Joanne Gair’s Habeas Corpus

Those lips. That Eye. Those Bodies. An exclusive look behind the spine of Body Painting, a masterpiece of visual illusions.

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If you’re not familiar with her body of work, as it were, you may recall New Zealand–born Joanne Gair’s sexy transformations of her friend and regular subject Demi Moore, whom she once body-painted wearing a formfitting men’s suit on an iconic cover of Vanity Fair.

Then there are her “emperor’s clothes” contributions to the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issues, which she has been brushing up on since 1999, painting bikinis and one-pieces on the world’s most fabulous belly buttons and other parts unknown.

The high-profile work has never ceased, but friends say that the spritelike 48-year-old artist never gossips or boasts about her many illustrious subjects and collaborators, among them such great photographers as Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, David LaChapelle, Peggy Sirota, Mark Abrahams, and Matthew Rolston; mega-celebrities like Madonna, Goldie Hawn, Pamela Anderson, and Demi Moore; and such supermodels as Carla Bruni, Elle Macpherson, Molly Sims, Carolyn Murphy, and Heidi Klum—the last of whom wrote the foreword to Gair’s astounding new tome, Body Painting (Universe/Rizzoli).

It is a long and laborious haul to the completed mirages included in this collection. To witness one of her “gigs” is to watch a M.A.S.H. tent in action, with her friends and family handing her the scalpels, and wearing the masks. It’s a close-knit group, nepotistic to the core. (Who else would put up with it?) The “surgeries” can last more than 18 hours.

Considered the world’s most renowned body-painting artist, New York–based Gair—known as “Jo” to her friends—is never without her longtime companion and collaborator Spencer Franklin, who helped navigate the following Q&A along a line of communication that his best friend does better with her brushes (often stuck in her hair like kung po–stained chopsticks).

BLACKBOOK: What was Gair’s first medium?

SPENCER FRANKLIN: As a very small girl, crayons and watercolors were the media most available to her. She remembers “coloring in” (as she still calls it today) at any opportunity. Her mum pointed out yesterday that she was a natural dreamer and captured those dreams through the medium.

BB: Some may see body-painting as a dying art.

SF: In the advertising world, Jo can already see this happening in job proposals that come and go her way. She was up for a large Super Bowl commercial last year, where the director greatly wanted to have her body-paint the models in dripping chrome. Ultimately, the client decided to go with computer generated imagery. Jo notes, though, that body art as a medium and its wide spectrum of painting, adornment, and tattooing—tribal and otherwise—will never die.

BB: Demi Moore is a recurring subject of Gair’s. Tell us about that.

SF: Artistically and personally, Jo gelled with Demi upon their first meeting on a job together in the late 1980s. Demi was pregnant with Rumer at the time, and it was a normal makeup job for a Vanity Fair pictorial that also featured Bruce Willis. Early on, Demi realized what Jo was capable of, and creative ideas evolved between the two of them. After the success of the Vanity Fair cover, featuring Demi pregnant and the following year’s body-painted suit, the two would make time to collaborate on creative side projects between jobs.

BB: How long does a more elaborate body-painting shoot take?

SF: On average, it is generally between eight and 12 hours of painting, makeup, and hair. Jo has twice in her career spent over a day’s period of time on an incredibly detailed painting.

BB: There is a dreamlike quality to it all. Does she have a recurring one?

SF: None that warrant being included in an episode of “Twin Peaks,” but she does have a recurring one that involves [her old manse behind Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont]. We now live in a tiny Manhattan apartment. A few things were sold off from the house sale in L.A., but the majority of items, including these infamous palace gates, are all in storage between New Zealand, Los Angeles, and now New York City. The dreams consist of Jo building her next fortress, at a cliff’s edge, in New Zealand—this time all designed around these palace doors.

BB: If she were an animal in another life, what would it be?

SF: Jo would be a pussycat. Not just any kind of pussycat, especially not the ones that are scrounging for food and missing one eye in the streets of Italy. She would have to be a pampered pussycat, living with a loving family. She’d be like her own cat, Tailgate. If this was to be her fate in another life, then she would feel that she had evolved.

BB: If someone were to say to you that she was flaky or dotty, how would you respond to that?

SF: Flaky? No. Dotty? Maybe. Jo is an artist, in the true sense of the word. She lives in the moment, focusing her vision through her artistic sunglasses, desiring only to create. Her life, though, can tend to meld together with her work and art. —N.M.