A grey faded corduroy hat covers Bren Bataclan’s head on a cold day in February while he searches for the right key. In the heart of Harvard Square, he is just as anonymous as the hordes of shoppers, tourists, and students that pass him by. Finding the key, Bren opens the glass door to the abandoned basement that once housed a popular bookstore. The basement, complete with disconnected wires hanging from the ceiling and a “This Is Not An Elevator” sign scrawled on what appears to have been an elevator, is oddly warm. The floor is covered with a thick dust filament but Bren kneels on it anyway. He has been commissioned by the Harvard Square Business Association to paint a few characters on massive pieces of paper. These characters will hang in the window of the abandoned store and serve as an attraction for people visiting Harvard Square. The idea is that visitors will take their pictures in front of these landmarks and email them to the Business Association in order to win two roundtrips tickets to any destination the country. With their incandescent colors and childlike playfulness, the characters are a far cry from the usual ivy-and-brick austerity that graces most local postcards.
When faced with something absolutely ridiculous looking, an unavoidable human instinct causes us to smile. And, as Bren has discovered, few things look as ridiculous as a bright-colored creature with big spotlight eyes. His characters, a composite of a few uncomplicated strokes and two or three colors, are visual gems. They betray nothing of their early incarnations as the notebooks doodles of a bored high-school student and later, of a broke and frustrated artist. And just as there is much more to them than merely a modern, easy-to-digest, pop-culture aesthetic, there is also more to Bren than what his standing as one of Boston’s up-and-coming artists would suggest. There is not a trace in him of either the condescending cynicism of a commissioned artist or the narcissism of a publicly recognized one. In fact, at this precise moment, in this godforsaken basement, he simply stares at the blank sheets on the floor the way you imagine Michelangelo looked at a slab of marble.
After a few minutes, Bren disappears out the front door to buy paint, bringing a much-needed trace of color to the abandoned room. The base color of the basement is gray, with speckles of left over color on stripped walls. Ventilation laces the exposed ceiling, and pipes lay uncovered. Some light penetrates the dusty windows. When he returns, Bren drops the bag of paint, expertly removes a pencil from his pocket, and begins tracing a large shifted square onto the sheet. Squatting, practically on the paper, Bren draws two ear-like shapes, an eye on the body, a line anchoring the eye to the body, and a massive upside down arc to serve as this character’s smile. Bren, on his hands and knees, swiftly gives the arrangement of lines and shapes a personality. Finally, he draws a big heart on the characters stomach. The character appears to be some sort of square giraffe. He uses a school bus –yellow color, and light blueberry hue, and finally fills the heart in with a deep, loving red. He is done in fifteen minutes at most. The character beams.
Bren originally came to Boston to teach graphic design at UMass Amherst, but eventually realized that he wanted to do other work. He tried to sell some of his computer graphic designs at open studios but none ever sold. Disheartened, Bren began painting the characters he had doodled in school. To his amazement these characters quickly became incredibly popular. “For the first seven years I showed my computer-generated work. And no one bought anything. Zero. Not one. So when I painted fifty-six paintings my family thought I was crazy because I hadn’t sold any. They said, ‘Oh, you would be lucky if you sell three.’ I said ‘That would be wonderful, because I haven't sold any.’ Within a few days forty-nine of them had sold. And my neighbors came. They brought champagne.”
A few years after his initial commercial success, Bren is selling his paintings in a show outside of Tokyo Kid, the local embassy for Asian pop culture aficionados. A small boy runs out of the store, hugging a canvas tight to his chest. “That’s his first piece of real art.” Bren says, smiling widely while he watches the boy show the painting to his parents. When Bren sells a painting he makes direct eye contact with each customer, treats them like an old friend, makes them feel important, no matter what age or background. However, he is no smarmy salesman; his friendly personality instantly pulls people to him. He shakes their hand and introduces them to his characters. Andrew, Tokyo Kid’s store manager, first came in contact with Bren’s paintings three years prior. “I was out to dinner, and my friend pointed out this painting. He said it was a Bren Bataclan painting. I recognized the name. Bren buys a lot of figurines from here.” Andrew can vouch for Bren’s sincerity: “Bren is a really cheerful guy. He’s got one of those great optimistic personalities. People really like that. He has this really great vibe going on, really bright and fun.“ If anything, the description is an understatement. Bren’s laughter is truly amazing, like a set off display of fireworks. His deep brown eyes light up, and sometimes you can catch him doing a sort of hop-skip move when no one is looking. It instantly becomes evident that the combination of his coffee brown Filipino skin and black hair is a clever disguise for something colorful inside. If you watch closely you can catch glimpses of that character that lives inside of Bren’s human camouflage. Yet the popular artist never lets his charisma outshine his paintings. The most popular response to his work is the aforementioned smile, followed closely by authentic laughter. Spectators are very open about their fondness for the paintings, and many even know someone who knows someone who already owns and treasures a Bren Bataclan painting. Lookers soon become buyers.
