Poets and Artists Magazine

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Acadia Foundation Grant

This year I received a grant from Richard Estes' Acadia Foundation to spend the month of July painting in Northeast Harbor, Maine. I'll post the images on my A Painting a Day blog.

The Artist's Magazine: Earning His Daily Bread

Through hard work and ingenuous use of the Web, artist-entrepreneur Duane Keiser became an Internet phenomenon.

by Lisa Wurster for the October 2008 Issue of The Artist's Magazine

In some ways painting has remained the same for hundreds of years, but with the Internet, our venues for seeing and marketing art have undergone a seismic shift. Duane Keiser from Richmond, Virginia, was tired of waiting for gallery directors and patrons to respond, so he seized upon the tools and global audience accessible through the Web to promote and sell his art.

Before he even knew the meaning of the word “blog,” Keiser began his most popular one, A Painting a Day, for which he created a painting every 24 hours, in spite of distractions. It was an ambitious project, one he maintained for well over a year. The idea for his post-card-sized paintings arose long before the brief stint when Keiser was living and painting in New York City from 1990 to 1992. He’d returned to Richmond, and several years later, his work found homes in New York galleries. Yet he still struggled.
For a long time, he’d been compelled to paint oft-overlooked, everyday objects—a freshly cracked egg or a child’s winsome toy. But reality stood in the way. “These beautiful things weren’t traditionally market-able subject matter, so for years I didn’t bother,” he says. “Then I thought, Why can’t I paint them?” As an experiment he began rendering the objects on pieces of gessoed paper that lay around his studio. Eventually he upgraded his surface to linen mounted on hardboard, and the small pieces made him feel more liberated artistically.
Galleries who carried his larger paintings weren’t particularly interested in these small works, as they wouldn’t generate enough profit. So, once he’d amassed a large enough collection, he decided to hold his own show in a makeshift gallery, complete with “cheap bell lights and lots of food and beer.” The concept for the show was attractive: 100 paintings for $100 each, and it allowed those who previously couldn’t afford it to acquire his art. Nearly 80 percent of the collection was snatched up and, after holding a few more DIY-type exhibitions, Keiser took his work to the boundless Internet. Thus was born his A Painting a Day project, in which he sold his art directly from his blog.
Following coverage by a popular website and in prominent magazines, the blog took off and e-mails started pouring in from interested buyers as far away as India. To meet demand, Keiser set up sales of his art on eBay. “It kept the process from being a lottery and made it less frustrating for buyers,” he explains. The postcard-sized paintings sold for an average of $350—with $1,500 the highest amount paid. Surprisingly, a painting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich became the biggest hit, and it continues to be Keiser’s most sought-after subject. He explained the nostalgia surrounding this lunchtime staple, which sometimes generates heated discussions on the best way to prepare a proper PB&J. For an artist, the textures and tactile appearance make the sandwich a challenge and pleasure to paint (see photo, page ••).
Keiser begins his paintings simply, with a raw umber “veil” to mute the white of a canvas or create a warm undertone. From there the approach varies; he may work all over or complete one area at a time. “I might not draw at all,” he says. “If I do, my drawing consists of a little paint and raw umber; then I just dive right in. My technique changes depending upon the subject matter; sometimes it’s all direct painting and other times it involves glazing and scumbling and the like.” “I always tell my students, ‘Technique follows vision,’” says Keiser. “My job as a teacher is to take beginning students and allow them to develop their own way, to guide them. If I interfere too much, the works all end up looking the same.”

