Makeup Artiste : Joanne Gair’s Magic on Faces--and Bodies Like Demi Moore’s--Brings Fantasies Vividly to Life
Guess model Drew Barrymore stares down from a Sunset Boulevard billboard and out from the pages of magazines wearing sultry, strong makeup--smoky eyes and arresting red lips against a pale, pale complexion.
Madonna flashes on the MTV screen, her face an ethereal vision of peaches and pinks.
Demi Moore slips into a three-piece suit of body paint for a magazine cover.
The name Joanne Gair may not ring a bell, but the images she creates as a makeup artist set off buzzers and sirens of recognition.
For the last few years she has been in such demand that she could work seven days a week, for Vogue and Allure, Aerosmith and Grace Jones. She has painted Goldie Hawn gold and tattooed flowers on Annie Lennox’s torso. From now until Christmas, she is on location in and around Rome, applying her brushes to Oscar winner Marisa Tomei for the Norman Jewison film tentatively titled “Him.”
While more natural-looking “beauty work” pays the bills, Gair has established a niche in the rarefied world of paint and powder with her meticulous, imaginative body painting.
“I’m usually hired to complete someone else’s fantasy,” she says in a long-distance interview. “My thoughts are usually adapted, elaborated or modified to the artist or whomever is hiring me.”
Her other recent works appear on the tattooed back of a woman in Janet Jackson’s “If,” drawn entirely in eye shadows and pencils, and on the fronts of models selling St. Moritz Eyewear, painted trompe l’oeil -fashion to blend with chipped facades or industrial piping.
For the latter job, she had been recommended by a rival, the Celestine agency. “In their opinion, she was the only one who could deliver what I wanted. She was the best there was,” says David Tate, of Tate & Partners, the Los Angeles film-production company that did the ads.
Being easy to work with helps, too, clients say. “She works with a great many stars, and they’re fragile. She has the perfect temperament for that,” says Polly Mellen, creative director of Allure magazine.
One of Gair’s most cooperative subjects is certainly Moore, who posed in nothing but makeup for two Vanity Fair covers. In one, the actress was seven months’ pregnant. In the other, she is in a trompe l’oeil Richard Tyler suit that took 11 1/2 hours to complete.
“To (have her) use my body as a canvas was a great honor,” Moore says. “I wouldn’t have been in that position if I didn’t feel a great trust in her. She’s easy to communicate and create with, a great collaborator.”
Gair, 35, grew up in New Zealand and briefly worked as a schoolteacher there. Her first experience with makeup involved painting Maori mokos (tribal markings of the indigenous people) on children’s faces while they listened to her tell Maori legends.
Restless, she left the country at 21 and found work in an Amsterdam nightclub, where several fashion-model regulars admired her Thierry Mugler clothes and heavy makeup and encouraged her to get into the business.
After attending cosmetology school in Australia, Gair bounced from the Land Down Under to Europe to Japan on assignments, gathering information about aboriginal tattoos, Western beauty standards and Kabuki makeup.
In 1983, she landed in Los Angeles, a place she knew only for its images of “Disneyland and Cadillacs”--and for its opportunities in the print, film and video mediums--with just enough money for either a ticket to London or a beat-up car. The car won out.
The Cloutier agency, which handles makeup, wardrobe and hair stylists, immediately sponsored Gair for citizenship because, says owner Chantal Cloutier, “Her talent was obvious from the start. There are a lot of body painters in the business, but none with the same sensitivity. Her work is clean and delicate, but crosses over from one extreme (beauty work) to another (special effects).”
Gair’s skill, combined with pop culture’s infatuation with tattooing, created a whole new market for body painting, Cloutier says. Today, Gair is one of the agency’s busiest and highest paid artists, with per-day fees in the thousands.
But things haven’t always been so glossy. Early on, Gair resisted the conventions of cosmetology. When she was told not to use greens and blues on a model’s face, she used greens and blues. Her teacher told her she would never succeed. Undaunted, she went her own route, regularly roping her boyfriend into “being tattooed from top to tail with eye shadow” for her portfolio shots.
“Makeup is an art form, not the be-all, end-all. Natural makeup can be boring day in, day out,” says Gair, who was heavily into dramatic wigs and eyelashes for a time but now favors virtually no makeup, Yugoslavian lace-up orthopedic shoes and hair colors that constantly change.
“I follow my instincts,” she says.
Among Gair’s most vivid live canvases of this year was Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, who thanked the makeup artist during last month’s MTV awards for creating his zippered-up-the-middle look (based on a shot of ‘70s model Veruschka) for “Livin’ on the Edge.” In the same video, she did his Ninja Turtle and pheasant get-ups.
In fashion circles, she has made up most of the world’s top models. The effect of crazy schedules and stuffy, dry airplanes shows on their faces, she says. “You can see it under the eyes. There might be a little dryness, or they might have a pimple from emotions or from flying.”
Her beauty secret for models and non-models is the same: “moisture, moisture, moisture.” “Carry a small bottle of Evian to spritz your face. Also, wear sun block for sun prevention and always wear sunglasses because you’re naturally squinting without even knowing it,” she advises.
Gair plans to dabble in age prosthetics and computer imaging in future projects. But her next big make-over will be the foreclosure-sale wreck of a house she recently bought behind the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood Hills.
With a little paint in the right places, she says, “It’s going to look like an Italian villa.”
