Face Paint, Sunday Times

Women artists are pros at dealing with colour and form. So how do they approach the blank canvas of their own faces? Bettina von Hase finds out.

I recently met the American artist Kiki Smith at a Sotheby's preview of the Whitechapel Art Gallery auction. I was struck by her appearance: she had pale skin, kohl-rimmed eyes and a full mane of glamorous white hair, and her hands were adorned with a flurry of small blue tattoos of rings and stars. Smith had donated to the auction a large-scale drawing of a woman in a scrappy dress, reclining like an odalisque and wearing wonderful nail polish, just like her creator. I couldn't help wondering whether artists have an edge on the rest of us where make-up is concerned. What are their secrets? What tips can they give us? Do they know the perfect red lipstick? I wanted to find out.

My mini survey of artists (Smith, Gillian Wearing, Cathy de Monchaux and Fiona Wright) revealed that they often go through periods of intense experimentation in their younger years, using their faces and bodies as a medium for their creative ideas before unleashing it on their work. In the case of, SAV, Cindy Sherman, her make-up is her work. Sherman's look, in her famous Film Stills series, is defined by a theatrical approach to beauty, make-up is a part of becoming multiple personae.

Smith, 52, who is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, in New York, has precise ideas about her looks. She uses fake eyelashes, because, she says, a as you get older, you begin to recede out of existence". She wears pale powder (“l used to wear a pale-blue or lavender shade, to look paler”), kohl from Indian shops, an SPF15 Estée Lauder face cream and, occasionally, red lipstick.

Smith never makes up her eyes and lips at the same time (a tip we can all follow), as she doesn't like to attract too much attention to her face; she reserves that for her work, “l don't use make-up in my work, but I do make up the women in my drawings — their nails, lips and eyes — to insist on their femaleness. It's the same thing, dressing up a drawing or dressing up a person. I live vicariously through my drawings and sculptures.”

The London-based video and photographic artist Gillian Wearing is more overt in her approach to beauty. In her work, she has worn masks, or asked others to wear them in videos where they articulate their deepest fears and desires. Now 43, Wearing filmed herself at 39 wearing a mask of her 17-year-old face, copied from a photograph. “l worked with a woman who paints prosthetics,” she says. “The make-up had to reflect my 17-year-old freshness and vulnerability.” In another work, Snapshot (2005), she used make-up “more conventionally”, employing a make-up artist to create images of women in different eras, from the 1920s to the 1960s.

In her daily life, Wearing wears only Dior foundation and Clinique lipstick. “Wearing a lot of make-up doesn't suite me, as I have a mobile face,” she says. “People with immobile faces look better in stronger make-up.” In fact, quite a few artists shy away from make- up. It is rare that you’ll see Tracey Emin or Sarah Lucas, for example, wearing lipstick. The scrubbed, no-make-up face seems to be popular with many women artists, who reserve embellishment for their work.

Like the other artists I talked to, when she was a child, Wearing was influenced by her mother's makeup habits. She also experimented on her dolls. “It was a Freudian thing,” she says. “My favourite doll was called Nana. I covered her in foundation and bit her fingers off.” Hearing this reminded me that I once customised my Barbie doll, a Jackie Kennedy lookalike, by biting off her nose, which I thought was too pointy. -Making changes to dolls gives them a unique identity, as make-up does for women.

The made-up face can be a liberating mask to hide behind: “You can get away from yourself and be more yourself,” Smith says. De Monchaux, known for erotic sculptures in leather, velvet and metal, says: “I wore more make-up my mid-thirties, as I was on the pull more.” Now 46, she wears Lancome Teint Idole foundation and waterproof mascara. “It was magic, creating this bland surface,” she says of her first encounter with foundation. She has made kiss drawings with traces of smudged lipstick across paper, at once sensuous and violent. However, de Monchaux points out the dangers of make- up on ageing faces: “Lipstick bleeding into the lines of your lips, foundation collecting in wrinkles — it's like women of a certain age wearing sleeveless tops.”

That's why the performance artist Fiona Wright, 40, who experimented with heavy eye makeup as a teenager, has now given it all up, except for gold or silver nail varnish and glittery party powder from the Body Shop, which reminds her of the fact that “little girls like to shine”. Her mother used “old block mascara with a little brush; you had to spit on it”, but Wright has moved away from the tyranny of having to wear a face every day when going out.

“Nowadays, sometimes women wear it and sometimes they don't,” she says. “There’s more of seeing women in process, rather than in a finished state.” It is a generational issue, too: Wright believes that younger women bring a sense of irony and knowingness to wearing colour on the face and body. “For them, it's optional, and they are more self- possessed.” The female artist can experiment on herself as the mood takes her. The body and face are a canvas crying out for self-expression. Practise a bit of artistry yourself today.