Back in 2005, the year in which I began writing Lines and Colors, I reported about an artist from Virginia named Duane Keiser, who had the year before begun a practice of painting a small painting every day, posting it to a blog titled “a painting a day” and placing it up for auction on eBay.

It seemed a unique thing at the time, and as far as I can establish, Keiser was indeed the originator of the practice.

In my article, I remarked on what a great idea this was, and how I wished I could emulate the discipline. It promised the kind of advancement as a painter that only regular painting can provide, aided by the incentive of selling the paintings as they were done.

The following year, I reported on others who had become “painting a day” participants, like Karin Jurick, David R. Darrow, Shelly Grund, Elin Pendleton and, in particular, Julian Merrow-Smith.

Over the years since then, I’ve watched and reported on the burgeoning of the “painting a day” phenomenon, although it has become so widespread and generalized that the term has lost much of its meaning, and I now tend to use the more general term “painter/bloggers”.

This is a practice in which hundreds of artists, at all levels of experience, are painting and posting their work on blogs and connecting with buyers through online auctions, PayPal payments, Etsy shops, group sites like Daily Paintworks and other means of direct sales — either bypassing or supplementing the traditional gallery system.

After following this for some time, and having gradually brought my own painting practice somewhat up to speed, I’ve decided to jump in and try it for myself.

The regimen of painting every day remains appealing, and the idea of selling the work makes it more likely I will adhere to the practice and hopefully will allow me to devote more time to painting.

What I’ve learned and decided so far.

I’ve tried to observe some of the best practices from those who have been doing this for a while; and as I begin my process, I’ll try to make occasional reports on Lines and Colors for those who might be interested in what I learn.

I’ve also tried to follow my own advice in my article on “How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web” and the follow up series on “How to Display your Art on the Web“.

So far I’ve established a few things that seem basic and essential, and I’ve also made a few decisions to vary from the mainstream.

Though I endeavor to paint every day, my goal for posting finished paintings will not be “a painting a day” but a more modest one of two small paintings a week, which I will try to post consistently on Mondays and Wednesdays. [Addendum: I've changed this to Mondays and Thursdays.]

The blog

Like most painter/bloggers, I’ve created a blog, on which I will post my paintings as I put them up for auction.

Unlike many, however, I’ve decided that on that blog I will only post paintings, and not water it down with posts about works in progress, studio photos, the new brushes I just got, the weather, or any other topics not directly related to the paintings. I will continue to insist that the home page of a website, or the top of a blog’s home page, should always be aimed at the first-time visitor, not those familiar with the site who are returning.

For the design of the blog itself, I’ve deliberately chosen a dark neutral background, as I think it shows off the color of images to best advantage. Many painters without design experience don’t realize how much a colored web page background, that may seem appealing for the blog itself, can compete with and detract from the presentation of their work.

I’ve made a point of dedicating the sidebar to introducing myself, and describing the intention of the site, the size, medium and support of the paintings, the process, and my policies for selling and shipping the paintings. I’ve also made sure to provide a contact email address.

The current painting will appear at the top of the page, and visitors will have the ability to click on the image to view it large, or click on a link to view or leave comments. Comments will not only add interest for those visiting the site, but hopefully provided informative feedback on the paintings.

The auctions

I’ve chosen to use eBay for the auctions, primarily because I already have an account and there is no upfront expense as with the Daily Paintworks auctions.

Most of my paintings are 5×7″ or 6×8″, and in keeping with the kind of size-based scale I would apply to gallery pricing, I’ve decided to set their auction minimums at $100 and $125, respectively.

I’ve also decided to limit my auction periods to 3 days, though this is one of the elements of the process of which I’m least confident, so it may change. [Addendum: Yes, changed to seven days.]

On the blog, I’ve provided a consistent line below each painting on the entry to show the painting’s status: At Auction, Available or Sold, and a clear link to the auction.

There will be an archive of past paintings, sold or otherwise, and a page for available works that are not at auction. Paintings not sold at auction will be priced at what I would consider gallery minimums at $200 for the 5×7″ and $250 for the 6×8″.

Contact and promotion

Near the top of the blog, I’ve included a sign-up for a newsletter, by which those interested can receive an email notice whenever I post a new painting.

For this, I’ve chosen to use MailChimp, which allows you to create and manage an email newsletter list for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month for free.

I’ve created a new email address, specifically for contact through the painting blog.

I’ve created a new Twitter account, @CParkerArt, specifically for announcing paintings as I post them. I had to log out of my Lines and Colors Twitter account to create the new account. I’m using TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts now that they’re established.

I’ve also given the blog some basic search engine optimization (more on that later) and I will probably leverage my ability to place an ad on my own general topic blog (i.e. this one) to perhaps send some visitors, and some “Google love”, to my new painting blog.

Waiting

One thing I’ve decided to do differently than most painter/bloggers is to delay posting the paintings for several weeks.

Common practice is to post a painting as soon as it’s done, hot off the easel, so to speak. This, however, means that the purchaser, whether direct or through an auction process, must usually wait several weeks for an oil painting to dry enough to be shipped.

At the risk of appearing out of sync with the seasons, particularly as they change, I’ve decided to wait three to four weeks for the paintings to dry, and then apply a light coat of retouch varnish — with another week for that to dry, before posting the paintings and putting them up for auction.

This will allow me to ship the paintings as as soon as the auction closes. I’ve tried to weigh the the plusses and minuses of both approaches, but if I buy something, I’m much happier when I receive it sooner rather than later.

Varnishing

My decision to varnish the paintings is as much a desire to even out the painting’s surface appearance as to provide protection. I seldom use medium when painting, so even though I’m using a very high quality paint (more on that later), passages in which I’ve used thinly applied chromatic blacks in particular (e.g. Alizarin plus Viridian or Ultramarine Blue plus Burnt Umber) can look flat or “sunken in” compared to more thickly applied areas of brighter color.

After a bit of research, I’ve decided to use Gamblin’s Gamvar synthetic resin varnish, thinned with odorless mineral spirits (OMS to varnish 5:1), to act as a retouch varnish. This can be applied much sooner than a final varnish as it allows the paint to continue to dry. A light coating of this also has much less gloss than a full coat of final varnish.

Photographing the paintings

Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve arrived at a completely satisfactory method of photographing the paintings. I’ll go into more detail on what I’m doing in that respect in a future post.

The start

I’ve been pretty consistent in recent weeks with painting every day and finishing two small painting each week. I’ve just posted my first painting (above, top), which was painted at a nearby state park several weeks ago (with a few finishing touches in the studio).

Progress reports

I’ll try to occasionally report on my progress here, as I learn what works for me and what doesn’t.

Of course, I’m always open to comments or suggestions from others who have engaged in the process.

It’s all about learning.

In the left hand column of this blog, about halfway down, under the long lists of categories and the longer list of archives, is a list of links under the heading “Relevant Blogs”.

This has long been ignored, both unduly so by myself, and perhaps rightly so by those who have clicked on many of the links only to find they were out of date, broken or otherwise less than useful.

In response to a little recent pestering by a couple of readers (to whom my thanks go out for bringing it up into my field of attention), I squeezed out some time over the past few weeks to weed out the dead links, blogs that have not been updated for a year or more and less interesting destinations that were left over from years ago when the pickings were slimmer.

I’ve also included a number of fresh new destinations, to which I will continue to add.

The list is divided into generalized categories of blogs (which I may also eventually refine a bit) that hopefully make it a little easier to browse.

It may not look like much — it’s just a list of links — but as I’ve tried to demonstrate with a few examples above, there are treasures to be found.

