Metapainting

Metapainting (v) is the act of painting a painting within a painting.
It is particularly defined by the purpose to inspire collaboration, and is distinct from Metapaintings, or paintings which contain other paintings as subject matter within them (see Ancient Rome or the work of Las Menias.
Metapainting invokes an overall goal of seamless collaboration, and leverages controls of color palette, idea, boundary, participant audience, and theme (among others) to achieve this end. In practice, artists are free to create within the area of the work designated for their participation and within the technical and logical boundaries set by the metapainter responsible for the final work.
Typical controls of color involve the selection of a restricted palette or hue boundary. Typical controls for idea involve directing painters (often random strangers) to an idea or theme for painting at the outset of their work. Boundary controls are physical and constrained by recessed borders, by masking areas of the painting from inadvertent strokes from neighboring painters, or other primarily physical and respect induced constraints. Participant audience controls are of particular note, since participants can readily be isolated by location, culture, mindset, or other social divisions, within which the metapainter draws his human palette of painters. This creates a potential to invoke a form of paint journalism such as occurred outside the 2016 DNC among the protesters at the Philadelphia City Hall. (Video)
The term metapainting is here distinctly used, as modern examples of collaborative painting exist, such as the Tunisian collaborative painting movement, without a larger framework describing the intent of the meta painter. Activities of this type can benefit from a meta term to describe the effort of the master collaborator. The maturation of ideas sometimes involves multiple efforts to instantiate the framework under which they can thrive.
It is also notable that metapainting is distinct from strict collaboration, such as undertaken by Olly and Suzi whereby the artists share the intent as part of the planning process. Metapainting primarily draws on the crowd to paint, and is therefore both ephemeral, in the sense that certain crowds exist only at distinct points in history, and therefore can only be captured as part of the time within which they occur.

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