The right words

Dallas Clayton has them.

Art outside

Here is an incredible, international, project that is bringing art to the streets, and you can get involved. Yes, even you. People all over the world are visiting galleries, snapping photos of overlooked or forgotten portraits, and replicating them in the streets of their cities.

It all started with French artist Julien de Casablanca, after an abandoned painting of a woman in a corner at the Louvre caught his eye. “I had a ‘Prince Charming’ impulse,” he told Slate.com, “I wanted to free her from the castle to give her a second life.” He took a photograph of the painting, printed it onto large-format paper, and pasted it onto an urban wall.

Since then, the project has become a global participative project called Outings. Any of us can take part, by going to our own local galleries and snapping photographs, preferably of anonymous (and therefore possibly forgotten) portraits. The Outings team can edit and/or print the photograph for you, or you can find someone local, then you simply paste it to a wall in your city, using wallpaper glue and a brush.

The full guidelines are on the website, including tips for keeping this kind of public art legal (rather important).

Now, you and I can become street artists, AND share some of the masterpieces of the past with people who might not have the time or inclination to make their way inside the local gallery.

That’s quite lovely, don’t you think?

Image credits: art given a new lease of life in (from top to bottom) Frankfurt, New Orleans, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Warsaw. Used here with Julien’s kind permission