A nose for oils

What follows from a great deal of painting is an acute understanding of one’s tools, and Keiser has become intimately acquainted with the characteristics of his paints, even going so far as to say he enjoys the color and smell of oils and the feel of paint being crushed under his brush. “If you don’t love all that,” he says, “I don’t know why you’d bother to paint.”
Keiser primarily uses a thick medium of stand oil, turpentine and Venetian turpentine. “The medium is a slow dryer so it gives me lots of time to work the paint. It smells nice, too,” he says. He also uses Gamblin’s petroleum-based mediums. “I use Galkyd, especially when I’m working larger and fumes become an issue, because I can use low odor/toxicity Gamsol as a thinner with Galkyd,” he explains.
Some of his favorite paint hues include the earth colors. “I like how they move under my brush, and they’re quick driers,” he says. “Titanium white moves slowly; alizarin is quick and transparent; ultramarine blue possesses a translucent, otherworldly quality.” He regularly uses Gamblin or Williamsburg paints, the latter being hand-made in such a way that lets the pigments retain their natural working properties. “If I walk into an art supply store and see a wall of Williamsburg paints, my wallet breaks open, my credit card comes out, and pretty soon I’m out a couple hundred dollars.”
Keiser recommends his videos to students and wishes he’d had the same learning opportunities as a stu-dent. One of his most popular videos shows him rendering a candy apple. It’s been viewed nearly 30,000 times and counting. A camera resting on a tripod poised over his shoulder records Keiser’s hands obsessively moving like any artist’s, making and correcting mistakes, his fingers gently smudging an area. He uses video to show not only how a painting is done, but how it’s not done. “I think my videos are a demonstration of seeing rather than of technique,” he says. “Painting is never ‘step 1, step 2, step 3, and voila!’ I don’t want my students to waste time looking for a magic technique.” There’s one format he hasn’t found particularly useful as an educational resource, however, and that’s how-to books. “They tend to emphasize technique and present a process that’s neat and tidy—which paint-ing most certainly isn’t,” he explains. “They give you the special effects, but not the reason for them. It’s like teaching a film student special effects before he even knows how to tell a story.”
Besides teaching and posting his videos online, Keiser sets up a studio-cam so people can watch him paint in real time, and he keeps several art blogs, accessible through a main page, http:// duanekeiser.blogspot.com. These include his Process blog, in which he documents a painting from conception to completion; On Painting, in which he answers questions about technique and discusses paintings that have inspired him (such as those by Velázquez, which he traveled to the Prado in Madrid to see); and his Topophilia blog, which translates to “love of place” and is taken from the book The Poetics of Space, by French philosopher and physicist Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). Keiser currently has a new blog in the works; he’s also begun a series of large-scale (averaging 4x5 feet) paintings. “When you paint big, the process becomes physical. It’s like the difference between physics and quantum physics,” he says. Yet he admits, “When you’re in the midst of painting a 6-foot-tall oyster, you do feel a little nutty.” These larger paintings are a reaction perhaps to having limited the size of his surface for so long, but Keiser isn’t prepared to analyze or explain why. “I’m of the school of thought where you don’t have to explain it to yourself—just do it. You’ll understand it later,” he says.
Although he no longer does a painting each day, he still creates his “postcard paintings,” which he sells from his website. While he compares painting to alchemy and remarks on Rembrandt’s ability to “turn paint into skin,” that magic happens not without diligence. Keiser’s inventiveness seems instinctive: He’s even created a cigar box palette for oils so he can paint on location. (The impressive work ethic, however, was instilled by teacher and artist Raymond Berry, with whom he studied at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. “Berry taught his students to think of art as blue-collar work. Sometimes you don’t feel inspired and painting sometimes feels just like digging ditches. I understand that’s just a part of the creative process, so I force myself to get inspired,” he explains. “Highway workers don’t tell their boss, ‘I don’t feel like paving a road today.’ If those guys can work in 100 degree heat, we sure as hell can get to an easel.”

Meet Duane Keiser

Born in 1966 in Beaufort, South Carolina, Keiser received his master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College in New York, and his undergraduate degree from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he’s currently an adjunct art professor. His work has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions and hangs in corporate and private collections worldwide. He’s credited with start-ing the Painting a Day movement in 2004. To learn more, visit his website, www.duanekeiser.com, and stay updated on his blogs at duanekeiser.blogspot.com. You can also watch his painting videos online at YouTube.com.

Above is what I look like after painting for 15 or so straight hours. I wanted to keep an
alla prima feeling to this picture of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—a sense that
it was a giant oil sketch. This required me to use a slow-drying medium to keep the paint
wet and to work until my arm fell off and I couldn’t see straight. The result was PB&J
No. 6 (oil, NEED DIMENSIONS).


“A bird had found its way into a studio where
I was teaching and no one could get it to go
out. When I came in the next morning, the
bird had died,” recalls Keiser. “As I was car-
rying the body to the trash, I looked down
and noticed how perfect it was, how beauti-
ful the feathers were, and that the body was
still pliant and warm. Suddenly, throwing
it in the trash seemed inappropriate, even
disrespectful. So I took it to my studio and
painted Viewing (oil on board, 4x51/2)—a
viewing of sorts, a way to pay my respects.”
“Trying to capture the energy of sun-
beams in paint is difficult. Edges, tonality,
hues, paint texture—everything has to be
carefully observed before that blob of paint
becomes ‘lit,’” says Keiser. “My wife drinks
tea, so Tea and Sunbeam (oil on board, 4x5)
is a scene I often see in the morning.”


