Media Coverage Reprinted from Go Triad, part of the Greensboro News and Record June 17, 2011 edition read the original article Meet the Artists: Scott Fray and Madelyn Greco As told to Erin McClanahan Rainwater Body-Painting Competition Scott: There’s kind of a body-painting tribe worldwide. It’s very popular everywhere but here in the U.S. The top performers go to these body-painting events in China, Berlin, Australia, everywhere. We won a competition called The North American Body Painting Championship, which moves to different major cities. We won that championship and are No. 1 in North America. We went to the World Bodypainting Festival last year in Austria and came in second. They judged us on the quality of what we do as body painters. The World Bodypainting competition is in Austria again this year, and (this) month, we will be going back with our eye on the No. 1 spot. If this happens, we will win the North American competition and the world in the same year. I was the first inductee into the International Fine Art Body Painting Association this year. I am the only body painter to be so far. That would make this a big year. If we get the trifecta, this might catapult us to a different level. Prepping for competition Scott: Right now, much like the Olympics, we are training for the world championship doing body paintings. In the upcoming circumstance, our model is from the Netherlands, and she’s meeting us there. After last year, we had some interest from people in being our model. The way I like to do things is entirely intuitive. I like to be guided by the exchange of energies between me and the model. Something will arrive and develop, until layer upon layer, the art will happen. The competitions are the exact opposite of that. They have to be very highly planned. They have to have a developed narrative. Madelyn: You have to present to judges with an exact start and stop time. To execute this, we practice ahead of time multiple times until we get the design right. It takes about eight to 10 hours if the finished product is photography. In a competition, we get six hours, and we typically like two or three more hours than the competition affords you. The kind of paint they use Madelyn: It’s theatrical-grade makeup paint formulated especially for body painters. We can use a sponge or a brush in the competitions. We don’t use any machines; we don’t compete in the airbrush category. It’s all hand-painted. Continuing a tradition Scott: I approach this as a fine artist interested in creating a very complex finished piece. I think body painting is something that is part of the long human story. This is something every culture has done from every time period from every culture on the globe. They have done it for the past 100,000 years. They’ve done it to celebrate rites of passage, joy and mourning, tribal affiliations, anything that can be signified or celebrated by a human population has been done using body paint. I see what Madelyn and I do as a continuance of that history, that story. Nudity in their art Scott: We don’t see what we do as being salacious or lascivious. We are anti-shame. We hope we are contributing to the healing of negative body-im-age messages that people get from the media all the time. If you were to be body painted, you wouldn’t feel that this was a sexy thing. You would feel empowered. Creating a partnership Scott: I started by accident in 2002. I did a little swirly thing on a friend’s arm at an outdoor festival, and they went crazy for it, and it snowballed from there. The first time I saw (Madelyn), I body painted her. It wasn’t until later that I saw her with her clothes on. We work as a team; we paint as a team. Madelyn: I am a graduate of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I studied fashion illustration and desktop publishing, but I learned body painting from him. This was not my medium. I was a performer and performance artist before I met him, so I brought some of those aesthetics with me. We have been together almost eight years. The first day I ever met him, he painted me, he turned me into a garden of flowers. The power of paint Scott: The body painting experience has been extremely powerful for certain people. There was a young woman who came to us at a festival. We painted her, and she went off and spent hours enjoying the festival. She came back in tears hugging us, grateful and overwhelmed. She had been in a car accident as a teen and felt like it had taken her looks and her youth. She told us all during the day she had hundreds of people taking the time to cross the street and gush and tell her how beautiful she was. Most of us never get that. But she wasn’t used to thinking of herself as gorgeous. She was used to feeling damaged. But when she looked down, she couldn’t see her scar. She was this beautiful, vibrant, incredible, walking art form. It was a significant day in her life. For us there is a real soul-healing element.