“The Last South China Tiger” (YouTube)

In January 2010 Artist Craig Tracy showed his work “The Last South China Tiger” using the bodies of three models, inserted onto a painted background, as his canvas.

The work had been commissioned for the organisation “Save China’s Tigers” by the founder of the charitable foundation, Li Quan. “I initially wanted to call for volunteer models to come forward and have their body painted into tigers to produce a 2010 calendar along with real tiger images. But upon seeing Craig’s breathtaking work in a local newspaper, I thought this was just the right artist we needed, as Craig is two artists in one – painter and photographer”.

The Artist

In February 2006 Craig Tracy opened the PaintedAlive Gallery in his home city, New Orleans, La, USA. PaintedAlive is the first gallery in the world dedicated exclusively to fine art Bodypainted images.

But where did his interest in using the human body as a canvas start?

The body has been adorned in “paint” for thousands of years and can still be seen today in tribal rituals and celebration around the world. Craig himself hints that it possibly started, in his case, in the preparations, as a child, for the Mardi Gras carnivals in New Orleans.

Certainly by the time he was sixteen, in his high school years, he was working sometimes fifty to eighty hours week, at nights and weekends in his local mall as an airbrush artist. His biography says: “There he primarily painted custom t-shirts and other personalized gift items. It was an important time for the young artist as he quickly learned how to paint almost any image on a vast multitude of surfaces.”

 By the time he was 20 he had graduated with honors from The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, but his next six years as an Airbrush Illustration artist, painting mainly commercial and industrial images, left him cold. He quit this to return to painting “murals, t-shirt designs and just about anything and everything possible.” It was another five or six years before he started to consider body painting seriously. As Craig himself says:

“The day that I finally asked myself ‘why’, why I liked painting on people so much, that led me to… Well, what if I take this passionate interest seriously? That one question and a quick Google search changed the course of my life.”

He initially began collecting the works of other body artists, before releasing his first images: “The Nature Series” a collection of fifteen images which was very well received.

As well as carrying out his own work, he receives commissions, sometimes from clients who want to be the canvas for his work. Occasionally he will work with another body artist to produce work such as “Elements” (shown below), where the two artists use each others body as the canvas to produce the finished work.(In this case it was with the German body painting and makeup artist, Britta Herold.)

Craig Tracy is now considered a cornerstone in Bodypaintings progressive movement.

 The Art

 
“Inclement”

“KindredLG”

“Sax-Green”

“Inferno”

“Speed”

“Ultramarine”

“Winter”

“Eminence”

“Elements”

To see more of Craig’s work you can visit his site at http://www.paintedalive.com/gallery.html

Also by C. Jordan in his “Amazing Art” series:

The Amazing Hand Art of Guido Daniele

The Amazing Epic 3D Street Art of Edgar Mueller

Amazing Art: The Dynamic Driftwood Horse Sculptures of Heather Jansch

Amazing Art: Eric Joisel Turning Paper Into Dollars