Photo by Steven St. JohnSteven St. John/Tribune

Steven St. John/Tribune

Mark Reid, co-founder of the U.S. Body Painting Competition, paints bluejeans onto the legs of model Korinna Romero during the body-painting jam. It took him about three hours Friday night to dress her in paint. "I talk to my model, and at the end of three hours I know everything about her and she knows everything about me, and we're best of friends," Reid said.

Photo by Steven St. JohnSteven St. John/Tribune

Steven St. John/Tribune

Artist Benita Brennan applies green paint to Cliff Matthews' face during a body-painting jam at the Embassy Suites on Friday. Matthews' floral top-knot was contributed by hairstylist Lorenzo Colorado. The jam, in which artists used the bodies of volunteer models as living canvases, is part of the U.S. Body Painting Competition that continues through Sunday.

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Mark Reid needs only a few flicks of his wrist to lace up Korinna Romero's rose-colored bustier.

That's the easy part.

But it took him about 45 minutes just to get her into the bustier.

And before that, he spent more than two hours squeezing the lissome Romero into a snug pair of bluejeans that are faded along the creases, torn at a knee and reveal the outline of a compact or a Skoal tin in the left hip pocket.

It took that long because Reid was dressing Romero with a brush during a body-painting jam Friday night at Albuquerque's Embassy Suites hotel.

Her jeans and bustier are paint, pigments of our imagination, mere illusions of concealment.

Except for a G-string, pasties, hoop earrings, high heels and bright red lipstick, Romero, 21, is naked under the water-based paints Reid whisked over, behind and in between her sensitive areas.

She said acquiring the jeans definitely tickled more than getting the bustier.

"The paints feel cold and wet sometimes," Romero, a feisty young woman with a ready smile, admitted. "But I feel like a million dollars. This feels like being art."

And the result was so realistic, Romero could have walked through the hotel and drawn stares of disapproval - not because she was nude - but because her "clothes" were tight and skimpy.

"If he paints me every day, I won't have to pick out what I want to wear for work," said Romero, a waitress who also does promotions for a broadcast company.

Friday's jam is part of the first-ever U.S. Body Painting Competition. Reid, who grew up in Dexter, N.M., and Pam Trent, who grew up in Albuquerque, organized the event to promote the exotic art form they practice.

Actual competition takes place tonight and Sunday when live models, in varying stages of undress, will show off the work of 17 artists from California, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico and Korea.

Friday night's jam - which, like the rest of the event, is limited to people 18 and older - was sort of a warm-up for the artists and a chance for the public to explore the wild and mostly naked world of body painting.

For an $18 admission fee, the public was permitted to gawk all they wanted and to take pictures of the models - as long as they asked permission first.

Some people who came only to look got caught up in the raw exhilaration of it all and became models themselves, stripping naked to the waist or nearly naked to the floor.

That might explain the two nude, green men - one painted as an aging dragon in chains and handcuffs, the other as some botanical creature with a flower growing out of his head - who were among those roaming the jam site in the ballroom of the Embassy Suites Conference Center.

Trent said body painting has been around for most of human history, but today it's being used for product promotions and for its shock factor.

"Ladies love to have lingerie painted on them for photographs for their husbands," she said.

Most body painters break into the business at the top - face painting - and work their way down.

That's the way it was for Reid, who got into body art more than two years ago and can't stop.

"From the day I did my first body painting, I was hooked," he said. "It's like a drug. And I can't explain why unless you've done it. It's a passion."

He said he has painted everyone from waitresses to Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

"When I paint a woman I've never worked with before, I walk her through it," he said. "I tell her everything I'm going to do, tell her everywhere I'm going to paint. Then I say, `Take your clothes off.' "

Vanessa Castro, 23, is a petite woman who does some modeling on the side while studying to be a nurse. She had never been a body-painting model before Friday, never taken off her clothes in front of so many people before.

She got into the flow pretty quickly, however, while working with artist Nick Wolfe, of Orlando, Fla. Wolfe recently finished 10th in the prestigious World Body Painting Festival in Seeboden, Austria.

"I just told him I wanted colors, and he said he wanted to do something abstract," Castro said as she admired the bright, vivid vines coiling about her arms and torso. "It's fun. It's exciting."

Wolfe said body painting is good for the world because we need to get back to touching. He said it's good for him because he is sick of doing the same old things.

"I'm sick of logic, sick of math, sick of war," he said. "I just want to do some naked chick painting."