Easy Crafts: Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings

We copy Damien Hirst's famous dots in this done-in-a-day craft.

Ever since he came into the public eye in the 90s, Damien Hirst has been an art world bad boy. Hirst is best known for his formaldehyde-preserved dead animals and other provocative works that address the question of art as a commodity.

Among the less controversial of the works in his oeuvre are his "Spot" paintings, which are white canvases covered in a rigorous grid of uniformly-sized, colored dots. I know there are layers of meaning to these works, but on a purely surface level, I've always thought they were sort of fun and pleasant to look at. After the first five of the "Spot" paintings, Hirst's assistants took over the actual painting of the dots. He's rumored to have said, "I couldn't be f#*king arsed doing it." With this anyone-can-make-it attitude in mind, I decided to create an homage to Hirst's Spot series.

Instead of meticulously painting dots onto a canvas, I cut circles out of brightly colored paper. (To make uniform circles, I traced the bottom of a juice glass.)

Then I lightly marked a grid onto the wall with a ruler and t-square. With my grid marked, I simply taped the paper circles into place with double-stick tape. Afterwards, I erased any visible pencil marks. The whole project took a couple of hours, as I was extremely careful with my circle cut-outs and grid marking.