by Marty Coleman | Jan 7, 2013 | Art, Artists I Love, Veruschka
When I was a young boy, around 13 years old, I would sneak a look at my father’s Playboy Magazines. I was no different than any other boy when it came to what excited me. Then again I was different. The famous 60s supermodel, Veruschka, showed me that with these photos from Playboy that I first saw when I was perhaps 16.
Veruschka – Playboy Magazine, 1971
Seeing a naked woman in art and photography was not that big a deal to me, having grown up around the nude in artworks of all types in my grandparent’s and parent’s homes. But this was not a naked woman, this was a woman transformed into something other than herself while at the same time expressing an even greater sense of who she was. It was a revelation.
Veruschka as a Peacock
Veruschka in Pink
In that and other pictorials she also became men, Marilyn Monroe, unzipped herself and transformed from animal to vegetable among other things. No other woman transfixed my imagination as a youth like she did. All the rest came and went, but Veruschka stayed in my mind as a woman apart. Not a model only, not a muse only, but an artist.
Verushka as a Man
Veruschka the Redneck
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Veruschka started out as Vera Lehndorff but was unsuccessful as a model under that name and so reinvented herself as the mysterious Russian, Veruschka. She actually was born in Prussia (Poland) before WWII and was a very tall and gawky 6’1″ by the time she was 14 years old. She was teased and made fun of for her looks and skinny angularity. She stopped growing at 6’4″. She, along with Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, were the first supermodels, dominating the covers and editorials of Vogue and every other fashion magazine of the 60s and early 70s.
Veruschka – Vogue Cover
Veruschka – Life Magazine Cover, 1967
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One of the most amazing things about Veruschka was that she did almost all the creative work on her fashion shoots. She did her own hair and makeup, as well as have creative control over the editorial scheme of the shoots in many cases. If you look close at her early fashion images you can see the roots of her later artwork.
Veruschka – Early body painting work
Notice the ‘Flower Power’ body painting work from the late 60s.
Veruschka in Brown
Veruschka in Green
Notice how she creates a visual image in which she completely blends in to her background. It’s a life long obsession to blend into the background that you will see reach it’s apex in her artwork.
Cheetah and Veruschka
Early on in her modeling career she worked to incorporate herself as animal into her shoots.
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Fast forward to the 1980s and I find a book by Vera Lehndorff called ‘Veruschka | Trans-Figurations’. It documents a 16 year collaborative art project between herself and the photographer Holgar Trulsch. During those 16 years Veruschka painting herself to match various surroundings, from oxidized metal in abandon factories to boulders to weathered wood to the sky itself. Finding the book was like finding a dear friend after many years and seeing the amazing things she had done with her life. It’s one of my most treasured books because it is that perfect combination of visual beauty, conceptual brilliance, individual creative drive and surprise that I love.
Here are some examples from that book.
Veruschka in the Forest
Veruschka Among Boulders
Veruschka and Electrical Box
Veruschka and Tree
Veruschka and Steel Pillar
Veruschka and Linen Closet
Veruschka and Window
Veruschka and Sky
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If you are thinking you’ve seen this sort of thing done many times before, you are right. Body painting has become a big thing over the past 2 decades in art and media culture around the world. You can see it among celebrities, in sports and in fine art. There are whole groups dedicated to it now with annual conferences and events. Take a look below to see some of the influence Veruschka has had.
Demi Moore
Sports Illustrated Body Paint book
Gotye video still – Somebody That I Used To Know – Emma Hack, artist
And finally here are some contemporary fine artists at work using the technique Veruschka developed.
Bookcase – Desiree Palmen
Bus Stop – Desiree Palmen
Qui Zhijie – tattoo 2
If you are interested in learning more about Veruschka or the evolution of the use of the body as a canvas start in google images and just type in Veruschka body painting and you will find plenty to investigate. Search under Qui Zhijie and Desiree Palmen to find out more about their art.
