Imagine if the movie Fight Club was about a secret society featuring competing painters and writers instead of, well, fighters. That’s the concept behind two new creative crazes hitting Toronto: Art Battle, an event going down later this month, and the Write Club, which is happening tonight.
Art Battle is a monthly painting competition where painters create the best work they can in 20 minutes. Simon Plashkes and Chris Pemberton started the event back in 2009 and have seen its audience grow from 70 to 300.
There are three rounds during the event, wherein four artists are selected at random by drawing names from a hat. The selected artists are provided a canvas and the same quantity and colours of acrylic paint, and they then have 20 minutes to create their masterpiece while music plays and drinks are poured.
The audience selects its favourites at the end of each round until a winner is declared. The paintings are sold in a silent auction at the end of the night. Any unspoken-for works of art are destroyed, which apparently is a pretty cool sight to behold.
There are now Art Battles cross the country, drawing fighting artists all the way from Vancouver to Halifax.
In a similar vein, the Write Club also pits writers against writers in a literal battle of the wits. Originally founded in Chicago in 2010, the Toronto edition was launched in late 2012 by Alicia Merchant and Catherine McCormick.
The concept is a fast-paced literary reading with some pretty simple rules: three rounds, two opposing writers with two opposing ideas and seven minutes for each side to make their argument more compelling. Like Art Battle, it’s the audience who makes the final call and crowns the write-ful winner. With the seven-minute time limit, the pressure gets high and the evening can get pretty cutthroat.
The evening is not for the meek writer who enjoys solitude — which is probably why events like these are important to the city’s art community. Art Battle and the Write Club bring solitary artistic activities into the limelight and remind some of us that sometimes it’s not only necessary to kill our darlings, it’s fun to do it, too.
Write Club Toronto, The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St. W., 416-519-9439. Feb. 19, 8 p.m.
Art Battle Toronto, The Great Hall, 1087 Queen St. W., 416-537-0803. Feb. 26, 7: 30 p.m.