I’ve profiled Boston based painter Jeffrey Hayes before (also here and here).

After being an early adopter of the painting a day regimen, Hayes realized that his inclinations required more time, even when painting on an intimate scale. Today he follows that direction, painting small, carefully composed and rendered still life paintings, with an eye to the influence of the Dutch still life painters of the 17th Century.

Hayes frequently utilizes a shadow box, for which he gives basic building instructions here, to compose his directly lit still life subjects in strong contrast.

If you look through his blog, or use the topics links for subjects like “In Progress” or “In the Studio” you will find additional posts about his process and techniques and insightful comments on the the work of a painter, as well as images of works in progress.

Hayes also maintains an archive of another blog that he is no longer updating, Watching Paint Dry. In addition, he has a YouTube channel with video demonstrations of his painting process.

Hayes posts paintings that are for sale, with links to purchase information. I still find it disconcerting that clicking on the images themselves takes you directly to the eBay page for the piece rather than a larger image directly on the blog, but it seems to serve well enough. In addition to a larger single image of the work, the eBay pages sometimes have one or more detail images from the painting.

There is also a link on his blog to Available Work, that also leads directly to an eBay page.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching Hayes develop and evolve as a painter over the time since I first encountered his work; his subjects becoming richer with multiple colors, surfaces taking on greater subtlety and character of texture, and the effects of light emerging as a driving force in his approach.

I’m particularly fond of the way he handles reflective metallic surfaces and transparent glassware, with hints of iridescent color delineating edges and bouncing from one surface to another.

(Image above: “Silver, Pottery, Glass”, original post here)

Georgia artist Don Coker found himself at a crossroads this year when the round of cutbacks and layoffs sweeping the newspaper industry (which is being hit by both the economic downturn and the changing paradigm of how news is delivered) caused him to be laid off from his long time position as a newspaper illustrator, cartoonist, caricaturist, art director and designer.

Coker had for a couple of years been following the “painting a day” phenomenon, and was particularly inspired by its originator, Duane Keiser, and an early practitioner, Julian Merrow-Smith (see my posts on “painting a day“, Duane Keiser, and Julian Merrow-Smith).

Coker decided this was an opportune time to explore that avenue, and started a painting blog called “A Daily Curmudgeon“. The intention is to do small oil paintings in the format common to painting a day blogs, 5×5 or 5×7″, but to indulge in his fondness for whimsical character studies rather than the usual small still life or landscape subjects that are the staple of the genre.

Coker says his painting process is to start with a blank canvas or gessoed illustration board and to take a small brush loaded with burnt umber and just start pushing and pulling until an image begins to suggest itself. This has led so far to an array of odd characters as well as a portrait of Shakespeare and a homage to Van-Gogh self portraits.

Be sure to click on the images in the blog to see the large version, and Coker’s technique, which can be painterly or smoothly refined as subject dictates.

Something tells me that Coker’s interests and multi-faceted talents will lead to a wider range of subject matter and approach in the future, but in the meanwhile, his small painted characters are a delight (and a steal at the auction prices he’s asking, I don’t think anyone knows about his blog yet, he just started a few days ago).

I first came across Antony Bridge in the form of his time-lapse YouTube videos about pochade painting, when I was doing research on pochade boxes.

In them you can see Antony painting at various locations in the English countryside and towns, using his small hand-held pochade box, as well as painting small self portraits.

I followed links to the site at pochade.co.uk where he displays and sells his paintings with other pochade artists like Carl Melegari and Ben Spurling, interviews artists who do pochade painting, (including Carol Marine, who I wrote about here), shares a blog with other painters on the site, and also sells the small hand-held pochade boxes he uses. These are made on a small scale basis by a UK carpenter and designer who works under the name of Red Top designs.

More recently, Bridge and Carl Melegari have chosen to display and sell their work on a joint site called The Pochade Gallery, with a current painting by each artist on the home page and an archive of both artist’s work. (The arrangement of the archive is a little confusing at first glance, take note of the artist signatures above the left and right sets of three columns.)

Antony Bridge (image above, top) studied illustration and, when not pochade painting, works as a freelance designer creating title sequences for TV productions as well as doing event branding. His pochade paintings range from hillsides and town scenes to still life and interiors. He also has a series of self portrait studies.

