Two hundred and fifty and going up

I was preparing some words to celebrate the 100 paintings in Paintmap when I saw that we were quickly going towards 200. Well, said to myself, we shall celebrate the “two hundred” paintings...But now we are exceeding 250 and I think it is a good moment to be marked in the growing process of Paintmap.

Micaiah, Martin, Dough, Epifanio, Vivien, Sarah, Dazza, Erika, Csich, Julie, Joe, Donald, Lindsay, Jim, Rob, René... The enthusiasm that many of you have shown with the project encourages all us to attract more people to show their artistic views of our common environment. I know that there are other colleagues interested in participating but different technical problems are delaying their presence among us, so we expect to see an increase of the Paintmap community.

Some of you are intense travellers that move around the world and produce artistic descriptions of very diverse environments. Most of us, however, are centred around more or less concrete spaces, may be at the scale of a country (e.g. Holland), different size regions (e.g. Mid-Whales, Margaret river area, Lambertville-New Hope, Cornualles...) or small places like Mawgan Port, Cape of Gata Natural Park and cities like Málaga or Almería. This is why, at this moment, the identification of “cool places” is rather difficult and it is closely related with the geographical distribution of Paintmap members. We should expect, for the future, to see the geographical (and subject) coincidence of different artists on a common space or environment, something that will increase even more the interest of Paintmap. We have to be patient and, first of all, to be convinced that the site runs properly, that users have all the tools necessary to make exploring Paintmap an easy and funny experience and –very important- that contributors feel free to extend the information about the values found in the environment selected as a painting subject. This will surely be an stimulus to reach the global environmental goal implicit in Paintmap.

Thanks to everybody!
Jaime