“It all started when I moved to Florida and everyone just wants to get naked!” he joked.He started doing work for clubs and special events and fashion shows, and has focused on body painting for the past seven years.Then, in 2015, he appeared on the second season of the reality TV show Skin Wars, where he came in second place among stiff body painting competition.“That’s when it started changing my life,” he recalled.“It opened so many doors and a lot of people just want to work with me and take me all over the world.”Ram, who is self-taught and goes by the moniker “Airbrush Hero,” started out as a spraypaint artist, and does a lot of wall murals in addition to human bodies.“Humans are a very fun canvas to work with because it’s not flat, it’s very curved,” he said. “You have to think, since the body is curved, how to make lines straight. It’s very challenging, but it’s fun.”
Though he’s based in the US, Ram’s Israeli identity has always been front and center. That was what inspired the calendar, which he is hoping to publish himself for 2018.“On the reality show I was representing Israel, so I was talking about Israel a lot – that my family is in Israel, also my work was about Israel,” he said.For the past few weeks, Ram has been traveling up and down the country, from the Dead Sea to Masada, Caesarea, Tel Aviv and the Galilee.He wants the art form to be better known in Israel, which he said is currently not the case.“In Israel, body painting is not yet known,” he said “When we were doing the project outside [this month], we inspired a lot of people, a lot of people were asking questions – so it was fun to do here.”