Ben Spurling (image above, bottom) was also trained in illustration. His painting subjects lean toward coastlines, mountains and dramatic skies, in addition to smaller scale subjects and still life.

They both have a passion for traveling the countryside, pochade box at the ready to capture a fleeting scene. As the description of pochade painting on the pochade.co.uk site declares: “Who needs a camera?”

Back in 2005 I found myself writing an arts oriented blog; partly because I enjoyed writing it, and partly because in the process I was discovering terrific artists I wouldn’t have sought out or encountered otherwise.

One of them was Duane Keiser, who had originated the “painting a day” blog concept; painting daily postcard-size paintings, mostly still life, and posting them to a blog called A Painting a Day. At the time, it was a novel idea.

I then discovered Julian Merrow-Smith, who was pursuing a similar process; but much to my delight, was painting not only the intimate still life subjects that lend themselves most readily to that discipline, but also beautiful small landscapes of the Provence countryside. He was posting these to his aptly named blog, Postcard from Provence.

I wrote articles on both artists; and in the subsequent years I watched the painting-a-day blog phenomenon grow from two to hundreds of daily painting blogs; many of them named for variations on “a painting a day” or “postcard from wherever”.

Over that time I’ve written articles on many of the best daily painters, as well as hundreds of other artists and topics, but I find myself coming back to Merrow-Smith’s site more frequently than the others.

I’ve tried to pin down why, exactly. Merrow-Smith is an excellent painter, but the potential subject matter of Lines and Colors encompasses a wide range of visual art, and virtually all of art history, so it’s not like I would favor him over Sargent or Vermeer.

For someone who has been to Provence just enough to respond to images of the area with a wistful desire to return, there was an element of personal identification and visual pleasure in his interpretations of the Provence landscape; and perhaps a projection into the imagined life of a painter in the rural French countryside, evoked by his simple but intensely observed still life subjects; but there was something else that kept me checking back more frequently than to most other sites.

I knew that I particularly enjoyed looking back through his archives, noticing the sequence of his subjects, how long he would pursue a series of still life subjects, then move to landscape, interject a striking portrait, and then return to still life and then back to landscape.

Within each avenue of subject matter there were fascinating smaller cycles of variation in approach, in the type of still life, or composition and choice of landscape; each with recurring themes, like his wonderful shadow-crossed rural French roads or his shimmering views of the Rhone.

In thinking about it, and looking back over his work, I finally realized that what makes his paintings particularly compelling for me is that they represent a story.

There’s a narrative here, a chronology of artistic discovery, perseverance, discipline, economic survival, and the ongoing effort to continue to grow and learn as an artist. Postcard from Provence represents several years of the living of an artist’s life, encapsulated in a series of small paintings, each one of which seems to be a penetratingly direct and honest observation of what the artist encountered as he met his daily joining of brush and paint.

Merrow-Smith has just reached something of a landmark, posting his 1,000th Postcard painting, a beautiful still life that seems to sum up the rich contrasts of value, color and texture that have marked his study of the simple and small (image at top), followed by his 1,001st, a landscape without land, the crown of a lime tree, bright against the Provence sky, not far from the door of his home (image at left, top). I’ve added a few more of my favorites, including two portraits; the one on the left is a self-portrait.

You’ll find his archives can be viewed chronologically by month, sorted by subject; or, if you’d like to see the thumbnails of all 1,001 paintings, viewed by full archive, which gives you an overview and sense of the story that I’ve found so expressive.

The process of writing my (almost) daily blog posts has taught me a few things about creative discipline, and also; after many fallow years, inspired me to take up painting again. And there I find my other fascination with Merrow-Smith’s process and progress — as a terrific example for painters, and other artists, of how to pursue art as a daily practice.

Addendum: The other portrait shown is of Merrow-Smith’s wife, cellist Ruth Phillips. (See this post’s comments.) I wondered if that might be the case, but wasn’t certain.

Katherine Tyrrell has a nice post about his 1,000th Postcard painting, including past comments on several of his pieces and an interesting interview with him about his work and his daily painting process. (See my post about Katherine Tyrrell.)

