Preserving the environmentalist spirit of Paintmap

Paintmap’s character and goals appear summarized in the frontal window of the site. Up to now, Paintmap’s collection includes some 350 paintings distributed all around the world and created following very different techniques and artistic styles, from figurative hyper-realistic to abstract. The basic premise was, however, always accomplished: that is, the subject can be related to some particular physical or environmental space. This is what characterizes Paintmap and makes it different from many other web sites where artists can show their creations.

Paintmap is in its first growing stage and it is now when deviations from its original character have to be careful controlled. The main problem appears to be related with the uploading of paintings that, because of their creativity origin, cannot be geo-positioned. It is important to note that this has nothing to do with the stylistic approach. A landscape can be expressed in many different ways; the important fact for Paintmap users is that they are faced up to some particular and geo-located piece of the environment (natural, urban, human...) through the creative approach of the artist. If the artistic work is of an exclusively conceptual character, it cannot serve the objectives of Paintmap independently of its artistic quality.

This is why the technical team of Paintmap has opened a way to moderate uploaded paintings. The process includes three possible actions:

(1) Geo-located paintings with a comment or, at least, a short sentence describing the subject: the painting is validated and published.

(2) Geo-located paintings without any kind of comment or with an inappropriate location: the author is requested to comment or to improve the map positioning before the work is definitively published.

(3) Non-geo-located, conceptual works whose subjects cannot be assigned to some particular geographical framework: sorry, but the painting will be considered unsuitable to Paintmap goals and its publication rejected. The same decision will be applied to paintings or comments including spam or promoting web sites of products.

The Paintmap Team apologize for the unavoidable implementation of this filtering process whose only objective is to preserve the spirit of the Paintmap project and to serve that parcel of artistic community concerned with the environment in a wide sense. We encourage other kind of artists to take advantage of the diversity of web spaces open to any kind of artistic production and acknowledge the interest they have shown in Paintmap.