Body paint, lube, Everclear, and a canvas as big as a bed sheet

We did not follow the directions. Directions are not sexy and sexiness is the goal of the “Love Is Art” kit, or at least it should be. According to the instructions you are supposed to empty the single bottle of body-safe paint on the canvas, then spread it around with your bodies. We, however, wanted to add more color and depth to the expressionistic rendering of our sex life.

Bob broke out her own oil paints and read the bottles to make sure they were safe-ish for skin. As she will receive her Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography this semester, she has a reasonable grasp of what is toxic, as well as a higher tolerance for chemicals.

In addition to adding colors, we were also overconfident enough to think we could plan the composition and document the process at every stage. This plan fell apart after our first position when it took me five minutes to clean my hands with sanitizer and paper towels in order to photograph the scene. By the time I put the camera down and was ready to jump back into the action, I realized I wasn’t in fact ready to jump back into action.

My dick has ADD. Five minutes of worrying I would destroy my camera with oil paints was enough to put my desires to sleep. Rousing my sexual ambition would not have been an issue had our hands been clean, and had Bob not been opposed to getting a urinary tract infection for the sake of art. She used some oral persuasion to get me back in the mood. This worked well, but it got paint in her eyes and face, and eventually on my dick, requiring more sanitizer and hand towels. This cycle repeated throughout the creative process. The Everclear destroyed our ability to find a solution that kept my dick paint-free, but it also eventually allowed us to abandon any pretense of controlling the painting or keeping paint out of our sexual machinery.

Our painting lost any pretense of composition. Bob emptied a tube of color into her hair and started whipping it around. Our knees became raw from rubbing the coarse surface. The canvas became little more than a tarp to contain our sloppy sex. The Everclear, lube, and paint flowed until all were emptied on the canvas.

Bob took sanctuary in the bathtub from the chaos of booze and paint. It did not matter that she had neglected to strap on the protective booties included in the kit. Paint already marked the path to the bathroom. I put on the paper footwear and found her passed out in a pool of blue bath water. Afraid that she would wake in the night and make another abstract painting of our bed sheets, I scrubbed her with the kit’s loofa. When she got cold, her feet blindly tried to twist the shower knob in search of warm water, but instead she turned the faucet’s spout and jerked it from the wall. After about 30 minutes of moving the paint around her skin, I recalled a TV commercial of environmentalists using dish soap to scrub oil off penguins. It turns out this soap works just as well at removing oil paint from humans.

Bob refused to leave the bathtub for the bed. I stayed awake, cleaning the living room, sobering up, and occasionally checking to make sure she did not need resuscitation. In our years of attending graduate school, we had accumulated few possessions we would have minded being destroyed in a sexual skirmish, provided the sex was memorable enough. Among the casualties of this episode were a few towels from our wedding, several tubes of oil paint, the bath-rug, the shower curtain, and our security deposit.

When I finally heard Bob climb out of the bathroom and flop into bed, I put down my spray bottle and rag. I turned off the water in the bathroom, drained the tub, and turned the lights off on all that had been unsettled in the night.

What seemed like minutes later, I woke in the morning to Bob laughing in the bathroom.

“It looks like someone was projectile vomiting paint in here,” she said. “It’s kind of cool-looking. But why is the faucet sticking out two inches from the wall?”

Ignoring the bathroom, I took refuge in the living room, which was not much messier than when we started the Love is Art project. Bob joined me in studying our painting. It looked nothing like we had planned. Aside from a few vibrant handprints, the oil paints blended into greenish-brown bruises pounded into the canvas.

“It looks like we murdered someone,” she said.

“It felt like that when I was scrubbing you clean in the tub,” I said. “If I ever kill you, I will definitely choose a cleaner method, like sleeping pills and a bathtub.”

We studied the painting to decipher what acts led to each blobs and to decide if the canvas merited the cost of being framed. In a weird way the chaos of colors and white space matched our one-bedroom apartment where mounds of her clothes drift like sand dunes around the blank sections I obsess over keeping clean.

“It kind of looks like our relationship,” I said, smiling at how clever I was.

“It looks like we got drunk and had sex in paint.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “If you want to look at it like that.”

Check out more sex-paintings and buy your own kit at LoveIsArtKit.com

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