Also, there is a nice article about Merrow-Smith and his 1,000th Postcard in The Guardian.

I’ve been writing about the “painting a day” phenomenon for about three years now, along the way looking at a number of painters who aren’t trying to maintain the strict “one painting a day” routine, but are instead painting on a regular but less frequent schedule. Often, these painters can devote themselves to larger and more elaborate works than the small (usually postcard-size) paintings favored by those keeping the daily routine.

A case in point is Mick McGinty, who I wrote about early in 2007.

McGinty has a blog called Twice a Week, on which he posts new paintings with about that frequecy. These are larger, and brought to a higher degree of finish, than the pieces by most of the daily painters, including many of those who are also posting on less than a daily basis. This is partly because of the less frequent schedule, and partly because of the impressive painting skills McGinty developed in his years as a professional illustrator.

His subject matter is also more complex than the often simple still life compositions that lend themselves most readily to the daily routine, varying from complex still life subjects to dramatic landscapes from the Rocky Mountains, and more intimate urban park scenes from his trips east to New York.

McGinty has a terrific command of value and atmosphere, and his tonal contrasts give his landscapes an inviting dimensionality. He also has a great ability to render and suggest textures, whether of the rough edged rocks of mountain passes, the sunlit waters of streams and lakes, or the concrete and cobblestone paths of Central Park.

Texture plays another part in painting, of course, not only the suggestions of texture in the image, but the actual texture of the painted surface. McGinty is one of the few painter/bloggers who posts images large enough to actually see the texture and brush strokes, something I’ve been recommending to other painters for a while. I think it adds considerably to the appeal of a painting to a prospective buyer, who must judge a painting without being able to see the original in person.

As with most painters offering their work for sale directly through a blog or website, McGinty places each work up for auction, in his case (as with most others) on eBay.

I recently did something I haven’t done before and bid on a painting online, one of McGinty’s landscapes, Wandering Creek (image above, with detail below, blog post here, larger version here). To my surprise, and delight, and I won the bid.

I was surprised in that my budget was quite low, as was my winning bid. Like many other painter/bloggers, McGinty has apparently decided on a relatively low minimum, perhaps with the thought that keeping the paintings selling is easier than trying to offer them for sale a second time, or leaving a backlog on eBay.

On receipt of the original, I was again surprised, as I would expect a painting of this size and quality to sell in a gallery for at least three times what I paid for it. (Some of this may also have to do with differences in expectations of gallery prices for art in different parts of the country, I don’t know. I’m on the East Coast, McGinty is in Arizona.)

I was delighted with the surface quality and painterly nature of the piece and very pleased with the color. (Though McGinty’s photographs are good, it’s always difficult to match color in an image. In this case, McGinty has balanced the tone for Windows gamma, which means that for those like myself viewing the image with a Mac, the image will appear lighter and less saturated than the original.)

I was also pleased with the little touches that often not as obvious in the online images; in this case nice little accents of red-brown on the edges of the creek and the underside of the trees where reflections from the sun picking up the color of the creek bottom throw light up under the branches and exposed roots, the subtle blue greens in the background and the varied colors in the stone of the bridge.

Even though McGinty is one of the best at presenting his work online (many suffer from too-small images or make the mistake of offering only a link to eBay, without the advantage of a preview image hosted locally on the blog), I’m still struck by the difference between an online image and the much more immediate charms of an the original work.

It makes it all the more interesting to me how artists like McGinty are to a large extent bypassing the traditional gallery structure and taking their work directly to their buyers through the web.

In addition to her own painting and blogging regimen, the indefatigable Karin Jurick (who I have written about previously here, as well as in my posts on “painting a day” painter/bloggers here and here) has a new project in which she participates, guides and hosts a collaborative painting blog based on a simple but fascinating concept: multiple artists’ interpretations of the same scene.

Different Strokes from Different Folks starts with the premise that multiple artists paint a painting from the same photograph. Jurick provides the photograph and gets the ball rolling in each case with her own interpretation, leaving subsequent submissions open to any artists who wish to participate.