Images above, from the blog list categories:

“Art, Painting & Sketch”: John Macdonald Aiken from Underpaintings and Ivan Generalic from Art Inconnu

“Painting a Day”: Duane Keiser

“Other Painting Blogs”: Hans Versfelt

“Illustration”: William J Aylward from 100 Years of Illustration and Design

“Sci-Fi & Fantasy”: Bob Eggleton

“Comics & Cartoons”: Kazu Kibuishi

“Animation & Concept”: Jacob Stålhammar from Animation Blog and Peggy Chung from Concept Art World

“Paleo & Scientific”: Elanor Kish from Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs

“Tools & Techniques”: Mark Hess from The Tools Artists Use

Considering that many of these blogs are in themselves both extensive resources and jumping off points for even more great sources of art, I’ll issue my Major Timesink Warning should you choose to jump down any or all of these rabbit holes.

Enjoy.

Who would think that paintings of people with their backs to you could be so compelling?

When I first wrote about Atlanta based painter Karin Jurick back in 2006, one of the things I admired, in addition to her bright, fresh, painterly approach, was her series of paintings of art museum patrons, in situ, as it were, their backs to the viewer as they stood engrossed in the artwork before them.

This has turned out to be one of Jurick’s favored themes in the subsequent years, and she has recently published a collection of over 100 of those paintings in a book titled Museum Hours.

You can see a preview of the book on the Blurb site; be sure to use the controls below the image to view the preview in full screen mode, allowing you the pleasure of seeing Jurick’s work larger than it is usually reproduced on her site and blog.

The book has a nice feature in the form of an illustrated index of the paintings. In addition to the titles of her paintings, it lists the works being viewed by the patron, (of which Jurick has painted at least a partial interpretation), and the museums in which they are to be found.

Jurick’s work is part of a three-woman show, along with Karen Hollingsworth and Suzy Shultz, at the 16 Patton Gallery in Ashville, North Carolina that opens tomorrow, October 22, 2011. I don’t know how long it runs; the gallery’s website, such as it is, hasn’t been updated with show information and does a poor job of presenting the artists they represent. [Addendum: Jurick was kind enough to let me know the show runs until November 26, 2011. See also my recent post on Karen Hollingsworth.]

You can see a preview of Jurick’s pieces in the show on her website. She has chosen a theme of “New York Life” for her part of the show, and the selection includes some of her art patrons pieces, as well as other New York scenes (love the Flatiron Building).

Ruth Phillips is an English cellist living Provence, France. She is married to Julian Merrow-Smith, an artist I have written about previously.

After Duane Keiser, Merrow-Smith is one of the earliest pioneers of the “painting a day” painter/blogger model of creating small daily paintings and offering them for sale over the internet. He also happens to be one of my favorite contemporary painters. I’ve been following his daily paintings blog, Postcard from Provence, since 2006.

In one of my previous posts about Merrow-Smith, I pointed out that watching the images of his postcard paintings arrive by email day after day, as well as traveling back through time by looking through his extensive archive of previous work (over 1,600 at this point), was particularly appealing because I saw within the series of paintings a story, as the landscapes and the fruits and vegetables gathered from local markets for still life paintings changed with the seasons, and as Merrow-Smith worked, experimented and grew as a painter over time.

Here, then, is another side of that story, along with Phillips’ own, as she works to balance her life as a cellist, a wife, an artist’s assistant, an Englishwoman in Provence, a homeowner and an observer of the life, and lives, around her.

In her book Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard: A Memoir of Provence, Phillips has given us a verbal parallel to her husband’s postcard sized paintings — small colorful glimpses of other places and other lives.

In succinct, three or four page chapters, she paints vivid short scenes of life in Provence, lives of the villages in which she and her husband have lived, lives of the individuals they have encountered and lives of some of the people who have purchased Merrow-Smith’s paintings.

The latter glimpses are often told in the individuals’ own words, included in italics as chapter beginning or chapter ending quotes. They were gathered in response to a request Phillips sent out for the purchasers to write with short accounts of their particular Merrow-Smith painting or paintings, where they were hung and what they meant in their lives. She received a much more extensive response than expected, from which she culled down selected accounts to season the book.

