Artistry au naturel: with the body as a canvas, an art form sweeps into North Carolina.

• Author: Overman, Ogi
• Position: NC TREND: Body painting

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The cover of this year's Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue skipped the suit in favor of strategically placed paint.

Tourists in Times Square tip for photos with women topless but for patriotic brushstrokes of red, white and blue. Now, the skin wars are coming to North Carolina when Greensboro moves from the minors of regional body painting competition to hosting Living Art America's North American Bodypainting Championship.

Body painting is what the word implies--turning the human body into a living, breathing canvas, a walking, talking work of fine art. An accepted, mainstream art form throughout Europe and most of Asia and South America, it's spread more slowly in the U.S., though attitudes seem to be changing.

But Greensboro?

Couple Scott Fray and Madelyn Greco are the movement's global ambassadors with local roots. The Reidsville artists, whose business is Livingbrush Bodypainting, are five-time World Bodypainting Championship winners. With no more mountains S to climb, they retired from competitive body painting to turn their attention to judging, conducting workshops and producing events. Fray and Greco hosted sold-out regional qualifier events in Greensboro for the last two years to such positive response they decided to move the national championship from Atlanta.

"Our goal all along has been to attempt to bring [body painting] into the realm of fine art," says Fray. "We want to take it to the highest point of the fine-art spectrum--in a lot of ways we have to, because of where we are as a culture. We realize it's not going to be for everybody, but for those...