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She has painted a business suit on Demi Moore, a swimsuit on Heidi Klum and yesterday Joanne Gair showed Auckland makeup artists how she used naked models as a canvas for her artwork.
Miss Gair, daughter of former cabinet minister George Gair, was brought up in Takapuna and taught at Devonport Primary before she took her flair for fashion and makeup overseas 25 years ago.
Since then some of Hollywood's biggest names including Goldie Hawn, Cindy Crawford, Elle McPherson and Rachel Hunter, who already had their makeup applied by Miss Gair, have asked her to paint their entire bodies.
Last night she painted a multi-coloured tie-dyed shirt on Auckland model Annelise Burton, 20, to demonstrate the new range of MAC products designed to be used all over the body.
It was when applying makeup on a Slavic model with prominent cheekbones for a photo shoot in Australia that Miss Gair found she could use the products to do more than she had been taught in her makeup course.
Rather than concealing the shadows caused by the model's high cheekbones, she painted her a pair of sunglasses and the model pretended to peer over them for the shoot.
"She found it funny and I found it funny and that's where the humour thing started," Miss Gair said.
She said she had been passionate about sculpture since she was young, and found "colouring in" an already-sculpted body a natural progression.
Now Miss Gair, who lives in New York, calls herself an "image maker" rather than a "body painter" but when she arrived in the United States she was the only person to turn the art of painting on a naked body canvas into a business and body painter was the only title people knew to give her.
Most of her early jobs were for Playboy, as the models were already comfortable being naked, but she has since worked for many other commercial shoots like Sports Illustrated and has brought out two books which she photographed herself.
She gained worldwide recognition when Demi Moore appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing nothing but a suit of her body paint in 1992 and many of her images have since been reproduced around the world.
She said the most exciting swimsuit project she has done would appear next month in Sports Illustrated.