Each chapter of Cherries is titled as one of Merrow-Smith’s paintings, sometimes directly related to the subject of the chapter, sometimes just in a metaphorical relationship. The quotes, likewise, are sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely related to the subject of the chapter.

Within these short postcard-like glimpses, Phillips manages to tell the story of her relationship with Merrow-Smith, the beginnings of their marriage and their efforts to make an uninhabitable shell of a house in Southern France into a living home and studio against the tide of an arcane rural French bureaucracy, as well as the story of how “the painter who never painted” became an early practitioner of the “painting a day” discipline, and eventually one of the most successful of the painter/bloggers — artists who pioneered the use of the internet to bypass traditional gallery markets and take their work directly to their patrons around the world, even from a small village in rural France with spotty dial-up internet access.

The book, save for its cover, is not illustrated, but the perfect companion volume exists in the form of Merrow-Smith’s beautiful collection Postcard from Provence: Paintings by Julian Merrow-Smith (my review here). Of course, if you already have Postcard from Provence, Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard makes the perfect companion to that book.

I found it particularly enjoyable to have my copy of Postcard from Provence handy as I read Cherries, and leisurely turn between them, each providing “color” for the other.

Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard can be ordered directly from Merrow-Smith’s website, as can the Postcard from Provence volume. Both are also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers in the US and UK (links are provided on the site). You can read a sample of Cherries on fReado.

In addition to her website, Phillips writes two blogs, cello notes and meanwhile (here in France). In the latter, she chronicles her life in Southern France, in some ways providing a continuation and extension of Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard.

The episodes in the book’s short chapters, some sweet, some sour, are like the eponymous cherries picked from their Provençal neighbor’s orchard. They can be read as a memoir, a love story, a series of character sketches, an account of an artist’s progress or the chronicle of the early stages of a shift in the paradigm of how art is created and sold in the 21st Century. Take your pick.

Artist Carol Marine, who I have previously featured here on Lines and Colors, has lost her house and studio to the wildfires currently ravaging parts of Texas.

The fire devastated their entire subdivision. She and her husband and their son were not harmed, but they were able to take only what they could carry when evacuating, and the rest is lost. The good news is that they have fire insurance, but the bad news is that it will take time for that to take effect, and they are living in a camper with few possessions.

If you’d like to help the family get back on its feet, a family friend has started a fund to immediately assist them.

You could also, of course, bid on some of the wonderfully bright and energetic small paintings that that Marine currently has up for auction through Daily Paintworks (images above). These will change over time as the older auctions end and newer ones replace them, as usual.

As Marine describes on her blog, her small paintings are one of the few things she was able to grab, so the auctions can be fulfilled.

[Via Katherine Tyrrell's Making a Mark and Karin Jurick's A Painting Today]

I just love this.

Back in December of 2004, Virginia based painter and teacher Duane Keiser originated the phenomenon that has come to be known as “painting a day“, in which painter/bloggers paint a small work and post it to a blog each day.

He painted a small painting everyday for about two years, and has since then painted his small works on a varied schedule, but has maintained a strong painting practice.

Keiser has a wonderful recent post on his blog, a short time-lapse video called Peel, in which he paints a tangerine, peels it partway, repaints it on the same panel, peels it some more, repaints it again, sections it, paints it again, reduces it to a single section and paints it again. Wonderful!

You can view the video on Keiser’s site, or on YouTube somewhat larger.

You can see the finished painting here. As of this writing, the painting is up for bid on eBay.

To me, this is not just a fun and novel painting demo, it’s also a vivid demonstration of the real rewards of a dedicated painting regimen.

The accumulated years of frequent practice grant him the skill with eye, hand and materials to not only repaint his subject multiple times on the same canvas, passing up multiple opportunities to say “finished”, but to consider an experiment like this in the first place, in which painting is the point, rather than a painting.

[Via MetaFilter]

I first encountered painter Justin Clayton when I included him in one of my early posts about Painting a Day blogs (and a subsequent post). Clayton has since moved away from the painting a day convention, but still posts small still life, landscape and figurative paintings to his blog on a frequent basis.

