Naked Vegas Casts interview on ReviewJournal

As the air date for the Naked Vegas, a TV show documenting a body painting company in Vegas, is approaching us (I believe it will air sometime next week), Review Journal did an interview with casts for the show.

Here’s the link to that interview: More to painting people than you know, say stars of ‘Naked Vegas’

I was pleasantly surprised by this piece because it nicely presents the body painter point of view, namely the struggle to decouple body painting as an art form from sexuality.

As many (serious) body painters will tell you, the “body” portion often times overshadows the “painting” portion.

Reading this interview makes me hopeful that the show could actually change the mainstream perception of body painting.

Here are few quotes from that interview that I like:

“I was getting ready to paint, and I knocked on the door,” Belmonte, 43, says of her most memorable gig. “And they opened it, and there was an orgy happening behind them. I was, like, ‘Whoa! Abort mission. We all need to leave. We do not belong here.’ And I sent a whole bunch of body painters packing.”

The medium is undeniably sexy. But, she says, it’s not sexual.

“If it’s done well, I promise you, you don’t ever see a vagina or a breast. What you see is the art.”

But at some point, Herrera says, naked flesh becomes just another canvas.

“With me being an artist,” Herrera says, “I can keep going back and keep adding to it and keep touching up where, unfortunately, my canvas is going to be, like, ‘All right, that’s enough. We’re done. I have to poop.’ ”

“There is literally this awesome transformation in the person. … They have this freeing, incredible occurrence in their life,” she says. “They’re, like, so taken over by what’s happened to them. It’s awesome.