Art Battle: 2018 Championship Competition

A few weeks back we were trying to find something interesting to do here in Los Angeles. Amanda was looking around the web and found this interesting event in downtown LA.

I don't know how long this has been going on, but apparently it is worldwide now. The event is called Art Battle and somehow we managed to get tickets to the US Championship event. Of course we had no idea what it was going to be and purposely didn't read anything about it so that it would be a surprise.

We showed up a bit early and couldn't get in the door so we stopped next door and had some food. We were sitting outside, so we could see when a line started to form in front of the building where the event was being hosted.

After giving the doorman our tickets and walking through into the main area, the following scene is what we saw immediately in front of us.

So yeah, as you can see. It is exactly what the name suggests. An art battle. In the back you can see a DJ setting up his equipment along with a rotating wall with previous art made by the competing artists.

It turns out that 5 artists have been in qualifying matches all over the country and made it to this final round here in LA. A 6th artist was picked from a hat or something. I didn't really get how that worked out.

View from where we found a seat

There was seating on a second floor surrounding the bottom floor so you could get a good vantage point for whatever was about to happen. Clearly some cool kids were gonna come in and start painting something on the canvases, but what are the rules?

After a few minutes, a crowd started to form and the somewhat nerdy looking DJ was ready to go. He even had a weird lighted helmet that he put on that really didn't make him look any cooler, but I digress.

Finally the rules were announced. They were pretty straightforward. There will be 3 rounds. Rounds one and two are 20 minues each.

After 20 minutes, they have to stop painting and we send a text from our phones voting on who we liked. The top artists go on to round 2. From that group, the top 3 go on to the final round, which is 30 minutes in duration. The champion is the winner of that group.

So in came the painters, and away they went... To the rhythm of some really aggressive dub-step and house beats.

Amanda and I kind of looked at each other and laughed about the seriousness of the whole thing, but it turned out to be quite a fun night.

It turns out that we were actually in the best spot, because the two best artists were right in front of us.

Luckily there was a big screen adove the stage where you could see the action a bit closer. There was a guy walking around with a camera live streaming it to the screen.

This one only emerged as a butt in the last 5 minutes of painting. We got a good laugh!

The guy who did the above face is apparently a TV actor who is a somewhat known artist named Joseph Lee. At first I wasn't really digging his stuff, but in hindsight, he was the most fine art artist of the group. His work is actually quite interesting. It's worth checking out his website here.

The above 3 shots are of the 3 finalist paintings. Amanda and I voted for the 1st (the Geisha), but the 2nd one won. Honestly, we felt that the 2nd piece was a bit amateurish compared to the first, but I think you really have to look at your audience when doing a competition like this.

In hindsight, we were surprised that Joseph Lee didn't make it to the final round because he was clearly the most unique artist. But as I said, you have to look at your audience. In this case they were mostly under 30 cool kids who were probably more interested in graphic artists than fine artsy stuff. Which I can totally understand!

I will leave you with Joseph's piece from round 2 and let you decide for yourself. I'd love to hear in the comments which painting you all think is the best from the above images. Keep in mind that all paintings were completed from scratch in either 20 or 30 minutes, depending on the round.