Body Art and Experimenting With Different Mediums

Crappy craft paint tubes littered the front yard. If you were to look under the tree in the front of my house on any given day during the summer, you would see about ten children under the age of twelve, each with acrylic paint quite literally up to their armpits. I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eye Peas was played to full volume, and some of the kids are bobbing along as they begin to paint up their legs. There you would see visions of rainbows, flowers, and superhero symbols done to the best ability of an elementary school student. This is how painting began.

There was an old snowman print plastic tablecloth underneath them, and atop that, about a hundred different tubes of craft paint. Only giggles could be heard, and at some point, everyone seemed almost hysterical with happiness. There I sat, realistic blue and purple flowers painted on my wrists, watching the young artists work hard.

I had always been an artist. Always. In my childhood, if I wasn’t creating projects out of the scrapbooking paper and the junk drawer supplies that I had monopolized, I was painting on my skin.

Tattoo-like acrylics on tan skin carried a specific form of temporal beauty, while I knew that the spiraled suns and daisies won’t remain the next morning. There was significance within the very idea of using my body as canvases; my mind thought that the very home for my soul could be decorated. It was somehow humbling.

So yes, some form of acrylics were first, as far as painting went. Yes, I sketched like mad with my cousin and best friend Braxton as a child, and of course I went through periods of crayons and colored pencils, but my love of acrylic painting came fast and through Walmart craft paint.