Comments (0) Best Place to See Wild Salmon Runs in Seattle  - 2007

Last December, Matt Jones was having a blast. "I was just dancing and painting with a friend of mine and, in a corny kind of way, said 'paintdancing.com!'" Last New Year's Eve, a mere two weeks after checking for the domain name's availability, Gasworks Gallery hosted its first Paint Dancing Party for 30 people, and has continued hosting them on the second Friday of each month since then. What's played is a mix of world, Latin rhythm, and '80s rock 'n' roll—a lot of different types of music. What's painted? "Anything that people want to paint," says Jones, the founder and owner of Gasworks Gallery, who supplies the paint, paper, and location. "You can just see their inner painter come out in them. . . . It's just in the spirit of play, as opposed to the way a serious artist might create something. But you might create your greatest masterpiece out of fun." You might also partake in the post–10 o'clock, paint-free dancing, which he describes as "free-form, wildly ecstatic." (This may or may not have anything to do with the BYO-wine policy.) Either way, says Jones, it "has a sense of performance art to it. I love it when art mixes with entertainment. You really don't see that. Except maybe street musicians, which we don't have enough of in Seattle."—Karla Starr Gasworks Gallery, 3815 Fourth Ave. N.E. www.paintdancing.com.