By its very nature, the job of makeup is to camouflage, conceal and create illusions. Unless you’re makeup artist Dick Page, with the eye of a cinematographer, the soul of a painter and the forthright attitude of someone who grew up in post-punk new wave Britain, where jobs were scarce but creativity rife.

For Page, makeup isn’t a mask. It’s a revelation. “I never erase the face and start over,” he says. “Even when I do something strong, you still recognize the person.”

That attitude informs all of Page’s work, be it his editorial collaborations with photographers such as Juergen Teller, Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Philip Lorca Di Corcia and Mario Sorrenti for magazines like W, Vogue (U.S., French, and Italian), Visionaire and V. It’s also the prevailing notion he wished to convey in this story, in which WWD Beauty Biz gave Page free rein to create a directional story for spring beauty. Rather than choose a young girl new to the modeling scene, Page requested to work with Annie Morton, who shot to fame in the Nineties as Teller’s muse and with whom Page is both a close friend and a colleague.

“It’s difficult for me to think about a cosmetics idea on someone who is basically a child,” he says. “I’m not crazy about anonymity in fashion or beauty or the fact that we work with very, very young models because they’re supposed to have the ideal body. They’re like ciphers,” he continues. “Bless them, but I don’t really understand it as an esthetic.”

Page’s own esthetic is based on the color principles and painting techniques that he learned as an art student. He defines his technique as “loose”— “There’s no single process,” he says. “I make it up as I go along”—and takes as his inspiration the world around him, most recently a painting by Edward Burne-Jones called The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, which he saw on exhibit in England.

Page’s big break came in the early Nineties, when he was asked to do the makeup for a Calvin Klein show. He had come to Klein’s attention via his work with Kate Moss and the young British photographers Corinne Day and David Sims. “It was my first fashion show. I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughingly remembers. “I was really, really well organized because I didn’t know what to do. We were ready two hours before the show.”

The makeup for that show consisted of some lipstick on the lips and cheeks and a swipe of Vaseline on the eyes. It helped usher in a new, naturalistic look that took the style world by  storm. “It was more luck than judgement that I happened to be working with those people at the time,” says Page of his meteoric rise. “We had just passed the period where things had been very glammy, very done, so this was a change. It looked very new and very different.”