Clayton’s approach is direct and painterly, often with roughly textured backgrounds in his still life compositions, in which he also shows his fascination with the play of light and shadow.

Clayton studied at BYU, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and the California Arts Institute; and cites as inspiration painters like William Nicholson, John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

In addition to his blog, Clayton has a website on which his paintings are arranged in thumbnail galleries by date or subject. You can also start with the latest work and click through them in sequence.

He also maintains a secondary blog devoted to his Beach Paintings, in which he continues to post paintings and photographs from a 2007 trip down the California coast, and additional work of a related nature since then.

He is also a member of the Daily Paintworks group of painters, who display their latest work together on a joint page. In addition there are three of Clayton’s process videos available on Vimeo.

When I first noticed Atlanta based artist Karin Jurick, it was from her early participation in the “painting a day” discipline back in early 2006, a then still-young practice among perhaps a dozen or so serious painter/bloggers.

I then wrote a dedicated article about her work, noting my admiration for her direct, painterly approach, and a particular fondness for her series of paintings of museum goers in front of various works.

Recently, I’ve posted about her side project of hosting a group painting blog, Different Strokes From Different Folks (also here and here), in which she periodically provides a painting challenge for numerous artists who paint the same photographic subject, and can then compare their work with the approach of others who take on the same subject.

In the time since I first wrote about her work, her own painting practice has evolved, as she has reaped the rewards of frequent painting, refining her approach and becoming more confident in her command of color, value and edges.

She has also shifted her focus away from small daily paintings somewhat as she becomes more in demand as a gallery painter and devotes more time to preparing for gallery shows.

A new show featuring her work has just opened tonight (I’m remiss in not getting this post up soon enough to make more people aware of the opening) at the Morris & Whiteside Galleries in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It is a three person show that Jurick shares with California Painter Ken Auster (who I recently profiled) and sculptor Jane Decker.

The opportunity to have her work in a show with Auster was particularly pleasing to Jurick, who cites Auster an influence before she even started painting, inspiring her to strive for that loose, impressionistic feeling that is the foundation of her approach.

As is evident from the works she has prepared for the show, Jurick has found a depth of interest in her continuing series of paintings of museum patrons viewing art, a subject that also allows her to do brief notational versions of great paintings, like Carravagio’s Supper at Emmaus, which was recently on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago from the National Gallery in London (image above, top), as well as paintings from the Art Institute’s own collection like Franz Kline’s Painting (second down) and one of the Art Institute’s most popular works, Paris Street, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte.

Her other series for this show concentrates on beach scenes, in which she also observes those who are oblivious to being observed and lets the sea and sky serve as the “artworks” that capture their attention.

Jurick has not only refined her painting technique over the years, but also her compositions, which have become more strongly geometric and graphically bold, while still retaining a warmth and sense of place (even in gallery scenes in which the observed work is less than warm).

In preparation for this show, she found it necessary to beg off from providing a subject for the Different Strokes blog for a while, urging participants to find their own subjects in the interim; only to be surprised some weeks later to find that they (119 of them) had organized and chosen to all do portraits of her as a thank you for the inspiration she has been providing for them (unfortunately the Picassa Gallery of those paintings is not available at the moment).

Jurick’s web site has a selection of available works, current works that are “Still Wet”, sketches and studies, videos, mentions of her work in various art publications and an archive of past works in which you can see her past paintings in a variety of genres.

On her blog, A Painting Today, you’ll find her small paintings, which you can still sometimes bid on through her store on eBay, and posts about her larger paintings, sometimes with detail crops (as in the details at bottom, above from the two paintings above them) and discussion of technique.

Painter Jeffrey Hayes, who I’ve written about before, featured Jurick as one of his Guest Artists, along with a short interview.

Jurick remains a favorite, whose work I follow often, and though I miss some of the older subjects that she has moved away from, like her warmly lit room interiors, I look forward to wherever her constant study and continual painting practice take her.