Rather than hiding the models, however, Tracy celebrates the shapes of their bodies, often exaggerating them and using them for creative effect. Owner of the world’s first gallery dedicated to fine art body painting (located in New Orleans), Craig Tracy creates his own beautiful and surreal body painting portraits that blend human models into backgrounds or turn them into psychedelic works of art. “It is the transformation of a human being into a breathing, moving, living work of art.” Painted Alive: Brilliant Work by Craig Tracy “Body painting is not just paint on a living canvas, it is picking up the body shapes in a subject and the painting on the body,” Marwedel told PSFK. The graceful, flexible bodies of performance artists are an ideal medium for artist Gesine Marwedel, who uses paint to turn them into animals like flamingos, dolphins, hummingbirds and tigers. It can take as long as nineteen hours to apply the makeup for a single scene. The models must be painstakingly hand-painted to match up perfectly with backgrounds that are often very complex, and then remain perfectly still so the scene can be photographed. Painted models virtually disappear into patterned backgrounds in works by artist Emma Hack. “When captured on film, the living, breathing people underneath the paint disappear, overshadowed by the masks of themselves. The paint washes off, but the smiles never do.

Artist and model renowned for her performances and body art. Safe, private and above all else fun, Love and Paint is the first at-home romance-art kit to bring couples together creatively, through art. “The models are transformed into embodiments of the artist’s interpretation of their essence,” says Meade. Milo Moire is a Swiss performance artist, psychologist and painter who lives in Dusseldorf. Those aren’t two-dimensional paintings on a flat surface they’re real, live people transformed into human canvases by artist Alexa Meade.

Body paintings on canvas