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Fall/Winter 2016
Winter/Spring 2015
Summer 2014
Winter 2012/2013
Winter 2011/2012
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by Marty Coleman | Jan 4, 2013 | Body Image - 2016, 2013 |
The New Year is resolution time and one of the most popular is to ‘get fit’. With that in mind I thought I would explore the idea of body image for a few days.
Who Owns You?
I saw a report about a murder trial yesterday where a woman is accused of stabbing and murdering her boyfriend. Her defense is that she was abused and it wasn’t murder but self-defense. One of the pieces of evidence is a photo of her in this t-shirt.
Jodi Arias
The defense submitted this t-shirt as evidence that the boyfriend, Travis Alexander, was possessive, going so far as to feel that Jodi was his property and making a shirt that stated such. Now, I don’t know anything about the trial, her guilt or innocence. I am simply using this as an example of how someone can abdicate ownership of themselves. Sometimes it is emotional or psychological, but it can also be physical. You can give up your rights to your own body (or have them taken away under force). A slave is what you become.
A Quandary
This is the quandary we humans find ourselves in. We both own our own body and we are slave to it, bowing to what it tells us to do. If we decide to sit on the couch all day every day, our body has no choice but to obey our command. It will not get up and take a walk unless we tell it to (sleepwalking excluded).
Owning Your Body
As a running coach I start each new season with some simple ideas for the participants. One of these ideas is that we really only have 2 things we run with. Our minds and our bodies. I ask them which controls which? The answer? The mind controls the body. We tell it to run and it runs. The body does what the mind tells it to do. Your body is slave to your mind.
Body Owning You
But that same body we can make bow to our mind’s wishes is also the body that can make our mind cease to exist. Our mind is dependent on our body. Without our body we can’t think, talk, listen, eat, laugh, cry, run, sleep, make love, etc. We cease to function. There are examples such as a concussion that takes our ability to think clearly away for a time or Alzheimers where our physical body slowly but surely causes our ability to think to diminish completely. And then we have the final example of death, where our brain function completely stops and all we could do and all we were conscious of via that brain ceases to exist.
The Bad Marriage
You have heard of marriages, you might even be in one, where you are constantly fighting with each other. You are not on each other’s side and the marriage is destructive. That is what we often do with the relationship between our minds and our bodies. We put our bodies through utter crap and then expect it to sustain us. We follow down paths of destructive thoughts and judgmental ideas about our bodies (and others) and then are surprised when our body and it’s shape becomes something we hate.
The Good Marriage
In the body/mind dichotomy analogy the marriage will always end in divorce. The body will indeed eventually die and our mind/consciousness/spirit/soul will either cease to exist or go on to another plane of existence without the body with which it started.
What we want is that while the marriage is intact for there to be a healthy, happy, and communicative relationship. Our mind listens to our body and takes it seriously and our body listens to our mind and does what is asked of it. It is no different than a real marriage, it takes patience, compromise, communications, love and attention for it to work.
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Drawing © 2019 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
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by Marty Coleman | Jan 3, 2013 | Photographic Sunday, Photography |
Welcome back Napkin Kin to part 2 of my portraits of 2012. Yesterday I covered the Second half of 2012, July-December. Today I am showing the first half with a bit of overlap, January to July.
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Niece, San Diego, CA, 7/12
Niece Jumping at Sunset, Del Mar, CA, 7/12
My drive down from Northern California in July ended with me at my sister’s house in San Diego. I took advantage of the opportunity to do a photo shoot of my young niece. She was quite the natural and loved posing in the backyard and on the beach where I grew up. My sister Jackie of course did a little stage mom thing, hovering, directing, etc. But my niece was a natural and didn’t need much help. She looks a lot like our late mother and that was an extra blessing of being able to photograph her.
