Portraits

The dogs days of summer with three dogs and a few cats. It must’ve been the hottest day of the year when we did this shoot, which made it all the more easier to do away with tension and clothes. Thank you Cherry and Ian for the pancakes and Palawan honey – they were as sweet and as delicious as you two!

There are
So many positions of
Love:
Each curve on a branch,
The thousand different ways
Your eyes can embrace us,
The infinite shapes your
Mind can draw,
The spring
Orchestra of scents,
The currents of light combusting
Like passionate lips,
The revolution of Existence’s skirt
Whose folds contain other worlds.

The Gift, Hafiz of Shiraz

Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully and are ready to fall, without regret or disillusion, after only a day in the sun. It is so every summer.

Rachel Peden

In me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda

For the two of us, home isn’t a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.

Stephanie Perkins

Throw It To The Fire

They say you can’t beat Wellington on a good day, but what a world of wonder it becomes in the blue gray summer haze. Rain, gloom and a bit of jet fuel all worked in our favor. Thank you Jay (or as I like to call him, Kuya), Clarence, Chris, Danny, Gareth and Tod! Here are scenes from Throw It To The Fire‘s debut EP shoot.

It’s an experience like no other, chiaroscuro in notes.

Throw It To The Fire

Portraits

Kailani

I am you; you are me. You are the waves; I am the ocean. Know this and be free, be divine.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba

The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. - Jacques Cousteau

My life is like a stroll on the beach... as near to the edge as I can go. - Henry David Thoreau

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused. - Rainer Maria Rilke

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm is terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. - Vincent van Gogh

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. - Kate Chopin

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are you feeling, feeling, feeling like I'm feeling? Like I'm floating, floating, up above that big blue ocean. Sand beneath our feet, big blue sky above our heads. No need to keep stressing from our everyday life on our minds. We have got to leave all that behind. - "At The Beach," The Avett brothers

It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea--whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came. - John F. Kennedy

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach--waiting for a gift from the sea. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach; one can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought. - Helen Keller

A gorgeous morning with a gorgeous model. And on the beach!!! Thank you Kiearah!

Portraits

Kaikane

Aurora hail, and all the thousand dies, which deck thy progress through the vaulted skies: the morn awakes, and wide extends her rays, on ev'ry leaf the gentle zephyr plays; harmonious lays the feather'd race resume, dart the bright eye, and shake the painted plume. - "A Hymn to the Morning," Phyllis Wheatley

But as time passes, my body quiets, my mind slows to match the stillness and I start to hear something else. The crater. The island. The sound comes not as sound, but through the rough sand under my hands, the slow gradations of color.

“Quiet,” Edward Readicker-Henderson (Hana Hou)

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze. - Thomas Carlyle

Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself, and know that everything in this life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from. - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think. - Robert Henri

By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear. - George Herbert

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world. - Hans Margolius

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it's always ourselves we find in the sea. - e.e. cummings

When I can’t hear my body anymore, I touch my wrist. My heart moves in time with something at the edge of sensation, a disturbance of the field. Maybe it’s the vibration of distant waves coming ashore. Maybe it’s just the island breathing. I’ve never heard anything like it. I probably never will again. I sit for as long as the quiet lasts, feeling my pulse, or maybe the pulse of Haleakala. Or maybe, just now, they’re the same.

“Quiet,” Edward Readicker-Henderson (Hana Hou)

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. - John Lubbock

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it. - Mark Twain

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? - E. M. Forster

Portraits

Cecilia

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

Jorge Luis Borges

Portraits

Arc

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest. - "The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems," Gregory Orr

Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly. - Plotinus

Portraits

Vesper

Elegance is something more than ease - more freedom from awkwardness and restraint. It implies a precision, a polish and a sparkling which is spirited, yet delicate. (Hazlitt)

One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

Simone de Beauvoir

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty. (Victor Hugo)

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better. (Virginia Woolf)

That is the key of this collection, being yourself. Don't be into trends. Don't make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way to live. (Gianni Versace)

Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness. ("Letters to Voltaire," Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand)

Shot on location at North Greenhills for Cece Smith: The Premiere Collection – Urban Opulence. Makeup by Monique Jaramillo-Señeres. Hair and styling by designer Agee Stella Dee. Kiera is wearing Cece Smith. You can see more of the Premiere Collection on Novermber 12, Saturday at M Cafe, Greenbelt 4, Makati for the Empresario Holiday Trunkshow (tickets are available at http://www.jotform.com/empresariomanila/eticket).