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Artist Coats Himself and Naked Model in 'Goop' to Act as Paintbrushes

 A new exhibit at Shoestring Press in Crown Heights includes "body prints" and portaits of women by two local artists.
'The Model and Her Artist' Exhibit
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CROWN HEIGHTS — He really put his back into it.

As part of his new “body prints” exhibit, local printmaker Lane Sell used himself and other models as paint brushes, coating his and their bodies  with and without clothes on  in “thick, viscous, water-soluble goop” to create imprints that were silkscreened onto canvas.

The results, featured in “The Model and Her Artist” at Shoestring Press, are images of human forms split up, rearranged and pigmented to create new abstract images of the body, he explained.

“They’re lots of pieces of bodies. A typical one might be made out of five or six screens,” he said.

Sell started making the pieces about two years ago with the help of filmmaker Rachel Cole, who printed her own body after hearing about his work, which he said meshed well with her own. Her films are “often about feeling weird about your body” and frequently feature naked subjects, Sell noted.

The overall theme of the show, which also features artist Phil Rabovsky, is to explore “what it means to be making art using somebody as a model” and “what the relationship is between the artist and the person who is being represented,” he added.

For example, Rabovsky’s paintings of women each started with a conversation between himself and the model, who is the “driving interpreter” to determine “how she wants to represent herself,” Sell said.

The resulting images will be on display in Sell’s printshop, Shoestring Press, at 663 Classon Ave. until Feb. 10. The exhibit is free and open to the public during the shop’s hours. 

For more information, visit the Shoestring Press website.