Let’s Paint Online
with John Kilduff
June 4–19 | 2:30–5:00 p.m. ET | Exploratory
Join legendary painter and performance artist John Kilduff—best known for his exuberant live-streaming persona Mr. Let’s Paint—for a wild, high-energy dive into painting, performance, and process. In this experimental course, students will learn how to set up a home studio for both painting and streaming, transforming their creative spaces into dynamic sites of art and action. A highly interactive course, students will be expected to have their cameras on during class sessions as they participate in real-time painting challenges and group activities that emphasize spontaneity, humor, and endurance as pathways to creative freedom. Materials can include any combination of oils, acrylics, watercolors, spray paint, markers, musical instruments, canvas, paper, cardboard, blank t-shirts, or caps—students are encouraged to work across multiple media and make their studios as dynamic as the performances themselves.
Situating Kilduff’s practice within a lineage of performance-based and process-oriented painters, this course draws inspiration from artists such as Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, and Bob Ross—figures who reimagined what it means to make and share art in public. Through this lens, students will examine how painting can exist as both a live act and a broadcast, dissolving the boundaries between artist, audience, and environment.
Assignments will include a full calendar of alternative painting exercises—painting while cooking, running on a treadmill, or singing. Students will also venture into their local landscapes to create rapid-fire paintings of shifting scenes and moving subjects. The course will culminate in a final performance built around a painting idea–celebrating the intersection of art-making, movement, and play. Students should plan to work with a computer or phone and free streaming software such as OBS (while Kilduff uses Wirecast, a paid option, free tools are encouraged).
SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PERFORMANCE 612 001.
John Kilduff aka Mr. Let’s Paint (he/him) is best known for the cable access TV show Let’s Paint TV, where he combines painting with performance. His first love in art was plein air painting, something he has done for over 40 years. Today, Kilduff goes back and forth between these two disciplines in the making of his art. He received a BFA in Fine Art from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1987. Following graduation, he became interested in performance and took acting and improv classes at Los Angeles City College and the Groundlings. After doing some movie background work, he started doing cable access TV in 1995. His first show was titled The Jim Berry Show; in 2001, he started Let’s Paint TV. In 2008, Kilduff graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited and performed all over the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe.