Bodies of Work

Artist Joanne Gair apologizes to a guest who complains of sensory overload in her presence. “I have that effect on people,” she says. She is a ball of fire in Chinese pajama pants; she is a whirling dervish, a Nepalese tonka with a million faces, a human mandala.

Heidi Klum, Naomi Campbell, Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Demi Moore, Elle Macpherson, Cindy Crawford (shall we go on?)--she’s painted them all. Their bodies are Gair’s canvas. “I’m an illusionist,” she demurs of her body painting, revered in the world of makeup artists.

On Moore, she painted a man’s suit for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1992. Her work on a Madonna video was award-winning. She can command $5,000 a day. Her most famous work, “Disappearing Model,” was in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not in 2000.” It is an astonishing piece of trompe l’oeil in which it is barely possible to pick out the face and body of the model from the red and blue and yellow flowers of the wallpaper. In this, it has, like much of Gair’s work, an eerie beauty. It is the ghost in the machine, the human inside the art, the ultimate self-expression completely erasing the personality of its canvas.

At Smashbox studio on a recent day in Culver City, she is painting roses on a 22-year-old model, Cassie Lane from Australia, for the opening of an exhibit of her work at PhotoImpact gallery in Hollywood that night. The exhibit of Gair’s work (shot by such photographers as Annie Leibovitz, Eva Mueller, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber) will run through the month, and Gair is working hard to make the opening unforgettable.

Lane sits half-naked in a chair she will occupy for eight hours while Gair, with her team of six artists, paints roses and tattoos and jeweled boots on her legs. “I’ve never felt so comfortable topless,” says Lane, who with Gair, will be escorted by three bikers to the show. Gair uses her favorite tool of the trade to decorate Lane: a Sharpie marker. Lane, in curlers and roses, is sucking a cigarette and drinking a glass of chardonnay while Mark Garbarino, a prosthetics artist and special effects man, studiously paints her breasts.

That night, the street in front of PhotoImpact is crowded. A bartender has set up shop on the sidewalk. The dramatically beautiful Ford model Jana, the first model Gair ever painted, towers above the crowd. She appears twice in the collection. Inside, people of all ages walk the halls and admire the photos. It’s one big fashion family.

It’s a marvelous evening for fashion gossip. “She’s gotten huge!” someone whispers to hairstylist Peter Savic, about a colleague who has recently been seen in a size 16. “A real heifer-model.” A Hells Angel biker drinks bottled water and makes a call on his cell phone. Call so-and-so at Ford Classic models, someone advises Frankie Lee Slater, founder of the Art of Living Foundation in Los Angeles.

“I want to model what’s possible,” a woman says obliquely. Meanwhile, the bartender breaks into a flailing fit. “I can’t stand still in front of a naked woman!” he shouts, abandoning his post to watch the entourage arrive on their Harleys.

In the world of body decoration, which includes piercings, elongated ear lobes, ritual scarring and foot binding, body painting is pretty tame. White-faced geishas, glam rockers like David Bowie, heavy-metal rockers, New Guinea tribesmen made up to look like birds of paradise, Native Americans, Indian mehndi designs--these are the forebears of the look Moore and, now, Lane have sported. Lane is not unfamiliar with the world of tattoos. She has a few herself, not to mention a pierced tongue. In fact, she likes her body painting so much that she keeps it on for two days after the opening.

What was it like living as an artwork? She went to a few clubs, staying pretty much in the Hollywood area. “It’s been fun being the center of attention,” she says, but not as much of a crowd-stopper as you might expect. She went to a supermarket “but no one stared. You know L.A.”

Gair, 44, lives behind the Chateau Marmont in a house that makes the word “eclectic” an understatement. Her house has so much iconography from around the world that if someone was the slightest bit religious he’d feel immediately guilty. Ganesh at one end of the room and Jesus on the other. Votive candles everywhere, a painting of the feet of Christ, a Hopi necklace draped on the shoulders of Shiva; Mexican tiles and Moroccan lamps. It’s a tattooed house, every alcove occupied by a prayer to someone’s god.

“My life is like the movie ‘Sliding Doors,’ ” says Gair, who like many in her business keeps her own face unadorned. She might have ended up, for all her fancy upbringing, serving pate to dinner guests, but she chose another path. “Kiwi Joe,” as friends call her, grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, the daughter of politician/diplomat George Gair. She taught dance in 1977 at a primary school, which is where she first began drawing on people with Sharpies and ballpoint pens. The first time she painted a Maori ritual face mask, called a moko--which is traditionally worn by men--on Jana in 1985, it took her several days. It’s taboo to paint a male moko on a woman. “You have to earn your moko,” Gair says, explaining that a local Maori priest told her she had earned the right. Who knows why? Because he sensed a purity in her native heart? Because he felt her respect for his culture? It’s true, New Zealand is Gair’s muse. The color, the ritual, the intimacy with nature.

Gair left New Zealand when she was 21, passed through England, spent a day and a half in Japan and arrived in Los Angeles, where she went straight away to the Chanel and Gaultier salons. Already a name as a makeup artist, Gair told them if they wanted her they could have her; if not, she’d be on the next plane home. They said yes. Soon enough, people in Auckland began stopping her public-figure father and asking if he was related to the famous makeup artist.

She says she’s ready to return to New Zealand, where her work was on exhibit in the Auckland Museum last spring. “This is not a balanced environment,” she says of L.A. “There’s so little capacity for love here.” (Gair talks like this. You just have to learn what she calls “the language of passion.”) “New Zealand is all about family and community, from the Slavic influence to the Maori village culture--it’s all about stories, ancestors and color.”

She wants to sell her house and everything in it, if only to get away from the 27 unfinished projects that track her every move; there’s the Kama Sutra shower, the Venetian candelabra and the crates in the wine cellar that are filled with shards of stained glass from Viennese graveyards.

Body painting is physically exhausting--it can take a full day, sometimes longer, to paint someone--and painters don’t get a lot of respect in the fashion world. And when the work is praised, the photographer usually gets the credit. But the makeup world, in which she reigns, crosses a surprising number of mediums--from music to television to film to stills. And it is somewhere in that cross-section that she may land. “I’m a multimedia girl,” she says proudly.

This is the conundrum: Body painting appeals to her eclectic and sensuous nature, but its very eclectic-ness engenders a ton of materials and paperwork and permissions and people, all of whom Gair tries to please. Now she wants out from under. She wants a clean room and a blank canvas. Or a blank roll of film. Or a blank page.

“The world wants to nail you into something, wants to make you fill a little niche. I won’t have it,” she says. “I won’t be painted into a corner.” She stamps her foot. Or is it a ritual dance?