About the Artist

History

I love making pictures!

You can say that I’m addicted. Yes, I most certainly am addicted! I love figuring out how to tell a story, capture a moment in time, or convey a message or feeling in a single frame. I’ve been involved in the visual arts since 1988, but in my early days I focused my art on pencil drawing and on 3D computer graphics, both media in which I can create something entirely from scratch that may or may not exist in the real world.

I started formally with photography in 1995, and I always loved taking pictures of people. But in 2003, I started feeling limited by regular photography, both in that I was photographing only what was already there, and also in that I was only able to capture “real” things. I wanted full creative freedom over every aspect of the final image, which meant that I wanted to create something and THEN photograph it. So I started in the world of bodypaint and body art. Nowadays, I still do “regular” photography and you can learn more about that here: www.intimatography.com

Methods

In the first year of my bodypainting foray, I worked exclusively with liquid latex. I liked the way it dries into a 3D surface and I liked that I had at my disposal not only color but dimension as well. There are lots of excellent bodypainters out there: airbrush and traditional paint artists that paint bodies in exquisite and extreme detail. But as much as I’d like to, I can’t say that I’m that good of a realist painter, so I had to rely on other methods to achieve the results I wanted. Working with liquid latex is more like special-effects makeup than it is like bodypainting.

But liquid latex is messy and difficult to work with, and it isn’t always the best choice for a particular project. After a few years of working only with latex, I added what I called “lightpaintings” to my reportoire: projecting images onto the model and then photographing that. The images in the “Lumens” collection are made this way. There is no Photoshop used to create these images. The image you see is the same as what I saw when I took the shot. It took me a while to get the technique down but I finally nailed it and now people often confuse my lightpaintings with actual bodypaintings. I wish I could say I was that good!

I do all the art and photography myself. Everything you see in the image is created by me. I’m a control freak and I take my art very personally so I would have a hard time “delegating my vision” to someone else. I also like to do as much as possible in-camera, rather than relying on post-processing to achieve a certain effect. Sometimes you have no choice but to do something with post-processing, but anytime you can do something live, it will be more convincing.

Subjects

I like to create images that are familiar – something you’ve seen before and can identify with, or that you could imagine would be something you knew. A lot of my lightpaintings feature abstract images, but I always try to ground the image itself in something real. Another aspect of this art that I enjoy is figuring out how to map a concept or metaphor onto the image of a painted person. I often spend days trying to get that right, but when I do get it right, the results are very satisfying.

I hope you enjoy viewing my images as much as I enjoyed making them!

Zaid