Boston-based artist Bren Bataclan used his Twitter account Wednesday to post this message: “I just left a painting at the MGM hotel in Vegas.”

Bataclan’s a guerilla artist. Since 2003 he’s been leaving paintings on park benches and public sidewalks with a notes attached explaining the artwork is free to the person who finds it. “The first time I left a painting, the note said ‘This painting is yours if you promise to smile at random people more often,’” Bataclan says. “Since the fall of 2008, I have a new note that says ‘Everything will be all right.’ I changed it mostly because of this economy we’re in.”

He’s on his way to Seward next week for a day teaching school children how to paint characters like his. They’re depicted as flat line drawings, but boldly colored so they pop off the canvas. Some are animals. Some are people. Others are neither. Some sport antennae like sci-fi creatures. Most have eyes of two different sizes. The characters with mouths always smile. You might find one on the streets of Anchorage Sunday, April 26, or in Seward on Monday, or in Anchorage after Bataclan’s return trip to the airport Tuesday. Bataclan has paintings in galleries and had recent solo exhibit at Boston Children’s Museum. “I’m about to paint a playground,” he said on the phone Monday from his home in Boston. His cheery voice made it sound as if painting a playground was a career goal, the equivalent of a musician playing Carnegie Hall, or an astronaut being selected for a space shuttle crew.

That cheeriness is something Bataclan doesn’t seem to shake. He’s been making cheerful art since he was a child, so his characters had decades to develop, but says never thought of giving one away—let alone painting one for sale—until he was out of work in 2003. Over the phone, he sounds a bit surprised to be telling this story. (In fact he sounds a bit surprised to be an artist.) But he’s told the story before, to Reader’s Digest Asia, Smithsonian magazine and to any number of newspaper and TV news reporters.

Bataclan calls himself a casualty of the dot-com bust. “I had a great job at the time, but when it crashed it was brutal,” he says. “But I still kept up this optimistic front. I don’t really know why.” Today he sells artwork at accessible prices in galleries, and is builds a following placing free art on the streets. Perhaps not surprisingly, he gets feedback by leaving his web address www.bataclan.com on each note.  “I am not making nearly as much money, but in terms of joy this is worth a hundred times more.”

scott@anchoragepress.com