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Julia Wade, New York City, NY, 6/12
I went to New York City in June to speak and attend Blog World. I met up with a dear friend whom I worked with back in the 80s and 90s at Eulipia Restaurant in San Jose, CA. Then Julia was a struggling student focusing on opera. I did a number of drawings of her back then in various opera costumes for a huge drawing (I never finished). Now she is now a very well known international recording artist of inspirational/spiritual music. We found some time to walk and talk early one morning before our days started. This was taken at a park right on the edge of the Hudson River. She has a blog called ‘Inspiratus‘. Check out the interview she did with me back in 2009 and then click on home to see her latest entries about her new CD.
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Meredith Wood in Blue, Jacob Javits Convention Center, New York City, 6/12
While I was at the Blog World conference I, of course, needed to eat. Not knowing any good places around the convention center I did what any good social media person would do, I tweeted ‘who wants to go to dinner?’ using the Blog World hashtag. I got a number of responses and ended up going to dinner with Meredith and 2 others. Meredith is from NYC and knew exactly where to go for the best meal, which it was.
Her eyes are almost as brilliant blue as my wife Linda’s and when we returned to the conference I realized her and her eyes would stand out fantastic against the blue that was everywhere in the brightly lit lobby. The next day we found an extra 10 minutes to take some quick shots. I was up on a bench to make sure I got the best blue background.
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Michelle Linn, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK 6/12
Michelle Relaxing, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK 6/12
I have been doing a photo-collage series for a number of years now called ‘IN Public/Private‘. It is of reporters and anchors in the Tulsa area. When my napkins started getting attention and reporters came over to interview me I basically told them, ‘You can interview me if I can take pictures of you’ and that is how it started. In many cases I offered to take some ‘normal’ photos (my version of normal at least) in exchange for them posing for my collage image idea. I also asked them to publicize my project to their co-workers to see if they also might be interested in collaborating.
Michelle was very excited about the idea and we met for the very first time at Philbrook to take the photos. Here are a few of the portraits I took of her. She was an enthusiastic delight and has since become a wonderful friend. Ironically, so far her collage image ended up in a new series called ‘Visual Poems‘ not the ‘IN’ series I had intended her to be in. You can find her at work in the mornings on Fox 23 here in Tulsa.
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Renaissance Faire Kiss, Muskogee, OK, 5/12
Renaissance Faire Gossip, Muskogee, OK, 5/12
In May I led a group of photographers at an outing to the Renaissance Faire. The theme of the shoot was ‘stranger portraits’ and I spent some time before hand explaining to the group how to go about asking strangers to pose for you. Of course, at a venue like the Renaissance Faire, it really isn’t all that necessary to ask since all the participants already know they are going to be photographed and most of the visitors are dressed up and want to be as well. But it is good to know anyway because you often might have to ask them to move from where they are standing or sitting to get a good shot. Here are 2 double portraits I took while I was there.
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Caitlin’s Senior Collection 1, Waco, TX, 4/12
Caitlin’s Senior Collection 2, Waco, TX, 4/12
My step-daughter Caitlin (whose portraits can be seen in part 1 yesterday) was an Apparel Design major at Baylor University. She had her senior collection show in April of 2012 and I was lucky enough to do the photo shoot for the collection. We found one of the most beautiful cemeteries I have ever seen to do the shoot, less than a mile from Caitlin’s house. Here are two of the photos from the shoot.
We also were incredibly lucky to have our first choice of model to bail on us. It freaked Caitlin out a bit of course but the result was we got Rebekah Campbell as our model instead. She had never done a real fashion shoot before and Caitlin was a bit worried about that. Luckily we had nothing to worry about. She was fantastic in her poses, facial expressions, taking directions and overall professional demeanor.
In addition it turns out she is an fine art major focusing on painting so we had an instant connection creatively. I am encouraging her to pursue both modeling and painting as best she can, I have no doubt she will be successful in both.
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Portrait in Black and White, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, 2/12
Woman in a Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK 2/12
In February I took that same photo group I mentioned above to Philbrook Museum of Art. This time the focus was on Black and White. We weren’t only going to have the finished result in BW but actually set the camera to BW so they could see what they were getting from the outset.
