Damon grew up in a suburb of San Diego, California, a small community known as Lomita Village. From ages of 5 and 10, he put on plays in his backyard and garage ... writing, directing, building sets, doing makeup, and acting. By the time he was 11 and continuing until a year before he finished high school, he was very active in school plays and community theater including The Old Globe Theater and Starlight Opera.A course of events led to him leaving his home and secretly living alone in a canyon cave be... more
Damon grew up in a suburb of San Diego, California, a small community known as Lomita Village. From ages of 5 and 10, he put on plays in his backyard and garage ... writing, directing, building sets, doing makeup, and acting. By the time he was 11 and continuing until a year before he finished high school, he was very active in school plays and community theater including The Old Globe Theater and Starlight Opera.A course of events led to him leaving his home and secretly living alone in a canyon cave behind his high school so that he could finish his last year of schooling. After graduation day (which he did not attend, but watched from the top of a hill), he set off to find himself. He headed to Big Bear, a small mountain community where he stayed for a summer working various jobs and meeting people who helped him understand himself. His friends in Big Bear, old and young, told him to either move to New York and get in with the "theater" crowd or go to San Francisco and share his artistic flair with the hippie movement. With winter coming on, New York did not seem like the right option. So off to San Francisco it was.Upon arrival in San Francisco, he felt like a little kid in a candy store ... Artistic freedom everywhere, people helping people do what made them happy, total acceptance for being who and what you were, and encouragement for what you wanted to do. It was in San Francisco that he blended his artistic ability and makeup techniques he had learned in theater classes and started body painting naked guys and girls. He made money from the tourists on Powell Street and the police never bothered him as long as he painted the "private" parts while draped under a towel so the audience could not see "that part" until painted. One eventful day, near the end of the "hippie movement", a well-known makeup artist suggested he move to Los Angeles, apprentice with him, and then hopefully become a makeup artist too. Within a year, Los Angeles was Damon's new home.Intensive training began and Damon learned willingly. When he started working, he was one of the youngest makeup artists in the business (most makeup artists then were between the ages of 30-60). Because of his youth, talent, outgoing personality, or perhaps a combination of them all, Damon found himself requested as a personal makeup artist for some of the top actors of the 70s. The majority of those performers however happened to be "gay". Damon could keep the secrets that were meant to be kept. He even worked under a variety of names to protect and hide the fact that he was probably the only artist at the time making up the majority of "closeted" performers.In the early 1980s, requests came in from studio executives and industry professionals for Damon to open a makeup training school teaching updated techniques that were so desperately needed in the industry. With more coaxing and financial backing from these sources, Damon opened The Institute of Studio Makeup, Ltd. in 1984 with a 10 year plan of accepting no more than 48 students per year and graduating no more than 480 students by the end of that period. The backers figured that this was the number of people and time needed to replenish the dwindling stock of qualified makeup artists in the industry.Knowing that he would close The Institute in 1994, Damon and his partner Andrew Levinson decided to branch out and create their own line of skin and hair care products that sold exclusively on television during the early 1990's. With the success of his skin and hair care line, Damon reentered the industry in 1996 doing makeup and was financially able to pick and choose only the projects he felt viable and only working with people who enjoyed the business as much as he.Today, Damon continues to teach privately and still works on film, television, DVD, and HD. He continues working within big budgets, medium budgets, as well as low budgets, as a ghost makeup artist, personal makeup artist, and/or key makeup artist.Damon married his life partner of 37 years, Producer Andrew Levinson on June 20, 2008, after the California Supreme Court made same sex marriage legal.
