Hair is Art Now

Portland stylists go beyond cut, color perm.

Patrick Compehos is a prolific artist with a studio in the Pearl and a penchant for pop art. But his canvases wobble and sweat, and his tools are curling irons and combs.

"It's a bold statement to say hair is art," says Compehos, who manages Hair MW salon and is organizing Thursday's second annual Hair Is Art show. "As stylists, we have our bread-and-butter work—cut, color, perm—and people forget that what drove us into the industry in the first place was the fashion, style, art." He believes that hair artists deserve the same respect as architects.

Elaborate weaves that grow into 2-foot-tall bouffants are on the drawing board for Compehos' vintage Barbie series at the three-part show. Then it's messy buns crafted into asymmetrical sculptures for the wood-nymph series and larger-than-life ringlets for the Marie Antoinette section.

"Couture is art, and it's there to question: Is that beautiful?" Compehos says.

Last month, another local hairstylist, Nichole Stewart, sculpted models' hair into a living First Thursday gallery for the Raw Artists showcase at Holocene. She sprayed black locks into lantern shapes and topped the baubles with a Chinese parasol. Stewart's bouffant with a double helix of braidwork and a top hat upstaged most shows in the Pearl.

"It's about pushing boundaries to see what hair can do," Stewart says, citing looks like the hair-sculpted octopus she saw at the North American Hairstyling Awards in Las Vegas.

"They don't teach you this in beauty school," Stewart says. "There aren't really classes on this."

But with the Portland Art Museum hosting the fourth annual Portland Style and Fashion Awards, Raw Artists hunting for a regular home and studios like Hair MW showing off avant-garde looks, Compehos hopes people will catch on. "Ten years ago, I didn't see things like this," he says. "Portland is much more laid back than avant-garde, but it's slowly filtering into a different aesthetic.

"Hair art is like a baby, a baby that needs a lot of attention right now."

SEE IT: Hair Is Art is at Hair MW, 1015 NW Lovejoy St., 715-2884. 7 pm Thursday, Oct. 15. $25.

Nichole Stewart's hair art Nichole Stewart’s hair art

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