A Tulip Painting

At this time of year, the Queen Wilhelmina Tulip garden is one of the happiest spots in Golden Gate Park, a glorious backdrop for marriage proposals and weddings, family photos and selfies for tourists from around the world. Yesterday morning it was backdrop for body painter Trina Merry and a very pregnant Rachel Ranz, who stood serene and shivering in the morning chill, wearing only underpants, silicon pasties and the garden’s bright spring palette.

“I knew it would be cold,” Ranz said. “I’m just glad it didn’t rain.”

Ranz had commissioned Merry, a world championship body painter, to create a portrait of her and her daughter ahead of her next child’s birth in May. Merry would paint them, then photograph them and in the resulting picture the images on their bodies would merge with the background; they would become one with the garden

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Ranz said she chose the chose the tulip garden for her portrait because she’d lived in the Netherlands when younger and tulips are pretty. But, “the almond blossoms in the Japanese tea garden would have been cool too.”

Merry has done these “camouflage paintings” all over the world. Her website shows photos of  intricately painted models blending in with such icons as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Tower of Pisa, the pyramids, the Washington Monument and more. On the website she explains she “uses models and body paint to breathe life into landscapes” to create images that are “thought-provoking, provocative and well, magical.”

It did feel magical to stumble across this moment on a morning where I had biked over to the garden simply to snap a picture of a tulip.

Such magic takes planning. The two had to coordinate schedules – Merry lives in Dallas, Ranz in Davis  – and secure a permit from Rec and Park for the precise spot where the painting would be done. They’d decided to frame Ranz against a bed of bright yellow blossoms, (the aptly-named “big Smile” cultivar) with the weathered brown windmill in the background. Merry worked fast brushing paint on Ranz and her young daughter. The girl giggled at the brush strokes and snuggled against her mom, balking only when Merry wanted to paint her eye lids as well.

Another woman walked up and greeted Merry. “I wasn’t sure it would so easy to find you,” she said, without a trace of irony. The woman, Carrie Overgaard, was fresh off an early morning flight from Los Angeles. She’d flown up so Merry could paint her as well, though they hadn’t yet decided on a location. Unlike Ranz, Overgaard has been painted many times, by Merry, as well as other body painters. She’s served as a canvas for parties and events and for her own pleasure. “I just love it and being around and sharing it,” she explained

“Do you paint?” I asked her.

 “Oh, I can’t paint,” she said. “That’s why I love being painted. I feel like I’m part of the art then.” She’s also working to promote the art; she’s organizing a body painting competition at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, where she bartends, and eventually hopes to hold a body painting festival at Paramount Studios. A lot of people don’t know anything about it, she said. “I’m just trying to bring it to the forefront of their minds, instead of them just thinking it’s smutty, or whatever.”

Tourists wandered in and out of the garden, taking pictures of the tulips, posing with the tulips. After a curious look —or two — at Merry and her subjects, most went back to photographing the flowers. The incessant picture-taking has struck me every time I visit the tulip garden. People trample the beds, step on flowers, pull at the blossoms to secure just the right shot. Twelve thousand vivid blooms of crimson, yellow, pink and deep purple; the flowers are spring incarnate, beautiful and beguiling and yet somehow not enough until captured in pixels. How Instagram has affected our experience of places.

A Saturday in March at the garden .

By the time Merry had finished painting Ranz and her daughter, the sun had moved behind the tall pines that border the garden and the chosen spot was sunk in shade. Until the bed of flowers was bright again, the photo would have to wait. Ranz pulled on a fleece jacket and Ugg boots, bundled her daughter into a blanket and went to sit on a bench in the sunny side of the garden.

Overgaard wandered over to her to chat. “Other than being chilly, how do you like your first time being painted?” she asked.

“It’s a dream come true,” Ranz said. “Hopefully the pictures will come out.”