Miniature Canvases

Boulder artist Remington Robinson breathes new life into mint tins

By LISA TRUESDALE

While most people see an Altoids mint tin and instantly think “fresh breath,” Boulder-based artist Remington Robinson sees a tiny masterpiece just waiting to happen.

Robinson, who goes by “Rem,” has been hooked on art since preschool, after his teacher was impressed with the complexity of one of his marker drawings. The idea of becoming an artist wasn’t much of a stretch, though—as a child, he often kept busy at his dad’s architecture office, drawing with colored pencils and drafting templates. He was surrounded by art at home, too; his great-grandfather was a well-known impressionist named August F. Biehle, Jr., part of the “Cleveland School” of artists who dominated the art scene in that city during the first half of the 20th century. “Our house, and many of my relatives’ houses, all had his paintings hanging all over the walls,” he says.

Robinson got serious about his art in high school, and it paid off quickly. He sold his first painting right after graduation in 2004, and things escalated from there; in 2010 after college, he was selling more and more works, and in 2016 started painting murals with friends. That year, he also discovered how much he enjoyed painting “en plein air”—painting outside, from life. 

About 10 years ago, he discovered miniature 2-by-3-inch canvases at the store and decided to start painting them for fun. A few years later, he began to see posts on Instagram that altered the trajectory of his career.

“People were painting inside Altoids tins, and I ended up painting with one of those people out in the field and asked her if she wouldn’t mind if I did Altoids tin paintings, too,” explains Robinson, who now has more than 800,000 followers on social media. “And she said of course she didn’t mind, because she had also started after seeing other people do it.”

Painting inside the tins was a natural progression of both the miniature canvases he liked painting, and the plein air painting, and Robinson has now been creating them for about six years, initially doing them when he wasn’t working on mural commissions. People ask him all the time where he gets the tins, and whether he gets sick of mints. Although he occasionally buys his own Altoids from the gas station—or sometimes he strays and tries a different brand—most of the tins come empty and pre-cleaned from friends and family, or he buys them in batches on eBay. One friend even sent him a box of eight empty tins that included an extra surprise: “Her daughter had included two strips of paper inside each tin,” he says. “One had a drawing on it and the other had words of encouragement. It was absolutely adorable!”

Though Robinson doesn’t include words of encouragement with the mint tin paintings he sells, he does include something else that’s always a fun surprise for recipients: “When I’m out in the field, I don’t usually bring all my paint tubes with me. I squeeze a little bit of each color into the tin, and it’s better to have too much than not enough,” he explains. “Then when I send off the painting, I leave the palette of leftover paint inside the bottom half of the tin.”

Although sometimes he gets comments from people who are offended that he wasted paint, most reactions to the palette are positive. “I think they enjoy seeing that part of my process, as kind of a behind-the-scenes look.”

When Robinson’s not outdoors painting inside Altoids tins, he continues to take mural commissions, either by himself or with his friend and fellow artist Jason T. Graves. Besides the obvious difference in scale, mural painting differs from painting inside mint tins in a number of other ways, he says. “Murals are done on location, talking with people, being out in the world and making art, and making people happy with my art, which I absolutely love. With the mint tins, it’s just me.”

There’s another difference, one that’s very important to Robinson and to his creative process: He doesn’t take commissions for the mint tins.

“The tiny paintings are fun and satisfying because I can basically go paint whenever and wherever I want,” he says, like up at Eldora on a snowy day, near the Flatirons, along Boulder Creek during spring runoff, or at the Pearl Street Mall. “I don’t take commissions for the tins because the work I create comes from a place of joy and a sincere interest in what I choose to paint, and people pick up on that.” remingtonrobinson.com