RALEIGH -- If you came upon a cartoonish painting left in an unlikely place in Raleigh last week, you were one of 15 people who unwittingly entered artist Bren Bataclan's world.
He hopes it made you smile.
"Everything will be alright. This painting is yours to take for free!" is the note he attaches to his giveaways, which he says he has sprinkled around 20 cities in the United States and in 20 foreign countries with help from friends and family.
Bataclan is a Cambridge, Mass., artist with a background in computer animation who figures he has given away between 400 and 500 paintings since he started his "Smile Project" in 2003. He also sells paintings, which is how he makes a living, and exhibits in galleries.
By now an accomplished publicity magnet, Bataclan has been featured in dozens of national and local news media stories as he has made his way, much like Johnny Appleseed, around the country. The exposure fans sales and commissions, sure, but it also spreads a little joy. And that's what it's supposed to be about.
At midweek, Bataclan said he had found Raleigh to be an ideal place for his joy-spreading. He said the friendly people here remind him of Columbus, Ohio, where he went to grad school. When he moved to Boston eight years ago, he found the populace not so friendly.
"I complained about the lack of warmth," he said. "That was the main catalyst why I started the 'Smile Project.'"
He came to Raleigh to give away art but also to meet with students at Hunter Elementary, Exploris Middle and Longview High schools, and to prepare for a project he will do at First Night this year.
Where the art was
If you knew enough about it ahead of time, you could have followed his exploits on his Twitter page, as he disclosed where he had just dropped off each piece of free art: in front of a trendy shoe store in Crabtree Valley Mall, at the Krispy Kreme downtown, at the courthouse, in the hands of a statue in front of the history museum (where dozens of children on a field trip from Stanley County surrounded it, and a teacher's aide finally retrieved the piece).
Generally, it takes between three minutes and half an hour for peopleto realize they can just take the painting, he said. At Crabtree, it took five or 10 minutes' worth of people approaching it and looking around in puzzlement, he said, before a family finally picked it up because it made their baby stop crying.
Bataclan's New Year's Eve project here -- titled "Smile Raleigh: Everything Will Be Alright" -- will entail taking the puzzlelike paintings that he and the local students made last week, leaving them around town and inviting the finders to bring the pieces downtown to be assembled into big puzzles. "It'll be a big, community interactive puzzle-painting experience," he said.
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