Culture

Someone’s Mum Has Kicked Off An Incredible Game Of Painting-ception

Yo dawg, we heard you like paintings, so we put painters painting a painting in your painting.

by Joseph Earp  31 January 2019
Paintception is taking over Reddit

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Reddit is a complicated, sometimes problematic place.

Like so many other websites in our fractured, confused digital age, the site is still struggling to properly police its more salacious forums; some of its digital pockets are hotbeds of conspiracy theories, hate speech, and outright lies (it is, lest we forget, that site that popularised and spread the Pizzagate conspiracy.)

But every now and then, something so goddamn wholesome goes down on Reddit that the site manages to reignite your faith in the human race.

Case in point: over the last few weeks, an incredible game of painting-ception has been taking over a Reddit forum.

It all started with a very wholesome post of someone’s mum with her second ever painting, a rendering of a bird that also looks suspiciously like that Faith No More album cover.

This is the post that kicked off a recursive painting war on Reddit

Image: Reddit / Imgur

Before long, the Reddit thread was filled with posters complimenting the amateur artist and her creation; as of writing, the image has over 75,000 upvotes.

But then something extraordinary happened. Another Redditor decided to get involved, and paint a photo of the mum and her painting.

The second entry in an ever-escalating Reddit painting war

Image: Reddit / Imgur

Soon, that excellent bout of paintception went viral on the site, receiving 120,000 upvotes and kicking off one of the most extraordinary, heartwarming trends the site has ever seen.

Redditors began painting paintings of other Redditors with their own paintings at an extraordinary rate. Before long, the whole thing was a mess of incredible art, complicated timelines and still, at the heart of it all, one mum and her white bird painting.

Extraordinarily, the spread of the meme has only added to its complexity. Different painters have begun to choose the same starting images, creating multiple branching timelines that would make even a professor of metaphysics’ head start to swirl.

Desperate to bring this meme to an end (or at least begin to uncomplicate it), one brave Redditor tried to close the loop in the most surreal way imaginable.

But it was to no avail. Nothing has the power to stop this incredible, recursive, M.C. Escher-inspired meme trend.

And to be honest, we wouldn’t want anything to.