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Have you met Susan Griffin?

Bouncy and vivacious, her blond hair up in artful wisps and tails with feathers and tassels woven in, her features accented by the swirls of color, it’s easy to fall under her spell. No matter which faire she’s at, years of experience have helped hone her knowledge of the perfect location to draw the attention of young and old alike. With a few touches of the brush, she draws you in to the fantasy, starting the day off by bringing out the beauty that hides in us all. Let me introduce you to Susan Griffin, proprietor of Face Paint Emporium.

Background

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Susan’s family moved to California when she was just three years old, first to San Diego and later to the heart of the Silicon Valley. Her mother, inherently artistic, kept the child entertained by teaching her to make most anything with whatever was on hand. With glue, paper, paste, and paint, they would create the most incredible things. Her father, on the other hand, was mechanically inclined and, as Susan got older, taught her to use power tools and allowed her to help him with various projects. The things they taught her have come in handy through the years as she lives the life of a traveling artist.

At nine, Susan started doing theatre and it has led to wonderful things in her life. She attended Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, finishing with a degree in theatre dance and design. After a brief stint at Stanford University, Marriott’s Great America Parks hired her to sing and dance as Yosemite Sam in one of their shows at the Santa Clara, California, site. Following recovery from a back injury, she spent several years with Ringling Circus as an aerialist, then a couple of years performing at Equity Dinner Theatres. Eventually she came to Houston, Texas, to teach dance—ballet, tap, and jazz—for the City Ballet of Houston as well as classes at the YMCA.

Finding that she wasn’t enjoying teaching, she left it and started doing various temporary jobs. She chuckled as she told me she was looking for what she wanted to do when she grew up. With her theatre background, she began doing odd jobs that centered on the theatre or some type of performance. Even her work as a very successful outside sales person for a fragrance company, a job Susan held for years before she went full time with the body art, was a type of performing.

Faire History

It was during this exploration period that she started doing makeup and costuming for feature films and TV, as well as working for the Houston Grand Opera as a costumer. In 1978, a friend invited her to attend the Texas Renaissance Festival where the Esoteric Philosophy Center had a fundraising booth. When someone from the Center recognized Susan, they asked if she would consider doing face painting for them and she agreed to work the next year. The first thing she learned to paint was an armadillo—kidney bean body, add tail and legs, head and great big ears, stripes and an eyeball. She worked with the Center for years, both as a face painter and as the costume consultant, writing a handbook on costume design and having responsibility for approving all the costumes worn by the group. When the Center closed, she contracted directly with Texas Renaissance Festival to have Face Painting Emporium on site.

She has continued to develop the business, expanding her schedule to eight shows per year, with four of those being eight-week runs and the other three being one to two week shows. Consequently, she spends little time in her Houston townhome and has little opportunity to date. It’s hard, she told me, to be home only four months of the year. You miss your “stuff” and you are not home enough to have a relationship. “Stuff” in Susan’s case includes her home office, design and sewing studio, and 1500 piece frog collection.

The relationship part is difficult because, unlike the circus or carnival, merchants and performers are not employees of the independent producing corporations and do not move en masse to the next stop. Each is an independent business owner, contracted to the faire and, depending on the circuit chosen, possibly only seeing friends once or twice a year. Besides, she said, “Dating someone on the faire circuit is difficult because everyone knows everyone else’s business. And you don’t want to date the locals because you know you’ll be leaving in a couple of months. Having a guy in every port just isn’t cool.”

She hears from people quite often, “I wan’na do what you do.” Her responses flow easily, bringing home the reality of her work with comments like, “Remember last weekend when it was 30 degrees and raining? I was here while you were at home reading a book and drinking tea.” At the end of the year, she clears very little, enough to eat and pay the electric but not a lot more, in the four-figure range. She quickly came back to all the good things about her life, though, telling me that the 35,000 smiles a year that are the result of her work make up for everything. “A lot of my pay is not what they hand me; it is giving those children 100% of my attention and seeing the look on their face when they look in the mirror. That’s a lot of pay.”

Current

Currently at Scarborough Renaissance Festival, Susan will take the month of June off, and then leave for Bristol Renaissance Festival around July 1st. She will be back in Houston for Texas Renaissance Festival and Dickens on the Strand to complete 2008. As the year finishes, she and her cat will hit the road in the motor home, heading for a rent-by-the-month RV Park in Florida. She wishes that festival management would plan their dates to end as the month changes and avoiding overlapping other faire dates. This year, the Bay Area Renaissance Festival extended into the first week of April, both conflicting with Scarborough Renaissance Faire’s opening weekend and potentially necessitating an additional month’s rent on the campsite. Susan made the difficult decision to pull out of BARF one week early to make it home for Scarborough and avoid the extra expense.

With 180 completely different designs on her display board, Susan has one of the most extensive collections of pre-designed art in the industry. Her most complicated is the Druid Mask, which looks like fine made lace all over the face. It is full of spirals and many detailed lines, showing a lot of negative space that gets some iridescent colors. A very precise work of art, it takes a lot of concentration to apply and requires the subject to sit very still for three to five minutes. While that might not sound like much, try sitting perfectly still for three minutes sometime.

Fifty of Susan’s designs cost only $5 and are perfect for the little ones who can’t sit still for more than a few moments. When preparing to paint, she usually asks the child for their favorite color for a base to work with. She will only allow them to choose one color because, she told me with a chuckle, “I never again want to paint a lime green and orange unicorn. I won’t paint something I wouldn’t wear myself.” The myriad of color choices in her paint box can seem daunting so she doesn’t usually let a child see, instead asking them to think of a simple crayon box—red, blue, green, pink, or purple.

Filling that paint box is a weekly task, with an average of $400 worth of paint necessary to keep it fully stocked. Surprising to me, orange is currently the most expensive color to purchase, running $15 per tube. Susan has found vendors all over the country, enabling her to walk in to a shop almost anywhere and find what she needs. These days, however, the internet, laptops, and aircards have made life so much easier on the road. Pulling up an online catalog, ordering the supplies, and having them drop shipped to you at the campground or faire office has streamlined the restocking process, not to mention the banking, taxes, and other everyday necessities of a small business owner.

She’s planning now for retirement, which she expects in thirteen years. In a few years, she’ll return to school, probably online, taking classes for a Master’s Degree in Art History. With that, she will be ready when she comes off the road and retires to docent at art museums.

Final Thoughts

Life on the road can be hard and a good deal of self-sufficiency is necessary in order to thrive. Susan has the tools she needs to do just that. Whether diagnosing and replacing the air-conditioner fan in the motor home, spending time with friends at a potluck dinner, or quietly decompressing at home with a hot meal and her cat at the end of a long day, she finds that it is all worth it. Susan expressed a deep thankfulness that the powers-that-be have brought people in to her life that let this happen for her. Body art and faires have endured everything.

Both photos from Susan Griffin’s collection.

May 6th, 2008 Posted by Escarlata | Have You Met? | 4 comments