Somewhat like a superhero, Bren’s identity as a charismatic artist is only a fraction as interesting as his alter ego: Bren, the anonymous, voyeuristic benefactor. It was four years ago, during a rare moment when the normally crowded streets of Harvard Square were desolate and dark. Out of the dark grey surroundings appeared two figures - a woman accompanied by her husband.A lone painting sat lost in the wintry mix. Despite the darkness, the woman wore black glasses that covered much of her face. She approached the painting with curiosity. This begins one of Bren’s favorite stories. His narrative tone is soft but passionate. As he tells it his words become more fluid and connected, his eyes revealing more humility than pride. “I didn't hear from them for a while but then she sent me a message saying ‘I’d like to meet you.’ And it blew my mind because it turned out that she wore the glasses because half of her face was caved in, and when she found the painting it was her first week of chemotherapy. She said it really helped her stay positive.” Bren is full of wonderful stories that he gladly shares with his buyers. Interestingly, only few take notice of a critical point: why was Bren’s painting staged for discovery in a random spot in Harvard Square?
For a graphic-design major who barely survived the dot-com burst, Bren was financially and mentally restored by his newfound success, but success changed more than his outlook on the future. In many ways, it fundamentally altered his life’s purpose. Bren, who was brought up in a Filipino family in California, and later spent years living in the easy-going Midwest, is almost friendly to a fault. His years of bad luck seemed to have compromised the qualities he cherished most about himself. Therefore, when he began selling some paintings he also began leaving others on park benches and trains and in schools and hospitals. The idea was for people to find and take them. Soon -- and perhaps inevitably -- this homage to good karma developed into a phenomenon of a scale beyond anything Bren could have imagined.
His story about the mysterious Harvard Square lady offers a glimpse into an underground movement that has greatly benefited Boston. The “Smile Boston Project” is partly the result of Bren’s experiences in the Midwest: “In the Midwest, folks were, you know, really friendly and always said ‘Hi how are you?’ and other stuff like that. I missed that aspect a lot.It was more of a family environment. And they just talked to you nonstop. So when I came to Boston I really missed the laughing and smiling and giggling, so I thought ‘I'll be proactive and regain it.’”
Laughing, smiling, and giggling was exactly what Bren wanted to see on a bright weekend morning, as he watched a large man slowly approach a dog sitting on a park bench. The man was not alone and the dog was not really a dog. As his family cautiously looked on, the man drew nearer and nearer, inspecting what he believed to be a painting of a dog. He took the small painting into his arms, his curiosity visibly piqued by the note attached to the back, which read: “This painting is yours if you promise to smile at random people more often.” Upon reading the note the man grinned and presented the goofy headshot of the dog looking creature to his family. Chuckling they looked around to see if they could spot who left this ridiculous treasure. Then, unable to locate its previous owner, the man unzipped his backpack, stowed this precious item, and continued his walk. This time there was a bit more resolve in his step – a sign, Bren hopes, of a bit more awareness of the good things in life.
Hundreds of similar scenes have taken place as Bren watches from a safe distance. After leaving numerous paintings in Boston, Bren began to scatter them in the cities he visited. “Not knowing this was going to be a full time job I started to leave paintings across country. I took the Chinatown bus to New York, left them all over in New York. Then Rhode Island, Maine, San Francisco, LA, and Alaska, near the North Pole. I started to vary the project by leaving uncolored ones for people to color themselves. It was kind of cool.” Paintings have also been left in Hawaii, Florida, Nevada, Wisconsin, Vermont, Utah, and Texas. Outside of the country, they dotted streets, parks and bus stops in Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Tibet, Taiwan, Korea, the U.K, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Honduras, Guatemala, Israel, Antarctica, and Canada. In the jargon of today’s media technology, The Smile Project has gone global.