One of the photographers had his wife along with him but she was not doing any photography. I persuaded her, in spite of her initial shyness, that she would be a fantastic model for those of us who wanted a person in our images. She eventually got into it and it made for some great images as a result.
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If you are interested in contacting me about doing a photo shoot you can contact me at the contact page in any number of ways.
If would like to see more of my work go to my website, MAKE Studio | Marty Coleman
All photos © 2013 by Marty Coleman | MAKE Studio – All rights reserved. Sharing this page is perfectly fine but please do not reproduce individual without attribution and permission.
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by Marty Coleman | Jan 2, 2013 | Photographic Sunday, Photography |
Hello Napkin Kin! Welcome to 2013.
One of my resolutions is to mix it up a bit on The Napkin Dad Daily in 2013 and one way to do that is to add in more of my other work for you to see.
Here are some of my photographic portraits from 2012. Starting with the latest and going back to July. Let me know what you think of them, ok?
The Morrison Family, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, 12/12
Lauren Morrison, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, 12/12
Kathi Morrison and I met online. She lives in Florida but she used to live in Tulsa and we met because she saw a photo of Philbrook Museum of Art that I had taken. She particularly liked my Velveteen Women exhibition images and we made plans that if I ever made it to Florida, where she lives, we would do a photo shoot together for use in a similar type of photo collage image. I haven’t made it to Florida yet (I am open to a patron/sponsor who wants to pay my way, hint hint), but she made it up to Tulsa to visit with her family. We made arrangements to get together at her favorite place, Philbrook, and do a quick family portrait shoot.
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Courtney in Profile, Tulsa, OK, 11/12
Courtney in the Fall, Tulsa, OK, 11/12
Courtney and I are running buddies. We help coach a 10k intermediate running group here in Tulsa. She is about the same age as my four daughters and we have a similar type relationship. That means I tell what she should do and she rolls her eyes at me. After this past fall running season I did a photo shoot with her that went from inside to outside at sunset among fall foliage. I absolutely love her profile so was really happy to capture it in such beautiful light. It took a little coaxing but once she got into it we had a great time capturing the fall feel in the outdoor portraits.
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Caitlin in the Fall, Dallas Arboretum, Dallas, TX, 10/12
Caitlin in Orange, Dallas Arboretum, Dallas, TX, 10/12
This is my step-daughter, Caitlin. I first met her when she was 13 and I started dating her mother, my now wife, Linda. When she was 15 we did a secret photo shoot so we could make a gift of photos for her mother for Christmas, which she loved. Seven years later we did it again. I went down to Dallas to visit her for a fall weekend. Caitlin loves the fall and pumpkins so when we found out that the Dallas Arboretum had a huge pumpkin display going on we made that our photo destination. These are two of the images from that shoot. We gave the photos to Linda for Christmas this year and she was very happy.
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Anna Kazmi as a Vampire, Oaklawn Cemetery, Tulsa, OK, 10/12
Meera Kazmi as Morticia, Oaklawn Cemetery, Tulsa, OK, 10/12
The Kazmi sisters are famous models in Oklahoma specializing in vintage clothing, accessories and photo shoots. They started wearing vintage clothing, in particular 1940s vintage, as young teenagers. They have an extensive collection of clothing now and are asked to participate in modeling gigs, exhibitions, fashion shows and the like all the time. Their mother, Karen, always accompanies them and the family is a complete delight to know and work with. I asked them to attend our Tulsa Digital Photography Group’s annual Halloween Cemetery shoot and the happily obliged. I stylized these images quite a bit to fit the theme, with Anna making a great vampire and Meera playing a perfect Morticia.
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In July I traveled to California to attend my ex-father-in-law, Dwight Johnson’s memorial service. Since I was driving down from Northern California after the service to visit my father in Southern California I took the opportunity to contact a number of old and new friends in California to see if I could rustle up some photo shoots to allay the cost of the unexpected expense of the trip.
