The Painted Body

The conclusion of this unusual study, based on a wealth of evidence from all six continents, is both aesthetic and anthropological. There is no body but the painted or decorated body, because it has always benn the focus of an imaginative revision and renewal, and still is; and there is no painting but body painting, in the sense that our whole system of pictorial representation is haunted by the graphic impulse to mark the human flesh. So that with body painting we reach back to the origins of imaginative creation and track it down to its initial and most intimate nerve center; the skin of living men and women.