My Body is the Art: He spends 800 hours staying still as a friend Transforms him to Incredible Painting

Afrik Update

Arts

By Mark Duell

This man really does suffer - staying completely still for up to 15 hours at a time to be turned into a human painting.

                           
  

Chadwick Gray's body is used as a canvas for his friend and fellow artist, Laura Spector, who creates these extraordinary paintings with special water-based theatre make-up from Berlin, Germany.

The pair, who are originally from New York and now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, have spent more than 15 y

ears scouring museum stockrooms around the world in search of controversial paintings.

                      Duo: Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector are friends and artists from New York and now based in Thailand
Mr Gray has now spent more than 800 hours as a motionless canvas - and admitted staying still can be a challenge, saying: ‘In order to stay completely still for so long I almost go into a sort of trance.’

He added: ‘I think of it as a meditation of sorts really but I usually try to focus on something else. I certainly remember the four paintings that have caused me the most pain.

      

‘Once we did a live performance in a store window and I had my left arm draped over my head for four hours straight. It took me four days to regain a full sense of feeling in that arm.’

The paintings they have recreated include the likes of Nell Gwyn as St Catherine by Sir Peter Lely, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Ms Spector added: ‘Most of these pictures were created by men painting women, so this is turning it completely on its head with a woman quite literally painting a man.
      

  

‘Some are much more difficult than others but we try to find coincidences within the paintings which can be imitated on Chadwick's body.

“Once we did a live performance in a store window and I had my left arm draped over my head for four hours straight. It took me four days to regain a full sense of feeling in that arm”

Chadwick Gray, human canvas

‘Most people really enjoy the pictures - they see them as something completely different and interesting to look at.’

A description on the pair's website says their Museum Anatomy project is ‘a collection of documentary photographs of works from museums around the world that have been recreated onto the human body. The recreated paintings of these historic portraits recapture the subjects in their own moment in history.’