Published Jan. 21, 2010

Is there something subversive about being wholesome? Ask artist Bren Bataclan.  

It’s time for another random act of street art. But without the spray paint.

I’m in Harvard Square with Bren Bataclan,
a Boston artist. He pulls from his backpack a bright painting the size of a tabloid newspaper. He’s going to set it in a public place, hoping someone will like it enough to take it home.

We walk to a spot along busy Massachusetts Avenue where he’s had success before. He tapes a note to the painting and props it up on a bench. Then we cross the street and head toward a brick half-wall at the entrance to a bookstore. “I’ve hidden behind this wall so many times,” he says.

A teenager in a gray hooded sweatshirt stops to look at the painting. He reads the note, which says, “Everything will be all right.” He sits on the bench. Is he thinking it over? The colors of the painting are striking, even from across the street. It depicts a cartoonish character with large eyes. Charlie Brown from another planet.

He likes it! The boy puts the painting in his backpack and walks away.

Bataclan has done this hundreds of times, but he still gets a kick out of it. His notes include his Web address and also say, “This painting is yours to take for free!” He has waited as long as a half hour to find a taker, he says. This time, it was just five minutes.

The art market can work in mysterious ways. This is how it works for Bataclan. Since he first started giving his paintings away in October 2003, he has generated the kind of publicity most artists yearn for. It started with a small write-up in Boston magazine in early 2004. Other articles followed. He was featured in Reader’s Digest, which led to a profile on CBS Evening News.

Bataclan’s hook was what he called the “Smile Boston Project.” He attached notes to his paintings offering them for free, “if you smile at random people more often.”

Born in the Philippines, Bataclan grew up in San Francisco, studied at UCLA, and then entered the industrial design program at Ohio State. But he didn’t experience culture shock until he moved to Massachusetts in 1995. Of all the places he’d been,
the East seemed the least friendly.

It became even more dreary after he was laid off from a high-paying job at a technology company after the downturn in 2001. “It was brutal,” he recalled. “I’m a pretty optimistic guy; I try to stay pretty positive, but I lost 20 pounds. One day I said, ‘Hey, why don’t I turn off all my computers and just draw again?’” He started working with characters he’d been creating since he was young, using the vibrant colors he associates with the Philippines.

On an open-studios weekend in Cambridge shortly afterward, he put 56 paintings up for sale at $50 each. Forty-nine of them sold. That’s when he did something counterintuitive. He hatched a plan to start giving his paintings away, partly out of gratitude for his successful weekend and partly to address a problem that had been bothering him.

“For years, I was complaining about the lack of smiles here in Boston,” he said. So he decided to use his art to brighten things up.

I asked Bataclan about his ambitions. Isn’t there a bias in the art world toward edginess over niceness? “I have no edge,” he said, laughing. “I’m like the wimpiest street artist.” But maybe, he speculated, there’s something subversive in being wholesome.

Bataclan gives away about five to 15 paintings a month. He has left them in 25 states and 35 countries. He changed his note to “Everything will be all right” in light of the current recession.

“He took his negative and turned it into a positive by random acts of kindness. That’s what I responded to,” said Elaine Dennis, who shows Bataclan’s work at Ink Studios in North Hollywood, Calif. She even placed one of his paintings on the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Part of the bang that Bataclan gets is from the reassurance he gives to others. One weekend in 2008, he set out to give away 115 paintings in Manhattan. One of them was found by Dian Crystal, who operates a gift shop in the East Village. Crystal recalls seeing the painting of a smiling red devil with yellow eyes 
on a bench. She had been feeling somber because it was the anniversary of September 11. The painting and note seemed to be meant for her. “It touched 
me so much; it brought faith and hope back to me,” she said.

And what about the teenager in Harvard Square? When I caught up with him, I asked what he liked about the painting. “I don’t know,” he said, looking 
off to the distance. “It kind of brightens up the mood.”
I detected a half-smile. When I told Bataclan about the exchange, he was as elated as if he’d made another sale. n

Learn more:
www.bataclan.com

Originally published in Ohio State Alumni Magazine.