She emphasizes that the intent is to paint the scene and not the photograph, which is basically a digital stand-in for the physical impossibility of all of the artists painting on location together. Each artist looks for their own composition and interpretation of the subject.

Each session starts on Wednesday evening and is open for a week. The results are posted on the blog with links to each participating artist’s web site or blog. The original photograph is posted first, followed by Jurick’s starting piece and followed by subsequent submissions in sequence.

Those interested in participating should read the instructions on the blog’s sidebar carefully. Submissions are limited to traditional media, must be sent directly to her email address, with a specific subject line, as a JPEG file (not as a link and no blurry photos) and accompanied each time by the artist’s name and web site or blog address (regardless of previous submissions).

The result is a fascinating look at how different artists interpret the same scene in paint, and once each session has ended they participating paintings can be viewed as a group, as well as in the blog post (weekly results links on the sidebar).

Jurick also posts her own painting, and often a composite poster of the others, on her own blog.

As of this writing, the subject is the Cloud Gate sculpture (locally known as “The Bean”) in Millennium Park in Chicago.

(Image above: left column: Karin Jurick, Emma Pierce, Dean Haven, Nancy Rhodes Harper; right column: Alice Thompson, Tommye Easterlin, original photograph)

I’ve been reporting on the “Painting a Day” phenomenon since well before it was a phenomenon, since my initial 2005 post on Duane Keiser (left); who originated the practice in its commonly understood form of painting one small painting each day and posting it on a blog, usually also offering it for sale.

The demands of the practice frequently encourage artists to paint small still life subjects of objects close at hand, fruit, china, painting supplies and so on, but a number of painters focus more on landscape and painting en plein air, so I’ll concentrate on some of those for this round. These painters usually work a little larger than the daily painters who focus on still life, roughly 8×10″ (20×25cm) instead of 6×8″ (15×20cm).

Though Keiser largely concentrates on still life, he does paint landscape, and I like to mention him in these posts.

Here are some other daily painters who concentrate more on landscape than on still life.

John K. Harrell is a Denver based painter. His subjects include the Colorado countryside, as well as paintings from his travels in the U.S. and Europe. Harrell has a nice economy of notation, in which impressionist handling is used for areas like foliage and textured surfaces where broken color is most effective; but like the American Impressionist painters from the turn of the last century he has not locked himself into rendering everything with short strokes, allowing larger areas of color to predominate when appropriate.

While most daily painters work in oil, Harrell works in acrylic and occasionally pastel. He seems to be using thickened acrylics, though, as they have a feeling of surface texture and brush strokes. Harrell also is a participant in the Daily Impressionist Painters group blog and has a dedicated web site that features his larger and more finished work.

Christopher Greco is a daily painter who paints primarily en plein air. His loose, painterly handling of landscape subjects is particularly effective, I think, in his paintings of small creeks and streams.

He also paints landscapes with structures in them, like houses, barns, garages and storefronts, where his succinct brushwork defines their forms in a series of brief strokes. Greco makes a point of saying that he doesn’t “edit” his work, in that every painting is posted, so that we see his daily progress as he experiments and grows as a painter.

Edward B. Gordon is a painter from Germany and has been practicing the painting a day regimen for longer than most, since November of 2006, and credits Duane Keiser with his impetus to begin the practice. He posts small paintings of a variety of subjects including figures, landscapes and still life.

He has a nicely angular approach to brushwork, laying in individual brush strokes that serve to define a plane. Unfortunately, his posted images are a bit small, leaving me wishing there were lager versions in addition, though he does occasionally post detail images of some of them.

Note: he has some kind of Flash map/comment widget running in his sidebar that my copy of Safari momentarily choked on. Your milage may vary.

George Coll lives in Colorado and his daily paintings are of the mountainous landscape surrounding him. Coll treks from his two acre property out into the back country with with 2 pack llamas carrying his supplies (now that’s different). His location paintings are often in the muted tones of daylight softened by the shadows of the mountains, accented with brilliant light on distant peaks.

He also paints figures and town scenes and his blog will occasionally feature images of his larger works, done in the studio from his location sketches. Coll also has a web site that showcases his larger finished work.

