The human canvas

Chadwick Gray has to remain motionless for upto 15 hours at time so that artist Laura spector can paint him. Yet this is no ordinary still life, for the canvas is not a sheet of paper but Chadwick’s body. It is all part of the New york city collaborative team’s Museum Anatomy project, which began in 1996 and sees them re-create old painting onto a human canvas.

Chadwick admits he suffers for his art and enters almost a meditative trance in order to stay completely still for so long. Sometimes his feats of meditative endurance are made publicly. In 2001, for example, Laura painted a 19th century portrait of a bride onto his body in the front windows of the Henri Bendel department store in New York. Chadwick and Laura scour the storerooms of museums across the world for likely subjects, frequently looking for paintings that have been stored and hidden away from public view because of their controversial nature. Chadwick says: “We often had to convince conservative curators, and once, in Prague, even a panel of nuns, to allow us to reproduce rare paintings of the female form onto the often naked male body.”

Once the body art is completed, Laura photographs Chadwick and the prints are developed to the same size as the original painting. The resulting photographs reveal a new work of art in which the painting acquires curves and sometimes leaves the canvas unrecognizable as Chadwick’s human form.