Amy at the Water’s Edge, Morgan Hill, CA, 7/12
Amy with her Feet in the Water, Morgan Hill, CA, 7/12
I first met Amy when I was a High School leader in a church we attended in San Jose, CA back in the 80s and 90s. She was my favorite high schooler in the group, with a fierce intelligence and a very creative streak. We kept in touch all these years and she was on the route to Southern California so I stopped by for a quick shoot. We took off for a small lake she knew of and did some images in the dappled sunlight.
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Kathy in Natural Light, Berkeley Hills, CA, 7/12
Kathy and I waited tables together 30+ years ago at Eulipia Restaurant in San Jose, CA. I had reconnected with her through Facebook and when I let her know I was coming to California she just happened to need some new business and business casual photos. We did a quick shoot at her Berkeley Hills home near where I was staying. The light was fantastic with the entire Bay Area reflecting in her incredible blue eyes.
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Susan with Dog in the Window, Malibu Pier, Malibu, CA 7/12
Susan Looking Up, Malibu Pier, Malibu, CA, 7/12
Unlike the other two I photographed on the trip, Susan and I had only met once before. We met at Blog World New York in June of 2012 at a closing party. We hit it off and later when I was planning my trip she liked the idea of getting some new, more natural portraits done of her. We met at the Malibu Inn and spent several hours there, on the beach and on the pier taking photos. She has a TV and acting background so she was delight to work with.
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That’s a fair amount for now, covering the second half of 2012. I will post first half of my 2012 portraits in the next few weeks. In the meanwhile, if you would like some photos done, you know who to contact! You can see a larger more extensive selection of my portraits and other work I do by going to my other website, http://www.martycoleman.com
All photographs © 2013 MAKE Studio | Marty Coleman
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by Marty Coleman | Jan 1, 2013 | Be It Resolved - 2012 |
It’s with charity in my heart that I tell you it’s day #5 of Resolution Week!
Rant
You know what gets my goat? Did you even know I had a goat? I don’t so never mind. You know what bugs me? When people rant and rail against the big bad welfare recipient who buys malt liquor and cigarettes with food stamps and drives a BMW and goes on vacations to Disney World. It’s not really a specific violator but a generic description meant to enrage people that somehow they personally are getting ripped off because someone who doesn’t deserve something is getting it. In other words, they are pissed off that life is unfair. They have problems and are dealing with them, but in the meanwhile these low-lifes are living high on the hog and not facing their issues and it just pisses people off.
Heart
Part of me understands but a larger part of me sees it as a heart closing up tight. It is the heart finding reasons to not love, to not give, to not have empathy or sympathy or understanding. Because in truth, the overwhelming vast majority of people who are on welfare, food stamps, some sort of government assistance are not in that fraudulent category. But that doesn’t matter to the hardened heart. They just think everyone should be able to do what they have done, make it as they have made it, behaved as they have behaved. And that, along with them telling the fraud story to themselves again and again, give them the excuse to not care. They don’t care because they have rationalized that those people don’t deserve care.
Who Do You Know?
They wouldn’t be able to rationalize like that if they actually knew those people in need, but they don’t. They might know a neighbor who is having a tough time and say, ‘ok, but that is a different story’. They might be told by their pastor about a family at church that had a bad thing happen and they say, ‘ok, but that is a different story’. And they are right, it is a different story. It’s a real story. But each and every person has a real story, even if they appear to meet some cliche.
Charitable vs Irritable
The question is, Where is your heart? Is your heart charitable or is it irritable? You’ll be much happier, and so will those around you, if it’s charity you feel. And that charitable heart will not allow people to do bad things any more than an irritable heart. It will just allow you to approach each person with love instead of judgment.
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Drawing by Marty Coleman
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Answer to yesterday’s trivia question:
Question: Who was the richest man to die on the Titanic and why was he on it?
Answer: John Jacob Astor. He was on the ship because he had married an 18 year old girl after divorcing his wife, a scandal of immense proportions in the US at the time. They had gone to Europe to escape the publicity and let the firestorm calm down. They returned when they learned his new wife was pregnant. She survived, he died. She gave birth to John Astor IV a few months later.
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