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A requirement for an elective course Brooke Wise took while studying fine art at Parsons School of Design was to teach sex ed to high school students through art. That’s when the L.A.-based curator “fell in love” with artist and lesbian activist Tee Corinne’s self-explanatory *Cunt Coloring Book.*
Four years later, trying to stay busy and connected to her community during quarantine, Wise remembered her favorite coloring outlet—not one of the Lisa Frank titles she used to buy during family vacations in Florida or her Barbie CD-ROM coloring games, but the Cunt book, which Corinne had published in 1975 to both educate and arouse.
Scandalous at the time of its release, the book presents myriad vagina outlines, all of them lush, dramatic and inviting—to color, that is. Corinne’s depictions of floral lips and mountainous vulvas were seen as symbols of free sexual expression during the heyday of second-wave feminism. Similarly, Wise’s The Fine Art Quarantine Coloring Book, launched early this month, taps into the times, offering a galaxy of curved and tangled lines from the hands of 25 established contemporary artists.
Free to download, the book caters to masters and novices alike. “A coloring book is less daunting than freely drawing or painting,” says Wise, who knows a thing or two about putting together art affairs with an edge: Her recent group show I Won’t Bite during Frieze L.A. celebrated the 100th birthday of late S&M icon Tom of Finland, and her annual Aloha From Hell film festival with Comedy Central has raised funds for Planned Parenthood. (The coloring book also offers a chance to support a good cause, via an optional donation to Meals on Wheels.)
The Montreal-born curator oversaw the book with help from designer Jesse Brown, and artists responded to her invitation to contribute pieces in their signature styles. Raymond Pettibon delivered an ironic illustration of a struggling small-town artist, disrobed and desperate to escape to Paris; Robin F. Williams contributed a luscious nature scene bursting with erotic eruptions; Cristina BanBan’s two voluptuous nudes parade in full blossom, hair flipped and breasts in full swing. Motifs of our quarantine life are here too, waiting to be colored with humor as much as hue. Life cereal and a Mr. Clean bottle appear gigantic in Grant Levy-Lucero’s two drawings, while spurts of hand sanitizer in Chloe Wise’s sketch of a friendly gathering (of more than three!) turn into tears. Julie Curtiss’s drawing of impossibly clustered hands and Kelly Beeman’s woman somberly looking out her window “mimic the current state of the world,” says Wise.
Playboy celebrated Wise’s invitation to “get creative” by sending pages from The Fine Art Quarantine Coloring Book to a diverse swath of curators, musicians, editors, comedians and photographers, all of whom used their time at home to harness their creativity and draw outside the lines.
Who says eyes are only for seeing? Junglepussy imagined her color choices as scents and flavors while coloring Heather Benjamin’s Island of Captive Girls, in which an otherworldly fairy with heart-dotted superhero sleeves and butterfly wings seems unbothered by her broken mirror. The fairy’s mysteriously labeled boots “reek of metal, nickels and dimes,” according to the “Cream Team” singer, who describes self-isolation as a time of “writing and surviving.” Junglepussy’s color palette celebrates the impending summer, with its juicy fruits and breezy treats. “The sky has a stench but is also deeply minty while she sits on peach sorbet sprinkled with shards of watermelon tourmaline,” she says. The aroma stretches over to the girl’s wings, where the singer notes a “whiff of strawberry” and rhetorically asks about the girl’s unruffled demeanor: “Is this not a reflection of myself and many others quarantined at home?”
A coloring invitation from Playboy could not have found Jordan Watson at a better time. Art consultant and mastermind behind game-changer social media platforms such as @love.watts, Watson has been busy launching an NSFW Instagram account from home and creating digital drawings of his Presa Canario dog, Chico. “Hands are like our magic wands,” he says of his motivation to color Julie Curtiss’s untitled drawing of hands with pointy power nails. “I wanted to embody my inner ‘alla-kazam!’ by using as many colors as possible.” Toward that end, Watson reconnected with his childhood self, whose favorite color was purple. His inner child told him to experiment with the alien skin tones teal, yellow and red. The drawing also made Watson visit more recent memories, such as his first “professional” manicure from his nail-artist friend Miho Nails, who re-created motifs of Devin Troy Strother paintings on his nails. “That opened my eyes to a new tradition of self-care,” Watson says, “and now I miss looking down at my hands and seeing them decorated with my favorite art.”
Followers of the digital art and fashion platform Paridust won’t be surprised that founder and creative director Pari Ehsan gravitated toward Allison Schulnik’s “whimsical and fairy-like” Dandelion. Ehsan calls the flowers, decorated with miniature cats, snakes and fairies, “my kind of world,” and admits that her current hobby of bird-watching in the Catskills plunged her into the curious world of ornithology. Schulnik’s drawing inspired Ehsan to imagine her own surroundings as “a place where creatures and plant life elicit a sense of wonder in every detail.” Ehsan’s bird-watching amusement led her to the National Audubon Society in New Jersey, where she came across a photograph of a lilac-breasted roller; the vibrancy of its purple, blue and orange attire is echoed in the fashionista’s palette for Schulnik’s drawing.
