12.04.10
Make up Artist Alex Box Interviewed
As the beauty deluge continues to rain on us with images of doe-eyed bouncy-haired girls-next-door, one person is challenging our perceptions of what is beautiful. Armed with a few brushes and a clever way with eyeliner, Alex Box is changing the parameters of image making today. Alannah Sparks explains how and why.
Blue skin. Wouldn’t that be amazing? I mean, how could you not want blue skin?” Alex Box doesn’t do smoky eyes and bronzer. She does green lips, black polka dots, white curly eyebrows and reinforced veins. Right now she’s developing a line of beauty products that includes blue foundation for the skin. And like everything else, she’ll make it look beautiful. Because Alex Box isn’t your average make-up artist. She’s a self-proclaimed “artist who works with make-up”, and like it or not, there’s a whole industry out there that’s having to adjust to her vision of beauty. To look at, she’s what you might get if you watched Valley of the Dolls through Tim Burton’s glasses. Whippet thin with a razor-sharp monochrome coif and blood-red lips, she’s refined her image through years of self-modification working on club doors and immersing herself in the fledgling goth scene up north.
“I was the only goth in the village,” she says of her upbringing in a small village on the outskirts of Grimsby – a town renowned mainly for its fisheries and for the bashing it took during the Second World War. But creativity flourishes in the most unusual places, and it was here – supported by her unicycle-riding dad and her quietly radical mother – that she began to push aesthetic boundaries, dyeing her hair and painting false beauty spots on her very young cheeks. When she moved to London to study fine art at Chelsea College of Art, her fascination with body and image really took form. She made installations and experimented with prosthetics, working part time in a make-up shop to fund her artistic materials. “I got to do some really weird and wonderful things there,” she says. “It honed my feeling about how you can actually change and manipulate the face – and it was just like my painting, only in this case the canvas was alive.” Having trained as a fine artist, Box sees no distinction between what she does now – fashion shoots, commercial campaigns and catwalk – and what she did before. “Art and craft are symbiotic,” she muses, “I still have that work ethic of an artist, where it needs to be laboured – you need to see the labour of it for it to have the weight and preciousness.”
This painstaking effort is abundantly clear in her recent project, a book on her work that was shot by Rankin. It’s page after page of pure unadulterated fantasy, stretching the limits of what we believe to be beautiful. From layering Post-it notes on the skin to daubing on icing sugar as impasto, she employs the most unusual techniques to achieve radical results. And of everyone, Rankin was the perfect photographer to shoot her work. “Rankin is very anthropological in his approach to photography. He’s like a public painter for our time – he shoots it how he sees it,” she remarks. Their working process was seamless, simply because they trusted each other. Without all of the superfluous elements of clothing, tricky lighting or the constraint of having to sell something, it became about “stripping it down to the point where I make a character and he takes a picture. I didn’t want to have to sift through layers to get through to the image, and that’s exactly what Rankin did.”
This apparently simple approach to photography was just what was needed to document her extraordinary artistry. Box is very clear on what makes a good photographer in her line of work. While she appreciates honesty and truth in pictures, she also admits to “erring on the side of a big production”. Point-and-click photography holds less weight when it’s employed in fashion, she believes. “I love those images where what you’re seeing is not the make-up or the hair, not even the photography – you’re seeing a moment. But that works best as information. When it’s a genre in fashion it can become quite like pastiche.”
It goes back to her deep respect for the labour of art – and photography as an art form should be no different. “A good photographer is always actively seeking to progress themselves and develop their process – questioning is their most important quality.” As a make-up artist, Box tends to attract like minded people in the industry – from visionary designer Gareth Pugh to photographer Warren du Preez and stylist Katie Shillingford, Box counts herself lucky to be “always working among the pioneers of image making”.
Working on a fashion shoot is a process she describes as somewhat intangible – as ordinary communication often goes out the window. “When someone asks you for ‘a kind of blackish white’, you have to be able to react,” she says. “There is a lot of ambiguity in fashion. You’ve all been brought together to make something beautiful, and when you’ve got the right group of people working together, then usually not a lot is said.” Words indeed become somewhat obsolete when you look at her technicolour tribal faces for Vogue, or her silver-lipped androids on the catwalks in Paris. Her inspirations read like A World History of Art meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – everything from Japanese Kabuki masks to dinner conversations with her scientist boyfriend is digested, stored, then spilled forth again from her brushes. One idea that she admits to being consumed by is the technology of augmented reality. “Avatar,” she says, “is stretching everyone’s concept of what’s acceptable. Second Life is a very powerful entity. The idea that you can create your own alter ego, and it doesn’t even have to be human anymore. It can be a square with ears if you want. Technology has taken a visual language and thrown it on its head, and we’re only just coming around to it.”
It’s what she calls the “evolution of surface”. As the internet draws all of the world’s subcultures together into one melting pot, it’s becoming harder to be original. “You can be in San Francisco or Japan and whoever is subversive is going to look pretty much the same, so now people are having to go to more extreme lengths to do something new – and quite often that creativity reaches its fullest potential in new media.”
Box is not one to be left outside the creative curve, and she has endless ideas for how to harness this ever-evolving technology for her own work. She wants to design skins for Second Life, get into computer gaming, explore the moving image. As creative director of the successful concept make-up brand Illamasqua, she wants to explore the narrative of make-up in social media. The inter-disciplinary nature of art and design is something she counts as one of the luckier offshoots of our developing technology, and she sees no project as out of her reach. While the shock of the new is something that clearly enthrals her, Box is almost scholarly in her reference to the art of the past. Renaissance etchings and paintings of strange visages adorn the walls of her house. “There are faces everywhere,” she admits. One painting she returns to time and again is Leonardo Da Vinci’s Virgin on the Rocks. “It’s the most perfect make-up. All those heavy highlights and exaggerated shadows – it’s augmenting reality on a flat surface, whereas I’m augmenting fiction on a real face. It’s a figure of eight, really.”
From Second Life to Da Vinci to social networking, from Paris to London and back each season, life is a glamorous figure of eight for Alex Box. Winding in and out of art and artistry and stretching our imaginations, she intends to leave an indelible mark on our culture of image. “I just love it,” she says. “All I want to do is keep feeding my head and keep doing what I’m doing, because whether it’s the straightest brief or the craziest thing, it’s constantly amazing.”
Alex Box is published by Rankin Photography Ltd, priced £50.
ISBN 978-0956315502.
www.illamasqua.com
www.dandvmanagement.com
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