“Sometimes it’s difficult to pin a financial value to an artwork. I don’t even try. So here’s a chance to get your hands on an original painting FOR FREE!”
The above is the kind of caption that can be seen attached to paintings produced by Warren Lewis aka CHCKN LEWIS aka @likelewis on social media. In 2011 he began what he describes as a social experiment which involves him creating original paintings and giving them away on Twitter. After a few exhibitions where he sold work to investment collectors he re-evaluated his ambitions as an artist and what he was actually trying to get out of making artwork. He decided that he would be happier knowing that his art is hanging in the homes of those who genuinely appreciate the kind of work he was producing, and so the seed for giving away artwork to people was planted. Lewis quite literally gives his work away for free by covering the material costs of creating his artworks as well as the delivery costs. The fate of paintings are usually decided by his 120 sided dice, or by someone showing their appreciation for the painting of the day. “I like to reward genuine appreciation where possible,” Lewis explains.
While the themes vary from work to work, Lewis explains that they all fit under the overarching theme of “popular culture and the complexity of the world we live in”. The layered, graffiti-like look of his paintings is created on corrugated cardboard with a variety of media, from glitter to acrylics to silver foil and pens. The point is to use the cheapest, most accessible materials out there. “I like the idea of being able to produce interesting, desirable stuff that people want to own from cheap ass scraps”
“I like to describe my works as being CALM or NO PROBLEM (void of stress and nonsense). This describes both the style and the process of how they are made. But in art terms, the best way to describe my painting style would be ‘Expressionism’,” Lewis explains. His use of puns makes his work cheeky and fun, while also commenting on popular culture. It provides a potency to the message he is trying to get across through his project, which is that “money can’t buy everything and that art can be understood by anyone willing to look”.
The subversion of monetary value is not only demonstrated through giving away his work for free, but also addressed more directly though his recent series of works, #100Racks. In this series he paints money on to his cardboard canvas creating a stack of bank notes. He plays on the idea of the value of money by using banking jargon and investment symbolism to highlight the paradoxes of what is seen to have value and how that value is produced. “There is an interesting irony there for me in producing paintings that represent money, and then giving them away for free. I guess it was a way for me to make the whole thing a bit more meta”.
His work in advertising helped him learn that when communicating with your audience, having a tone of voice that aligns with your brand allows one to talk from a bigger platform. He transferred this thinking to his project and developed a tone for the giveaway. “Mixing up classic bank language with chicken references felt like an interesting combination. It also helped to positively confuse the whole project a little bit and blur the proposition. I feel like people see so much of this type of shit everyday that they were getting bored of clarity and don’t want things to be explained so precisely like an ad campaign. Plus when you take on all the costs of a project you can do whatever the f*ck you want”.