Candy Barr is a painter from Vermont who frequently paints landscapes. Her paintings are sometimes very straightforward in their color palette and at other times “pushed” into brighter, almost expressionistic color.

She also has a web site on which you will find her larger pantings. Of particular interest are her “floaters“, images of nude figures floating in water.

Stephen Magsig is a Detroit painter whose blog, Postcards from Detroit, is a “Painting a Day” style painting diary inspired by pioneering daily painters Duane Keiser and Juilan Merrow-Smith.

Magsig focuses on urban landscape, and most of his paintings are of urban scenes in Detroit and New York, where he is a part-time resident. He studied at Ferris State College and the College for Creative Studies, but considers himself essentially self taught as a painter.

His large scale gallery paintings are almost photo-realist in approach, but his smaller, more immediate works have a wonderfully painterly quality that works particularly well for his subject matter of industrial scenes, abandoned buildings, empty houses and architectural details.

There is something particularly appealing about the way Magsig applies his paint in quick, brusque strokes that seem to have a texture just right for the rough surfaces of the neglected buildings and weathered industrial structures he revels in portraying.

I particularly enjoy his Hopperesque portraits of abandoned houses, sometimes boarded up, surrounded by weeds, and surprisingly rich in color. I also like his beautiful industrial nocturnes, reminiscent of Whistler’s atmospheric images of the River Thames. You’ll also see echoes of Charles Sheeler’s industrial geometry in Magsig’s angular compositions of smokestacks, factory walls, bridges and gantries.

When browsing through his site, you’ll find more variation as you go back in time, with occasional forays into still life and traditional landscape. Be sure to click on the blog images to get to the large versions in which you can see the texture and application of the paint.

I initially came cross Oregon born, California based painter Don Gray by way of his daily painting blog Daily Art West, in which he posts his small paintings of varied subjects, sometimes following the model of small indoor still life subjects common to the “painting a day” practice, but more often of outdoor scenes, frequently painted en plein air.

Following links from the blog, I found some of his more finished gallery work and discovered that he is a muralist.

Gray paints his small paintings in both oil and watercolor. His 30 years of painting have taken him through much of the Pacific Northwest; and he has applied his direct realist style to a variety of landscapes, both intimate and grand in scale. He has also developed the figurative work that features more prominently in his murals, which most often are of historical subjects.

Gray has in recent years experimented with moving away from realism in his contemporary work.

Perhaps because I don’t have much personal experience with the western mountains, I connect most readily with his smaller scale landscapes of woods, small fields and creeks. In particular his small plein air paintings of these subjects have a feeling of immediacy and deftness of execution that I find particularly appealing.

Looking back through his blog posts, which are plentiful as one would expect from the painting a day regimen, is a fascinating journey through varied countryside, as well as another sort of journey through the artist’s interest in certain subjects. These fascinations often result in small series — of his brushes, of pillows on a love seat, or the current small series of fruit wrapped in clear plastic bags.

His landscapes show a freedom of subject choice that indicates he is not reliant on the “picturesque”. Gray has developed an enviable ability to see painting worthy subjects in almost anything on which his eye alights.

Sherry De Ghelder is a painter in the St. Louis area who has taken up the “painting a day” regimen, painting small postcard size paintings of everyday objects such as fruit, vegetables, candy, small toys, and so on.

De Ghelder’s latest series, which I came across by accident while browsing, is something else again.

She decided for the month of January to place her small subjects on her husband’s Marvel Comics super-hero cards when painting them. These cards have black and white images on them, and as a background for her small painted objects, are strikingly graphic.

In the image above, for example, the almost van Gogh-like roughness of the rendering of the toy shoe makes a wonderful contrast with the painted interpretation of the black ink lines on which it sits.

The subject of the black and white cards seems almost irrelevant. De Ghelder usually crops her composition in such a way that the black and white lines of the card image appear more as abstracted graphic elements than recognizable images, and she could probably as easily have made them up herself.

I was just struck by the wonderful juxtaposition of the stark graphic lines and the colorful painted images rendered on top of them.

The result has the power of both the black and white graphic shapes and the painterly realism and color of her subjects, giving the combination a unique feeling that is quite different from either of those approaches alone.

Personally, I think she’s on to something.