Day 18: Selfless Portrait
Meet these two artists giving away art for joy and for connection (and for free)
Welcome to Day 18 of the Outsourced Optimism Digital Advent Calendar. Click here to learn more about this small seasonal series and to unwrap all the gifts in the archives. Sign up for freešš»š to have these daily delights delivered straight to your inbox.
If you love Outsourced Optimism, but donāt want to receive these daily Digital Advent Calendar emails, follow these instructions to update your settings.
There is a part in Still Life where a famous artist is creatively stuck and decides to sit, in disguise, in an Italian piazza with her easel and supplies. āShe intended to give portraits away for free; for artsā sake, she said. An act of joy, craft, and generosity.ā
It reminded of two artists I discovered this year whose work is both incognito and public facing and rooted in sharing art freely for joy and connection.
Meet Nishant Jain
can be found right here on Substack as The SneakyArt Post. With a sketchbook and an ink pen, he pays attention in public places and quietly draws what he seesā scenes of ordinary life, strangers in moments theyāll likely forget, forever a small part of his work, though theyāll never know it. Just like life. The intersections and impressions we leave with each other in the smallest, most remarkable ways.This year, Nishant has been giving his art away for freeā sometimes inviting his community to share tiny stories which he then illustrates, sometimes leaving his drawings behind in a public place to be found by another strangerā linking us all together, one tiny beautiful sketch at a time.
Meet Ivan Cash
Ivan is an artist, filmmaker, creative director and a kindred spirit (even though weāve never met and he doesnāt know it yet) whose large-scale interactive experiments are often centered around the smallest, simplest moments of human connection.
You can dive all the way through his brilliant body of work here, but the experiment that came to mind for this post was Selfless Portraits, a 3 year-running collaborative art project where strangers across the world drew other strangerās Facebook profile photos.
There were drawings that looked exactly like the photo, interpretive approaches, animation, caricature, sketches on skin, macaroni portraitsā¦over 50,000 people drawing other people as an act of joy and generosity. For connectionsā sake.