Bad Art Club founder Daniel Freedman, center, draws with other uninhibited artists, including 6-year-old Hudson Gootkind, right, during an event in the Hi-Fidelity Brewing parking lot during the East Bayside Block Party in Portland last month. Freedman’s club is a group committed to making art accessible and fun. Carl D. Walsh/Staff Photographer

Grace Korman, a professional woodworker and painter, used a Sharpie to draw an outline of a bird in a nest in one corner of a large piece of scrap canvas draped over two tables. Beneath the Bad Art Maine tent in the parking lot of Hi-Fidelity Brewing, she filled in the bird with many shades of gold

“Do you want to mess up my bird?” she asked. Daniel Freedman was doodling on the other side of the table and immediately said yes. “I know that’s your favorite part,” Korman said.

Freedman added red eyebrows and accents to make the bird angry, and the pair laughed at the cartoonish result.

Hudson Gootkind, 6, strode up to the tent with a shy confidence, trailed by his two adults. He surveyed the flock of funky pastel birds already crowding the canvas perimeter. As eight adults around him drew, he gripped a stubby black pastel tightly and boldly outlined what looked to be a humanoid bird.

As he filled in its belly, he proudly declared, “It’s a penguin.” By the time he was done, both his forearms were smeared with rainbows of oil-pastel dust.

“Little kids are fearless,” Freedman said, grinning as he watched Gootkind at work.

The Bad Art Club gathering, hosted by Bad Art Maine, was dedicated to making art approachable and fun for anyone at any level. There are no rules, and everyone is  encouraged to contribute to communal pieces. Birds, of course, were the theme of this one.

At club meetings, members do hands-on activities that encourage connection and expression. Sometimes, they pass a piece of paper around, each adding something to it in turn. Often, they’ll work together on a massive canvas, using markers, colored pencils, pastels, watercolors, acrylic paint and stitching to riff off each other. Most of the art supplies are donated.

Freedman, who lives in Scarborough, said he started Bad Art Maine with anti-perfectionism as its ethos. He struggled with intense artist block. He was drawn to sculpture while he was growing up in an Orthodox Jewish world in suburban Philadelphia, but by the time he graduated from college, he had lost confidence in his creativity. He knew he was not alone.

One accepted practice of a “Bad Art Club” event is the freedom to revise another’s art, which is happening in this photo. The club set up a tent in the Hi-Fidelity Brewing parking lot last month during the East Bayside Block Party and invited people to join in artistic creation. Carl D. Walsh/ Staff Photographer

“It is heartbreaking when you see people who are so sincere and so kind feel like they are not good enough to express themselves,” he said.

Freedman, 28, has spent the past seven years reclaiming his love of art. He described letting go of artistic perfectionism as a not-always-linear recovery process. He said he “refuses to allow the world to take art” from him. Over the summer, he showed more that 40 pieces – a selection of watercolors, oil paintings and mixed media works – in the gallery space in the Oak Street Lofts, most of which he made in the past eight months.

“I just cut loose a little bit,” Freedman said. “Part of it was Bad Art Maine. It gave me license to sit down and make a painting without worrying about it.”

While he battled his own perfectionism, Freedman started leading a class he called Making Bad Art last summer to help others on their own journeys. He framed it as artistic rehab.

The group talked about art and did projects together as well as solo work. Freedman encouraged people to think of art “as a form of communication and expression, not just for yourself, but with other people.”

“Art is at its core sharing,” he said.

He created the club to make that vision more accessible, he said. The idea was to have a free space in which people could create.

The first meeting was held last September, and from October to May, the club met weekly, while Freedman taught Social Studies full time at King Middle School. Over the summer, the club transitioned to event-based gatherings, like under the tent in the Hi-Fidelity parking lot.

Korman, the recent painter of birds, said that professional artists make up half of those who come. As an artist, she said, she appreciates the encouragement to make messy art and experiment with styles.

A CREATIVE OUTLET

Gretchen Nelson, a computer science teacher at Portland High School, started going to club meetings when she moved to Portland last September as a way to meet people and have a creative outlet. She’s gone more than a dozen times.

“I used to do a lot of art when I was younger, but I fell out of it,” she said. The club reconnected her to the notion that the “point of art is fun.”

Over the summer, Freedman added musicians to the mix, with the same basic idea: Just have fun. On June 29 and July 20, Bad Art Maine hosted the Really Good Summer Concert Series from 2 p.m. until sundown in Congress Square Park.

“Musicians like to play music and have an audience, and people who like to make visual art like to listen to music,” Freedman said. At the event, musicians made art with participants of the Bad Art Club.

At least one member of the Bad Art Club crosses state lines to be part of it.

Anthony Letts, who lives in Conway, New Hampshire, said he was “blown away by the community,” has been to six or seven meetings and he loves that there are new faces each time.

“Anybody can feel at home there,” he said.

In the fall, the Bad Art mission is going to Spain. Freedman will be teaching English and American culture part-time in Madrid, and when he’s not working, he plans to set up a tent in a square. In the mean time, the faithful fans of the club will continue to keep it alive in Maine.

“Some of it is universal,” Freedman said. “People are interested in creating.”