John Poppleton - UV Body Paintings

TH&Stary Van Dam Starry

Some time ago I went to psytrance party called Equinox which took place in Wroclaw/Poland . When I entered the place called "chill room" and saw decorations created by certain guy named Pszczola, my head exploded. Although the topic of paintings was great, it wasn't the reason I lost my head. So what exactly happened? Paintings were painted with special fluorescent pigments that illuminate in ultraviolet light. The visual effect was unbelievable.

There are lots of artists from across the whole world who create things by using this technique. We're going to present the most interesting of them. We'll start with John Poppleton from Sacramento/US.

Have a nice trip!

At the beginning we must strongly point out that a picture, even in the highest quality, won't refflect the effect of watching UV painting directly. This direct impression concerns the explosion of colours and feeling of depth, sometimes even 3D. What's more, sometimes if the painting is in a large size the artist can easily play with our brain by creating details and visual tricks.

John Poppleton in his projects "Black Light Bodyscapes" and "Black Light" concentrated actually only on bodypaintig. His medium are models covered from head to foot in fluorescent paintings. The topic of his work is mainly creations of Mother Nature. So we have landscapes, trees, rivers and even nebulas, galaxies and planets. It's impressive even when you look at the picture. Imagine seeing it live in UV light!

It's also worth to pay attention how John uses his models' natural shapes and figures to gain final effect; for example the hair which imitates waterfall. Sometimes he smartly uses 2 models.

// below you can check out a bit of the process:

Artists who deal with bodypainting like Craig Tracy sometimes create backgrounds which coexist harmoniously with models. John usually doesn't do it. His backrounds are mostly pitch black which is quite interesting thing because it highlights the model in the foreground.

Soon we'll back with more great UV-artists.