Richard Phillips for MAC cosmetics

To mark the introduction of one of its fall makeup collections — Make-Up Art Cosmetics — MAC asked three prominent artists, Richard Phillips, Marilyn Minter and Maira Kalman, to create works using the company’s latest pigments and products. Phillips, whose paintings are often inspired by fashion-world iconography, used 24 different products to create a retouched version of “Der Bodensee,” one of his recent paintings. The results were über-glamorous, to say the least.


Q

Why collaborate with a cosmetic company?
A

I felt it was a unique opportunity to recast the meaning and function of what painting’s role could be in terms of how art appears in contemporary commercial media culture. I was given free rein to create a piece that I felt worked best with the product collection I was given.

Did you make an original painting for the project?
When MAC first contacted me, they asked if I could make a new painting for the project. At the time I was in the middle of working toward my New York exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, and I said there wouldn’t be enough time to make a dedicated piece. Then it occurred to me that if we could get the world’s best photo retoucher — Pascal Dangin of Box — to collaborate with us, we could digitally transform one of the paintings I was working on with the cosmetic palette MAC gave me. The painting, “Der Bodensee,” literally received a MAC makeover.

Who is the girl in the painting?
The image of the young girl in my painting was inspired by a JPEG of an erotic model I found on a Eastern European blog, specifically the “beauty shot” in a layout that featured her in various explicit poses. In a way it was advertising that which is unseen.

Had you ever given any thought to the nuances of makeup?
My first group of portraits in the mid-’90s paid homage to the disregarded “art” of avant-garde fashion photography of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The radical makeup used on fashion images of that time were more of an inspiration to me than any of the pop, minimal or photo-real work that was done at the same time. Makeup ignites a psychological transformation of both the wearer and the observer. My paintings sought to locate the subject of art within the manipulation of that altered predisposition.