Item Details:

SPIN ART PAINTING FROM THEIR LAS VEGAS SHOW

BLUE MAN GROUP (1987-)

EARLY 21st CENTURY CONTEMPORARY, 2001

Spiral Cosmos

Day-Glo Paint sprayed onto Canvas

Size: 20 x 16 in; 50.8 x 40.6 cm

Signed: with Blue Acrylic Paint Thumprint, Recto, upper middle left

Las Vegas Blue Man Matthew Banks describes the Spin Art Painting Process:

The original Blue Man Group was born around 1987 in New York. Three friends -- Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink -- donned bald caps and slapped blue greasepaint on their faces, and a surprisingly complex character was born.  "An element of the character just happened once we put on the makeup," Wink said. "It erases your daily mask. The color blue felt a certain way, being bald felt a certain way, not speaking felt a certain way."  The show's popularity has not waned. Today, no less than 50 blue men perform in Blue Man Group productions in five major cities throughout North America and Europe.

The show opened in Las Vegas in March 2000 and enjoyed a wildly successful, five-year stint at the Luxor.  In October 2005, the Blue Man Group moved to a new home at the Venetian, a 1,750-seat, state-of-the-art theater created just for the trio.

"The Blue Man is someone that's inside of us, it's the human part of us that connects everything," Las Vegas Blue Man Matthew Banks told me as he shaved the back of my neck.  "The Blue Man walks like he's walking though peanut butter," Banks said, by way of instruction, as we walked on stage in an empty theater.  Banks continued to describe the essence of being blue. When you're walking, he said, keep your arms by your side, your feet parallel. "Stand like a gunslinger," he said. My stance was a little more Frankenstein than John Wayne, but I obliged.  Next we explored the stage. "Everything around them is an amazing, deep and important thing that they're absolutely bewildered by," Banks said.  The character is part superhero, part dog and part baby, he explained. The superhero supplies the intention to feel and help. Blue Man has the reflexes of a dog and the naivete and bewilderment of a baby.

But one can't be a true Blue Man without getting messy.  Spin Art is a trick from the show where a Blue Man catches a ball of paint in his mouth, bursts it with his teeth and spits the paint onto a spinning canvas.  If done correctly, it makes mighty fine modern art. The real Blue Men actually sell their Spin Art creations in the Blue Man gift shop after the show.

I wore Tyvek coveralls to keep the paint off my clothes, but it does nothing for the shoes. Next, I placed a gumball-size ball of hot-pink paint into my mouth; it tasted like rubber.  "Bite it," Matthew said. "Sometimes you have to chew it if it doesn't break right away." When your mouth fills with paint, it's best to swish it around a little bit. Let it mix with the saliva in your mouth and get nice and fluid."  No turning back now. This is what separated the Blue Men from the boys.  I bit hard. The paint was real, and it did not taste like cherries or bubble gum; it tasted like paint. But for my readers and for Blue Men everywhere, I took a deep breath, swished the thick liquid around in my mouth and sprayed hot-pink paint across a clean, white canvas.

Finally, my third-grade crayon-eating had paid some dividends.