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A good friend of mine, Cynthia she is a model. She and I have a symbiotic relationship. When I need a model for one of my columns, Cynthia never hesitates to come to my rescue. And she rescues me a lot. Actually you can see her in almost all of my Filipino photo-society columns. In return if Cynthia needs a photographer for one of her jobs, I jump in and either way we both get great photographs.
A few days ago Cynthia had a gig with a Filipino muralist and body painter, Al Galvez and she wanted me to cover it. Body painting always makes for good photos. It's like shooting fish in a barrel but a lot sexier and sometimes more colorful, depending what kind of fish you have in that barrel. By the time I arrived at Al's place he and several of his helpers were already feverishly re-decorating Cynthia and two of her model friends, Kaye and Aiza. I got some pictures of the painting in progress. But it takes a lot of time to paint three girls from head to toe. So after I had my fill of progress pictures I decided to wait it out in the garden. There I met Paul, the owner of the house. He is an artist and he was working on a large installation for a hotel in Davao. While I watched him sculpting away we had some artist's talk and worked a few beers. We exchanged insights into sources and availabilities of different kind of modeling clays. That's why people of the same trade like to hang out and form clubs. You can ask the others about things you are having trouble with, like for example finding a cheap and reliable source of modeling clay.
The place was pregnant with art. Just by walking into the front yard you knew that you stepped into an artist's den. Artworks were everywhere. Pieces from previous shows, half finished artworks, models, molds, casts and tools littered the garden. Everything, even the garbage had an artistic touch to it and splatters of paint to round it up.
With us there were also a bunch of people from the press. Once the girls had their paint job done they posed for the press in front of a backdrop depicting the Bayon of Angkor Wat. I squeezed in between for few shots but that posing stuff doesn't do it for me. When they all had satisfied their photo capturing urges I let the girls frolic around in the artistic ambiance of the place and took my pickings.
Since I came late I unfortunately never saw the girls in their raw stages. Purely for artistic curiosity of course I needed to know how they look like underneath all that paint. I decided to hose them down. Only one girl, Aiza was game and she will be highly rewarded with a bunch of great, although rather wet, photos. I got a few nice shots from the other two models too, but they are a lot drier.
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