Artistry has always been at the core of M.A.C’s beauty phil­osophy, but this fall the artist has a different kind of starring role: To celebrate its heritage of creativity and colour, M.A.C challenged three multimedia artists to use palettes from Make-Up Art Cosmetics — the brand’s new colour collection — to create three portraits.

The project was a perfect fit for photographer Marilyn Minter. “The glamour industry is the central source for my art,” she says. After a makeup artist applied a generous amount of glitter pigment and mascara on the model, Minter says she “went in and messed it up. I don’t like to retouch or clean up freckles or sweat.” The resulting shot is an extreme close-up of her subject’s closed eyelid, an image that is both gritty and sensual.

 

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Painter Richard Phillips, whose work is inspired by magazine clippings, chose to redo one of his paintings based on an image from a porn magazine. “In painting, you can create power through beauty, and when I speak of power I am speaking of creating unfulfilled desire,” he says. “This is advertising the unseen eroticism of the rest of her body. The painting is really an expression of sensuality.”

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Maira Kalman, an author and illustrator, started sketching her fanciful portrait of a young lady using eye pencils and lipsticks. “Thinking too much about a picture can be the death of it,” she says, adding that her choice of colours came from taste and instinct. “Allowing beauty to take over is what this is about.”

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