Love Art — Love/Art — Love, Art

Becca and Jacob Longbeach stood in the basement of their house with lots of open cans of acrylic paint in front of them. Dried acrylic paint decorated the floor in a sort of Pollock style haphazardry, though the colors definitely did not have the underlying order that Pollock’s paintings have.

Incidentally, Becca was covered in red paint. Jacob was covered in yellow.

“First you thought the giant monkey should be wrestling a duck, even though we had agreed on a devil monkey last week when we planned this,” Jacob said.

“So what?” Becca said, “I can’t change my mind?”

“Honey, you can, but I had cut the stencil already, okay? I mean, come on. It’s not like this is sketchbook work…”

“You’re just getting all up in my face about nothing…”

“And then this whole thing about what setting are we envisioning them in? I mean, it’s a concert poster. We didn’t even have a background. Setting?”

“Background, background, background. You want to try to think a little more profoundly about what we’re doing here? I mean, we aren’t like art pimps or something. We’re trying to improve the world around us with these posters, right? There can be a larger context that can inform what we do, even if it isn’t explicitly in … "

“Right, so what…”

“So I’m not the only one starting fights. Am I?”

“No one…”

“You had to be all obsessive about the navy blue paper and just drive me nuts about it. I want to go a shade lighter…”

“But the colors we chose…” Jacob said.

“Would not have looked all that different if we’d… You didn’t have to throw red paint on me. Asshole,” Becca said.

“I wanted to show you what blue would look like with the red I’d thought we were going to use when I thought we were going to do a red devil monkey - as agreed.”

Becca had worn a shirt in pretty much the same shade as the blue paper they had chosen. “You realize that in all the prints we’ve done together, this has been our first paint fight. Pretty gross. I love paint, but look at me.”

“Well, then, very mature of you to throw the yellow at me.”

“What the fuck did you expect me to do, you little bitch?”

“At least I had a reason for thowing blue paint on you.”

Becca gave him the finger, but she also kissed him. Then she punched him in the diaphragm when he wasn’t looking and knocked some of the air out of him.

She said, “I’ll make the fucking duck stencil. A duck will be better. We’ll use that yellow on you. I like it.” Jacob was sucking a little bit for air, but he had a smile, too.