Back in the dusty Harvard Square basement, Bren’s ambitions are much more focused. His brown eyes widen as he channels the second character. The pencil surfaces again, moves quickly across the surface of the paper and a robot looking character takes shape on the paper, beamed down from crazy. Outlined in typical black, and filled in a Martian green, the robot dances about on the sheet. Like Bren’s other creations this character has randomly colored hands and feet. But the fact that Bren uses bright colors is not insignificant. “The color palette I use in the paintings is from my home country. The color scheme is bright, vibrant and festive. It is what you see in the tropical country.”Each uniquely dazzling, intensely brilliant, character is a piece of Bren. “I try to create each one, you know, so they're special in a way. And one way I do that is that I don’t use paints straight from the tube. So I mix the paint, you know, so that this blue is not the same as that blue or that blue. That's how I keep each painting unique. And greens are fun. Green, it's actually, it's yellow, brown, green and white. Some people just mix green and yellow to try to make this color, but this one’s a very different green.”
The third character Bren paints in the basement is at once the simplest and the most inspiring character. His skillful hand travels across the page, bringing the character to life. Born from basic shapes, the star headed gleeful character wiggles across the massive page. Its black stick body is peculiarly disproportionate to its light pink star shaped head. Bren admires his work as he fills the creatures circular hands with color. He stands up and marvels. Then he remembers, and bends to scribble sign the painting with a flourish. He stands again, circles the painting, and turns to inspect the window where it will be displayed. The character smiles up at the unfinished ceiling. It suddenly becomes clear that the special thing about Bren is that he engages the natural human attraction to the bizarre but never in a provocative or exploitative way. For him, art has a purpose, and his in particular is designed to undermine loneliness – the loneliness he felt as out-of-towner during his first Boston winter, the loneliness of a patron facing her first round of chemotherapy, and the loneliness of hundreds of people who literally and figuratively stumble upon his paintings as they walk through city streets. That is why Bren’s characters are so unpretentious, so inviting to the unsuspecting bystander: so that one cannot help but stop, stare, and smile.
A remarkable quality about his work is that the people who purchase Bren’s paintings often can imagine themselves or someone they know reflected in the brightly colored creatures with silly grins. “It’s actually scary because one time a woman saw one of my paintings and said that it was definitely of her son. I just said ‘Gosh, I hope your son isn’t blue like that.” In fact, he purposely keeps his characters from being specific animals. Like the “Dog” found on the park bench, most of Bren’s characters are specifically ambiguous and are not always gender specified. “And what I like about this is everyone has their own interpretation of what the character really is. Like, maybe I like initially saw a polar bear, but other people see other things. So you can see that in a dog, rabbit or cat, it’s easy to see other animals. I really like that freedom. Also you can get people really interested and talk with them about it. Someone could say ‘This looks like a bear, but someone's poured yogurt on top of it.”
Bren’s talent has brought him public renown, but working in an abandoned basement does not leave much room for meaningful social interaction. For that, Bren relies on his other work as a commissioned artist. Three of his most interesting commissions were for a professor, a soon-to-be father, and a friend whose father had just died.
The first commission involved a very large painting depicting diverse characters with distinct expressions. The characters are crowded close to each other, but seem to only be physically together. Each one looks like it is thinking about its own problems. “I did that painting for a professor. He wanted me to paint characters in many different states, like from being happy to being scared. So people could point at a character and say ‘I’m like that, I'm happy today.’” As Bren understands it, the relationship between a commissioned artist and his patron is not unlike that between a therapist and his patient. His clients articulate their feelings, sometimes with difficulty, and Bren’s job is create art that reflects those feelings with sensitivity and disciplined creativity.
The second commission resulted in a painting of characters situated around the border of the canvas in a circle and smiling cheerfully against a beautiful blue sky. “It's for a guy who's father just died and is having a tough time. So he wanted a painting that sort of depicts characters looking, I mean, if you can imagine you’re on the floor or the ground and the characters are looking down at you encouraging you get up.” This painting is a perfect example of how Bren’s art is directed at influencing the emotions of others. He uses clever constructs and perspectives to immerse the viewer in the joy that his paintings offer.
Finally, the third commisioned painting is extremely different from Bren’s typical paintings. It is actually four scenes. Each scene shows a different view of a small electric yellow blob surrounded by a comfortable blue lining. The small unintelligible electric blob looking thing rolls around, and eventually takes shape. “Ultrasound. The husband didn't even know the gender. The wife didn't know about the painting. It was a gift. He gave me the ultrasound. It looked just like blobs, like foot, hand. So I kind of interpreted it. There's one that's clearly a little baby. “ Bren knows well the influence of art on the soul. He speaks of the characters that he doodled in his younger years almost with a tinge of nostalgia: “They were my friends growing up. They kept me company. Like we really didn't have full conversations and stuff, but as an example, when I was bored in high school or something, I would draw them inside of a notebook, and they kept me happy.”