Paint my paintings
In 2012 I founded and curated Paint My Paintings, an on-line community of people contributing to and collaborating on art projects. The community was entirely inclusive, free and open to anyone, anywhere in the world; artist and non-artist alike.
Paint My Paintings provided a digital platform for people to express themselves, be part of something creative with others and find some creative fulfilment. Its secondary purpose was to explore the potential of social media in enabling wider participation and collaboration in art. The projects delivered over 120 works by artists from the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands, Nigeria, Brazil, USA and Australia. Here's how it happened:
Paint My Paintings provided a digital platform for people to express themselves, be part of something creative with others and find some creative fulfilment. Its secondary purpose was to explore the potential of social media in enabling wider participation and collaboration in art. The projects delivered over 120 works by artists from the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands, Nigeria, Brazil, USA and Australia. Here's how it happened:
Making art is a solitary practice. Fortunately, I'm not an extrovert and I enjoy my own company, working through a creative problem, trying out different ideas, discovering what feels good, what looks right. Having to please no one but myself, art-making represents total freedom and self-actualisation.
Around 2012, soon to turn 50, I was a busy husband and father of young daughters, working hard with my wife to keep a roof over our heads and provide a happy childhood for our girls. Late at night, when the house was quiet, I sometimes had spare energy to do some painting on my kitchen table. Other visual ideas sometimes found their way onto scraps of paper but most stayed in my head.
One day in November 2012 I was reading a conversation between Brian Eno and the Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang. On the subject of rules and constraints, the conversation turns to Terry Riley's "In C".
Eno explains, "It's a very interesting example of some very simple rules that produce something very rich. There's a score, and there are 52 bars, and each bar is a slightly different phrase in the key of C. It can be played by any number of musicians, and the rule is that they all start together, all playing to the same tempo, and they keep playing the first bar as many times as they want – each one. But then when you want – say you're playing clarinet – you can move on to bar two, and then you keep playing bar two. And then when you want to move on to the third bar ... well, the piece starts to separate out, and if there are 20 musicians, they might all be playing a different bar, but on top of one another, and it's all in C, so everything works together. So the piece has this beautiful characteristic: it starts out in unison, and gradually it becomes richer and richer and richer. And then they all have to end together, so they gradually converge back.
To make that piece by top-down writing would be impossible. It's different every time. This is one of the things that the composer has to accept: he or she can't precisely predict the outcome."
So I quickly found Riley's piece on YouTube which I played on a loop for the next week or so. Remembering all the unpainted ideas swimming in my head I wondered, "What if I could get other people to paint my paintings?" And although it's an absurd notion - when does 'my' painting become 'someone else's' painting - amazingly, I did! I announced the first project on Facebook in December 2012 with the simple instruction (something like) "clouds of different shapes with a black diagonal" and got about 12 participants - mostly friends, some strangers. The project was up and running and there would be a new project every month. Many artists returned month after month, forming a loyal cohort, but every month we would get new people participating from all over the UK and the rest of the world. The project ran until early 2014 when it died a natural death.
Reflecting on it at the time, it seemed to me that for visual artists to have fun participating on a creative endeavour with others was something novel. Collaboration for artists in the performing arts is natural and essential to the form. I reflected on the notion of play in creativity. Musicians 'play' music. Actors perform in a 'play'. One doesn't normally think of artists playing. One 'does' or 'makes' art. It's a task. Not something playful.
Whilst I'm proud of my part in bringing people together to create, Paint My Paintings never quite became, to my mind, what it could have. I only wanted to start the idea not to keep leading it. I wanted to give it away. I kept encouraging other participants in the project to post their own project, but no one did. I really wanted someone, somewhere in the world, to steal the idea, but to my knowledge, no one has.
