PAINTED INDIANS -
A COLLABORATION:

At one point when doing the life-size, full length portraits I had an assistant who was a rock climber with a very muscular back. I also had a painter friend who made Picasso-esqe portraits. I had an idea to have her paint a face on my assistant’s back and do a life size series of photos of his back with a face painted on it. I thought it would be a powerful but confounding image. However, it had no raison d’être, or reason for being: there was no relationship between Patrick’s back and a painted face.

My first full length Native American portrait was of a friend, Bunky Echo-Hawk, who not only had Pawnee “War Paint” on his face, he was also a painter. Suddenly the idea of painting someone’s body made sense, and he agreed, so we were off and running.

We began by painting a face on Tom Cain’s back, then turned him around and painted that same face on his face in Tom Cain II.

This marriage of painting and photography creates an opportunity to combine the real (photograph) with the unreal (painting) and mingle them inexorably. We were able to confound the picture plane: “wait a minute, he’s standing in front of the painting, but the paint is also in front of him!,” create the illusion of transparency in the photograph and generally blur the line between the two media. Not only did the line between the two media become blurred, but using them in this collaborative enterprise enabled us to create a final product that exceeded the boundaries of both painting and photography.

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