When the nose on your face looks like one you’d ordinarily see on a dog or a kitten—complete with freckles and whiskers—or you’ve been decorated with butterflies on your cheeks, or flowers on your forehead, chances are good everyone who sees you will be smiling. If you got these decorations at an event in this area, chances are good Jen Sekella of Painted Love Face & Body Painting is the one who transformed you.

Jen says face painters and body painters are often asked “What’s your real job?” Or they’ll say, “It’s almost like art.”

More than almost. To use someone else’s face and body as a canvas, Jen draws on specific skills she’s honed for years. The Finger Lakes native was involved with art from childhood on, taking classes at 171 Cedar Arts and at the Rockwell Museum before earning a teaching degree, which she did while also taking studio art classes. For a while she worked as a middle school English teacher, but art remained her true passion. A little more than ten years ago, a friend asked her to paint faces at a festival. Jen researched face painting techniques and best practices, then recruited friends as the models.

“It’s a constant learning curve,” she says. She mines advice from a worldwide community of face painters online, goes to conventions, and takes classes. What’s used on skin has to be FDA approved, she explains. The tools she uses that touch paint and people have to be washed and sanitized between clients. She needs to be fast (she usually has a line of people waiting to be painted). And for the person sitting in the chair being transformed, “It’s empowering and magic!” Jen says. “It’s a huge thing for me to help create that experience.”

Face and body painting has a long history, particularly among indigenous people. Doing it for fun may have been introduced to non-indigenous Americans in the early 1930s by Maksymilian Faktorowicz, a Polish-American inventor, entrepreneur, and beautician better known in America by his Anglicized name, Max Factor. He also re-created “makeup” as a noun while developing products for the movie industry that crossed over to become popular with middle-class women striving to transform their own appearances.

At the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, Max painted an impressionistic zipper across nude burlesque actress Sally Rand, with the dark shapes of the zipper’s teeth strategically camouflaging parts of Sally that were illegal to display in public. Sally had only recently been released from prison after her dramatic ride into a pre-fair opening party on a white horse, wearing only a scanty velvet cape, a feat that earned her prompt arrest for public indecency.

Face painters work on a smaller but equally challenging canvas. The first thing you look at, Jen says, is hairlines. If someone has a high forehead, there’s more room to paint above the eyebrows, and often less room on the sides of the face.

“So you’re constantly altering visually before you even start to paint,” she says. “You have to design with the shape [of a face], be aware of facial structure. It’s not a flat wall but a three-dimensional surface, different from person to person, though with the same focal points. And often you have to move beyond designs you know.”

And it all gets done in about three minutes, often on wiggly children, a process that includes talking to each child about what they’d like. “Sometimes parents will say, ‘I can’t believe she’s actually sitting still and letting you paint her!’” Jen says. “But it’s an experience. She’s telling me what she wants and I’m trying to bring that to life with my entire attention on her.”

Most people gravitate toward cooler colors, though sometimes a child, examining the results, will surprise her by asking for a pop of brighter hue. “I love seeing how each skin reacts differently as a canvas,” Jen continues. “The same design on two different complexions might look entirely different.”

Painting faces has taken her interesting places, including a volunteer gig at Camp Good Days and Special Times, a Keuka Lake camp serving children and their families dealing with cancer. Jen, who had her own experience with breast cancer some years ago, says she had a lot of help getting through it, “and the idea that I can do something to help kids is very humbling. It’s a fill-your-cup thing to get to do that.” She calls her breast cancer journey “devastating and freeing.”

Jen says, “I stopped worrying about a lot of things. It makes you do a reckoning.” She began writing poetry, combining that with her visual art and culminating in her upcoming solo installation at the Przygoda Gallery at Community Arts of Elmira. She characterizes the show as being “about me and what I’m willing to bare to the world.” Jen received a grant for this project through the ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, allowing her to hire models, whose painted forms will illustrate poetry based on her lived experiences.

“Jennifer has pushed herself and her work to reveal the deep pain of struggle as well as the visceral joy of celebration in a rare mix of compelling complexities that we recognize in our own humanity,” says Lynne Rusinko, president of the Community Arts of Elmira’s board of directors.

The gallery is at the 413 Lake Street, Elmira. Jen’s opening is September 6, and her show runs through October 19. For more information, visit communityartsofelmira.com or call (607) 846-2418. Contact Jen through Facebook at Painted Love Face & Body Painting, or at (607) 857-5417.