by Martin Necas

Ah, Facebook! Such a polarising phenomenon. In the last few years, Facebook has come full circle. At first, Facebook represented a chic novel platform whose nave aim was to benefit all humankind by allowing limitless potential for human communication. But it did not take long for Facebook to turn into an evil empire, preying on users attention and making money from the worst of human vitriol, misinformation and behaviour manipulation. So which is it? Good or evil? Beneficial or destructive? And how could it possibly be used to improve your art?

Love it or hate it, the fact is that amongst the untold piles of garbage on Facebook, you can find absolute gems in the form of moderatedinterest groups dedicated to art, including watercolour. Moderated groups are monitored by a dedicated group of volunteers whose job is to make sure everyone behaves. These moderators have the authority to intervene in any discussions, authorise peoples posts and remove posts that do not conform to the groups policies or the normal conventions of human decency. Moderators can also block repeat offenders permanently. A little bit of surveillance goes a long way and, as a result, moderated groups are very civil, nice and generally safe on-line communities. People can share pictures and descriptions of their art, talk about materials and techniques, ask for advice and network with artists from around the world. And because many people showcase their art, there is never a shortage of material for inspiration and comparison. You can scroll through thousands of paintings to your hearts content and this allows you to quickly judge the quality of your own work against the work of others. But you can do a lot more. You can get a quantitative assessment of your work.
How?

There is a great feature of Facebook that can help you judge the quality of your artwork and that is reactions (Like, Love, Wow, etc.). If someone likes your work, they can show it by clicking on a reaction next to your post. Reactions are visible to everyone. You can see how many reactions your post has attracted and compare it with the work of others or compare one of your paintings with another. For instance, are your paintings accruing more reactions over time? How do your scores compare to professional artists?

Of course, reactions are not the perfect measure of the works quality. There are many potential biases. Just because someone has sent you a positive reaction does not mean their opinion is valid. Conversely, just because you did not get many reactions does not mean the work is no good. Different people react differently. Your scores for the same painting will also vary across different Facebook groups. Lets face it, assessing the quality of art is always going to be difficult, subjective and biased. But overall, reactions are a surprisingly good indicator, particularly on forums with thousands or tens of thousands of participants. In effect, by reviewing your reaction count, you can get a crowdsourced international opinion about the quality of your work. The greater the number of people in the group, the more objective and impartial that opinion will be. Crowd sourcing opinion really does work.

In a well-known experiment set up to explore the accuracy of crowdsourced opinion, the National Public Radio conducted a project where they asked a large number of people (17,205 to be precise) to guess the weight of Penelope, the cow. Penelopes real weight was 1,355 pounds. Individual people gave quite a large variation of estimates, but the average came to 1,287 pounds, an astonishingly accurate figure that varied from the real figure by only 5%! Whats more, the weight guessed by amateurs who have never worked with cows was actually closer than the weight guessed by a sub-group of experts who had a history of working cows! Astonishing. There are many other examples of crowd-sourcing opinion. In large numbers, it seems to work remarkably well.

So what if you too had access to a crowd-sourced opinion on your paintings from, say, 120,000 people? Sometimes with personalised comments. With the ability to ask questions and get answers from experienced peers or experts. Free of charge. Well you can! All you need to do is join Facebook interest Group such as Watercolour Addicts, Watercolour Alliance or dozens of subspecialist groups on topics as broad ranging as loose flowers or cat portraits.

Below are two of my paintings and their reaction counts. The one on the right is clearly superior in terms of composition, technique and execution. As expected, the painting received a better score.

And here is an example of one of my paintings compared to a professional artist, Herman Pekel, on the Watercolour Alliance Facebook Group.

Ouch. Clearly I have a long long way to go (maybe multiple lifetimes?) before I can match the ultimate maestro extraordinaire. But thats the point, isnt it? To learn, and to progress. And I have definitely found Facebook to be a powerful tool in gauging where I am and where I want to go with watercolour. If you are on a learning journey, give it a go.