Missing her friends during isolation lured actress Carlson Young to Chloe Wise’s Saniteary Eyed, in which a band of friends huddles under a steady rain of sanitizer. Does the image remind you of Beverly Hills, 90210? The 1990s teen-drama aesthetic is not coincidental. “To be honest, it looks like a 1990s acid trip, and I like it!” Young says. The actress, who starred on MTV’s reboot of the teen-slasher classic Scream, is no stranger to fluids flying through the air, which would explain her fascination with Wise’s choice to depict sanitizer mid-squirt: “I like the idea of burning alcohol tears replacing the natural salt.” The contemplative tone comes as no surprise from the former Disney star, whose quarantine pastimes include brushing up on Russian experimental cinema. Between her daily walks and meditation, she ruminates: “It’s as if sanitizer is our new drug of choice and we’re out here looking chic as hell.”
Whether it’s because he’s been eating too much ice cream or longing to travel, Andy Baraghani—a Bon Appétit senior food editor and the internet’s dream boyfriend—was intrigued by the whimsy of Alake Shilling’s Cool Kitty on the Go! It’s easy to hope Baraghani will jump out of the computer screen along with the mouthwatering dishes he whips up on the magazine’s YouTube channel; similarly, he wanted the cat and her ride to look as though they were about to launch off the page. “Honestly, I just thought it was a very sweet sketch and both the kitty and the car were feeling themselves, so I wanted to bring out their very best,” he explains. To achieve this, he made sure the sketch pops with color—even though he prefers muted and neutral hues for clothing and furniture in his daily life. In addition to cooking (and coloring), the culinary expert has been using this period of isolation to garden, peruse interiors in design magazines and maintain relationships with those he feels closest to, all of which helps explain the uplifting color scheme. Next on his agenda is to go back to meditating regularly: “I will eventually get to that point when I’m ready.”
For Benito “Benny Drama” Skinner, coloring Robin F. Williams’s Water Works meant making some corrections to biblical herstory. The comedian used the assignment as an opportunity to shake the “treacherous bitch” depiction of Eve that has followed him since his Catholic school days. To that end, he color-coded the female nude with hues that symbolize empowerment and unabashed femininity. The male, on the other hand, received aggressive and bold colors that “felt garish.” He is enticed by the way Williams rendered the woman as a life-giving source: “Queen shit!” Skinner has been using quarantine to create content for his audiences on YouTube and Instagram. “I want to give people who follow me an escape, even if it’s just for five minutes,” he says. Coloring gave him an escape of his own: “For the woman, I wanted absolute Lisa Frank vibes, coloring as if I was a kid again.”
Following Wise’s advice, Brandon Flynn decided to get creative with his resources in order to color Brian Calvin’s drawing of a woman staring at us from behind lowered shades. Colored pencils, blue nail polish and pink highlighter were all the 13 Reasons Why star had lying around, but they helped him combat what he describes as the “coldness of isolation.” The Lolita-esque eye reveal in the drawing speaks to Flynn as a collective gesture of “seeing” our way through social distancing. The abnormality of separation is felt physically, according to the actor, who has recently been experiencing a tug-of-war with productivity. He switches between home workouts, script-reading and meditation, or in silent acceptance of what he calls an “unusual pause.” Similar to his coloring tools, he has been drawing from a range of emotions throughout each day: “I feel like we are seeing in full color the possibilities of humanity, the abundance of strength and community.”
This is not the first time Richie Shazam and Raymond Pettibon have crossed paths. When the New Museum in New York opened Pettibon’s career survey, A Pen of All Work, in February 2017, Shazam was flexing their clairvoyant muscle at the museum’s window, giving psychic readings to a long line of participants as part of artist Curtis Kulig’s Love Me Magic 8 Ball Psychic Parlor installation. “I was in full character, wearing this insane yellow pastel outfit,” remembers the model and artist. They also chose pastel tones to color Pettibon’s drawing of a nude, mustached artist at work. Bringing life and light to the image was Shazam’s primary motivation, with clouds in the subject’s painting and a sun above his head. Shazam colored the nude with a brown skin tone for self-association. “He’s dreaming in a fantasy-scape, maybe going back to an infantile place,” they explain. Shazam hasn’t colored in a long time, and what is coloring if not an escape to sweet childhood? “I am for anything we can get a cathartic release from,” they say, right before starting a magazine photo shoot via Zoom.