusively to fine art bodypainted images. Alice, who visited Tracy's gallery last month and calls him her hero, says she wants to create images that would be beautiful enough to hang in a home.

"We want it to appeal to everyone, even if you don't know anything about art," she says.

For now, Alice only paints women.

"I'm straight, but I find the female form much more attractive, and I paint very feminine," she says. "One day I will venture down that line, but the idea of being around a nude man, I'm not sure I want to travel down that road. It's kind of uncomfortable, I mean, you can imagine."

In competition, models wear pasties and underwear, but the gallery wouldn't have the same requirements.

"We don't want there to be any shame in our art," Alice says.

From tribal cultures to henna painting in India and the Middle East, body painting has been around for centuries, seeing a resurgence in the liberating 1960s. But Alice says it's becoming really big right now, pointing to an AT&T advertising campaign that features painted hands and to the living statues seen on city streets.

Alice moved from her hometown of Lisbon to Philadelphia to attend the University of the Arts, majoring in jewelry design. But after learning how long she'd have to apprentice making minimum wage before she could do her own work, she became disenchanted and dropped out.

She eventually found the job that first brought her paintbrush in contact with skin, when she saw an ad for Stacy's Face Painting looking for help at the zoo.

"My family had been really involved in Halloween since I was young, hiring bands and renting out halls," she says. "They were big on makeup."

The first face she painted was a little girl who wanted the same mask her boss was painting on her twin sister.

"Mine did not look anything like it. The little girl cried and had to wash it off," Alice says.

But soon she was painting faces in three minutes at events around the city.

"Then the face got too small," she says. And her work, although it's still her paying job, got "way too Disney."

"Out of boredom one day, I started painting my friend's neck, then down her shoulder and arm. I was like, hey, that's really cool," she recalls.

In May of last year, she headed south for the Florida Face and Body Art Convention. The prize for body painting was bigger than the one for face painting, so she tried it out, using her friend as a model. Though she had planned out her design, she learned that she wouldn't be allowed to use her laptop.

"I had to paint from memory, just wing it," she recalls. "I wanted something to do with bees. Butterfly and flower designs are so overdone. I'm all about color, the brightest and boldest I could do."

Some artists use an airbrush, but Alice competes in the brush and sponge category. She placed third out of 36 contestants.

"I had no idea how," she says. "But I became, like, extremely addicted."

Vegas was the real thing. Artists have six hours to paint a model from head to toe, give them a headdress, do nails and eyelashes. They give an artist statement and a stage presentation. On the first day the theme was "around the world."

"I chose the general idea of love. I made it up as I went, doing filigree with hearts and roses, writing 'live, laugh, love' in Italian, painting a woman on her back," she says.

The second day was "evolution."

"You can go anywhere with that. I wracked my brain for months," she recalls

She thought about doing rock music, something with the Beatles, but she came across a fossil of a bird and changed her angle. She painted a prehistoric bird, a crow, a bluejay and feathers, adding a feathered wig to the piece.

Alice ran into modeling hazards both days, the first, when her model sweated off much of the paint. The second day, her model got extremely uncomfortable.

"I told her, 'We're not gonna win, so go shower,'" Alice says. "Then they call my name. I was the only one standing up there without a model."

But despite the stresses, Alice says, "I'm freaking happy when I paint. It's all about art and fun."

She hopes to lose some weight in the next year to try being a model for a bodypainter.

"I want to know the experience," she says. "You kinda gotta know what they go through."