A pub lunch for any occasion, xmas included, has become a staple in my office over the past few years.  But yesterday we did something different.  We went across the street to a new café that has only been open for a couple of months and as we sipped our caffeine of choice we picked up brushes and painted together.  We were at the Paintlounge and their goal is to transform art into an interactive activity for everyone through freestyle social painting.  They provided all the materials, tools and clean up for our experience.  We just had to pick our canvas sizes and paint.

As a team building activity it was something that we could all participate in despite our skill level.  There were six of us total: two with a background in landscape architecture (they actually know how to paint), two of us that really have no painting skill but were totally willing to put paint to canvas in whatever crazy form it turned into, and two that were a bit more hesitant to take on their own painting but swooped in to add accents to our group canvas.  Our group canvas has a lot to be desired lacking a theme and ended up as a mash of colours with our tag line on it.  And putting up our individual canvases up against each other shows our different styles and skills but at least will make for good conversation pieces when we use them to decorate our work space.

I first met the Paintlounge ladies a couple of months ago.  These social painters not only ditched their engineering education and regular day jobs to start a social painting café, but within weeks of getting up and running wanted to use social painting to bring local artists and community members together to help out the local food bank.  Since the summer the Markham food bank has been making public pleas for help because they can’t keep up to increasing demand.  And while food banks aren’t a long-term sustainable solution (see the Gumboot post on the Do the Math Campaign), people still need to have access to healthy, safe and culturally appropriate food when our social safety net fails them.  The food drive kick-off event partnered with the mall (as a venue), Markham’s sustainability and cultural departments, and local arts council to use their canvases to paint food drive boxes.  The local artists used Paintlounge canvases that would be constructed into food drive boxes for the holidays and will be auctioned off as individual pieces in January.

The Paintlounge is one of the most interesting and community building places in Markham that I’ve been to in a while.  Do you have a favourite small business that builds community or adds a social spin on traditionally individual activities?