This series is my way to pay tribute to the artists that I love and that inspire me. 

 

As usual I chose to work with voluteer models that I didn't know before hand. I love working with strangers, because the kind of connection and closeness that can be created through the process is a beautiful thing. 

 

I enjoy how within a few short minutes I make a person feel comfortable enough to get naked, and let me paint on their body, and photograph them at a moment of volnerability, in a dignified and respectable way. 

 

However in this series, I decided to interject a few self portraits. The first three images are self-portraits. And I have also applied the makeup to myself. I suppose, in a way, I was trying to see if I can translate the opennes I receive from my models into self-portraits. I wanted to see if I could make myself as comfortable in-front of the camera as my models are. 

 

Each one of these portraits took approximately 2-3 hours to paint, and about an hour to photograph. The reasearch and planning of the series took 2 weeks. 

 

I used Ben-Nyes cake aqua colours for the body painting (that was all done by hand)

and a Nikon D90 with a 70-200 Nikkor lens for the shoot. Lighting was done with an Elinchrome D-Lite it 2 and 4, using reflectors to fill. 

 

This was a solo project, shot in the studio.