How social media made an accidental performance artist: Gethyn Davies interview

Words by Tien Albert

Photos courtesy of Gethyn Davies

Gethyn Davies has been a painter his entire life, graduating in 1976 from the Kingston College of Art with an honours in fine art. In 2022, the then 68-year-old started his Instagram account, following a recommendation from a friend at a local gallery. His first videos, in which he described in detail the composition, tonal modelling, and brushwork of his landscapes and expressionist figural pieces, garnered under a hundred likes each. Now, he has over 210k followers on Instagram, with videos frequently passing several million views each. However, this came as a trade-off with the focus his artworks held in his videos, as they became crazier and more dramatic. Although the artist’s shift in his videos resulted in him gaining more attention on social media, they also inadvertently resulted in a change in his own medium.

Gethyn Davies and his works

‘Put a bit of artwork in danger and people will come in their droves’, says Davies. Davies first became viral in January 2023, when the artist posted a video of him threatening to throw white paint onto his work, ‘Winter in Yellowstone’, in front of him. He ends the video addressing the viewer: ‘Now why would I do that? Of course I wouldn’t. It’s just my way of enticing into seeing my painting, ‘Winter in Yellowstone”’. The video has since accumulated over 400k likes. ‘It was a learning thing, for me, that if you do something to threaten a piece of artwork or what have you, it will entice people to carry on watching, and carrying on watching means that the Instagram likes you!’, he says.

The overnight surge in viewership from that first viral post changed Davies’s mindset on his videos. He lost interest in making informational videos detailing the features of his paintings, and instead focused on the bizarre. ‘My first videos were very sensible, and they were about how I did my artwork, and it was sort of like “ah yes, of course my composition in this piece of artwork is such and such…” I soon found that no one was particularly interested. As soon as I got a little bit wacky about it, all of a sudden I started getting more hits on Instagram’. Davies started to learn how to attract an audience on Instagram, particularly through the importance of a ‘hook’. He then used it to appeal to Instagram’s algorithm, and build as big an audience as possible: ‘Nowadays, it’s a sport, you know, how many followers can I get?’. As a retired animator specialising in TV adverts, Davies certainly has the knowledge, and the desire, to achieve virality online. However, the quest for social media success came at an expense for the art Davies was displaying.

Davies threatens a painting with pink paint. The video received over 2 million views.

‘People want you to throw paint at a perfectly decent painting. Why would you do that, it’s crazy!’ Davies’s new focus on making and entertaining an audience means he hasn’t attracted people who are necessarily interested in art. His most popular videos include one in which he almost kills a hamster in a screen printing conveyor belt to advertise a limited edition print run, one in which he pretends to show CCTV footage of a man with an axe breaking into his house to steal a painting, and one in which he recreates the end of the film ‘The Italian Job’, in which the rear end of a bus, on which is placed a box labelled “ART”, hangs of a cliff, and Davies attempts to recuperate the box whilst trying to not tip over the bus.

Whilst these zany video concepts have attracted millions of likes, they haven’t really furthered interest in his paintings. ‘I’m probably attracting in large parts the wrong audience. There’s an awful lot of people following me who are just interested in wacky stuff, and they couldn’t care less about whether it’s art or not’. Davies says his videos haven’t had any impact on the sale of his paintings: ‘If I was trying to flog paintings, I’d be doing it the wrong way’. He continues: ‘The interesting thing, I suppose, is that if I was trying to sell my work, I’d be a bit more desperate about it and I wouldn’t be so relaxed, and it would be a completely different dynamic’.

Stills from Davies’s ‘Italian Job’ video, in which he attempts to save, and eventually reveals, his art

More than distracting from his art, the creative videos have actually become the art. Originally, Davies’s Instagram was started as a place to show his paintings to the world. But when he details the 75 hour effort that went into making the ‘Italian Job’ video, he forgets which painting he even showed at the end of it. When he does remember, he admits the painting probably took about 25 hours, less than half the amount of time he spent shooting and editing its promotional video.

Ironically, the paintings on Davies’s Instagram only appear at the last second to keep people watching as long as possible. His paintings are often pulled up by levers so they only enter the frame at the end. Other times, Davies stands in front of them, blocking their view. He usually does this whilst threatening the canvas with some sort of contraption. Davies says this is an alternative to artists on Instagram Reels that ‘generally try to entice the audience to wait and look at their paintings by slowly turning the painting around to face the camera’. Davies wanted to find a ‘different way to entice people to hang around until I reveal my work. And those ideas and how they are executed is what makes up the “art”’.

Davies isn’t the only artist who has started to take videos of their art, only for those videos to become more important than the artworks they were originally meant to promote. Devon Rodriguez, the self-proclaimed “most followed artist” in the world with over 33 million followers on TikTok gained immense popularity filming himself sketching hyperrealistic portraits of “strangers” and handing them the final result (there is large discourse to the extent to which the videos are staged). Rodriguez’s 2023 exhibition in NYC included large screens displaying his TikToks on repeat. The anticipation of the gift and the reaction of the sitter are what attracts the viewer’s attention, and what people care about rather than the portrait.

On TikTok, over 77 million videos are related to the term “pendulum painting”, in which artists film themselves swinging a pendulum filled with dripping paint onto an empty canvas, creating a pleasing geometric shape. The real viewing pleasure here comes from the satisfaction of seeing paint drip onto the canvas rather than from the finished product.

In Davies’ case, his wacky hijinks and shenanigans are what grab the viewer’s attention, as well as his charismatic grandfather-like persona, who gently tells of the viewer at the end of his videos for wanting to see him destroy his paintings: ‘I’d do have to be bonkers to do that, it’s one of my favourite paintings!’ ends one of his videos in which he threatens to throw paint on an artwork.

In this way, Davies has accidentally become a performance artist as well as a fine arts artist in an effort to gain more attention online. ‘I kind of am playing a character, it’s not really who I am. When I’m doing an Instagram film, I am acting’. Davies says he started pretending to be Robert de Niro in his videos: ‘You’ve got to be engaging, somehow.’ But the artist doesn’t feel forced to act in his videos to show his paintings, nor does he mind the fact that the videos are the art form consumed by the audience rather than his paintings. ‘I kind of prefer doing the videos to doing the paintings’. When the artist is asked which is more important to him- the paintings, or the videos, he replies simply: ‘To me, it’s the video I just have to show a painting at some time for the video to work’. This shift from prioritising painting to prioritising video occurred gradually. ‘When I first started out, it was definitely about showing paintings’, he notes. But the fact that his videos now trump his paintings in popularity is not bad but instead a valid change of focus. ‘Video is an art form, and it’s probably a slightly underestimated art form’.

Indeed, the medium of Davies’s art, displayed on a phone screen rather than in a gallery, might change people’s perception of his art. ‘The vast majority [of people], I don’t think will see me as necessarily a serious artist, but purely as an entertainment thing. It doesn’t bother me, that’s fine.’ But if anything, the display of Davies’s art online has made it accessible to many, especially those of a young audience, that might not have much free access to art otherwise. ‘If young people who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it can see it because someone like me brings it to them and feeds it to them as entertainment, then yeah, that’s a good thing’.

Ultimately, Davies does not think his choice of medium makes him a less serious artist. ‘I am a serious artist. […] I’m serious about doing the videos, and I’m serious about painting and I’m serious about being wacky and silly and why does anyone do anything? I suppose it’s a sort of after work project. It’s fun. And you know, what would I be doing otherwise? I’d be on the streets, and you know, smashing windows, possibly taking drugs’.

Davies’s level of seriousness in his final comment remains to be seen.