Matt Held: Painting Faces on Facebook

Here's possibly one of my favorite rags-to-riches story (well, fame definitely if not riches for the moment): Once there was an almost unknown Brooklyn artist having a painter's block, struggling for inspiration at his in-house studio with two children running around (one crawling to be more precise), then all of a sudden he got his "A-ha!" moment as he painted his wife's new Facebook portrait. He started making more of such portraits, starting with his friends - the project then takes off and becomes an internet phenomenon. He received coverage from publications such as New York Magazine, Juxtapoz, and of course, numerous bloggers - the media attention goes even as far as across the continent in countries such as Germany and Italy. He was also recently invited to a talk for the 1stfans member community at the Brooklyn Museum and now preparing for an exhibition at a gallery in New Haven, CT in May, along with many other exciting things to come.

Matt Held has a group on Facebook, by the name of "I'll have my portrait painted by Matt Held." For the members who joined the group and added him as a Facebook friend, he would look through their profiles and select the interesting ones (and yes, it is as subjective as it sounds) to paint as portraits. There are some rules however: the picture must be in color, no pets and no children. Small props and quirkiness would help. His goal was to paint 200 pieces, and now the group has close to 4,000 members - the odds are 1 in 20, not too bad for now, is it? Once a portrait gets painted, the sitter (facebooker rather) would get a free JPEG for the finished work and priority in purchasing the portrait.

It is interesting to see that there is an increasing amount of artists that begin to utilise social network and the whole networking phenomenon as their media platform and inspiration. In Matt's case, he brings in the age-old idea of portraiture and re-appropriate it to the modern world of Facebook. The project itself, is perhaps best explained by the artist's own statement:

With the development of social networking sites, I've developed an interest in how people take simple or complex snapshots of themselves, post them to their page as a representation of who they are and what they want people to see. It is an interesting form of control and, in a way, self-preservation. However, there is a strong likelihood that many people who don't know you will see this photo representation and make passing judgments as to who you may or may not be, much in the same way we make passing judgments on people we see in our neighborhoods every day.

Take a collection of these portraits and put them into the context of a gallery space or like setting, and you see a community of individuals - their likeness elevated and memorialized like the original commissioners of portrait painting; the rich and powerful – displayed as a portrait's original intent: expression of an individuals' character and moral quality.