“Krispy Kreme doughnuts have all sorts of
painterly attributes—they are sticky and
shiny and translucent and ... delicious,”
Keiser muses. “Yes, I eat all my still lifes, as I
did for Krispy Kreme (oil, 48x48).”






“Night Salt (at right; oil, 4x5) is a painting of
the stillness of night as much as one of a salt
shaker,” says Keiser. “I remember the area
of shadow above the shaker as being a chal-
lenge because the composition of the paint-
ing almost forces your eye to view the shadow
as a stripe painted on the wall, rather than a
shadow. So I really had to find the right hues
and tones, both within the shadow and along
the edge where the shadow meets the light.”
The egg is one of Keiser’s favorite recur-
ring subjects, and he’s “painted dozens,”
among them, Egg No. 16 (below; oil, 5x51/2).
“I like the sense of alchemy between paint
and subject or, more specifically, between
paint and albumen—the feeling of almost
changing paint into albumen and vice versa,”
Keiser says. “An egg makes me move paint in
a certain way in that it makes me delve into
the wonderful translucency of oil paint.”

Creative Journey Cafe

Interview with Duane Keiser

Mark on April 17th, 2008

Duane Keiser is a painter from Virginia with a trend-setting blog called A Painting A Day. The title says it all. Since 2004, in addition to his larger works, Duane has created a postcard-sized painting every day (give or take a few) and sold each one through his blog. His amazing work and clever marketing strategy have earned him an international audience of collectors and a feature in USA Today. I’m honored that Duane took time away from his easel to answer some questions at Creative Journey Cafe.

How did you develop the discipline to make a painting a day?

My painting teacher, Ray Berry, was also my karate teacher. I’ve practiced, quite intensely, a very traditional and rigorous form of Karate for around 23 years (Shotokan Karate of America). In a Shotokan practice we will often perform a single, basic technique a thousand times. We try to make each technique the best we can make it until, one day and tens of thousands of techniques later, it becomes second nature to us.

These kinds of practices are incredibly demanding and they require that you make up your mind to finish them. Our personal practices often involve setting up a specific challenge for ourselves like, say, making a thousand punches everyday for a month or making a practice of some sort everyday for a year, etc. (Ray made a hard practice everyday for 14 years and didn’t miss a day!) So by the time I attempted a painting a day, that kind of mentality was already ingrained in me. I’ve also been lucky to have been surrounded by people a lot more disciplined than I am throughout my life, so when I made up my mind to make a painting a day I did so with many examples of what real discipline is. I’m generally a slacker in comparison!

For those of us who might try a similar experiment, what challenges will we face and how can we overcome them?

As I mentioned above, you first have to make up your mind and commit to the project. You will not get anything out of it if you treat it like a hobby - like something you can take or leave depending on how you feel that day. Ray always used to tell his students that painting is blue collar work (ie if road workers can work on a hot asphalt highway in 100 degree weather all day long, we painters can certainly drag our asses to our easels to paint, even when we’re a little tired, bored, frustrated or even sick.)

Time will be a problem too - you need to plan and build your day around each session. Keep your easel, paints, and brushes ready to go at all times so that you don’t have a half a dozen little things you need to do in order to start painting. Prepare a few dozen supports in advance.

Set up a reasonable duration for yourself because everybody has a different situation in their life. So maybe say you can make a painting a day for a week, rather than a month or a year.

Expectations: if this is your first time doing this, or if you’re just learning to paint, don’t worry too much about good or bad. Just paint. Treat your paintings like experiments or meditations - you are savoring some object or scene via paint. Whether that paint forms a masterpiece or not should not be a concern. It helps if, in the beginning, you take some pressure off yourself by making this a private affair - no blog, no selling, etc. Just paint. When you are done with each painting, pin them to a wall. When you have 50 or so, sit down and take a look at what you have and then maybe make a decision about making them public or not.

Can you talk about money and art? You seem to thrive as a fine artist, selling every painting you post on your blog. How did you develop your business side?

I, like many artists, was always concerned about business mixing with my paint and muddying my palette, so to speak. I didn’t want to end up making widgets - meaningless products created for sales (ie rent) rather than as a pursuit of a deeply personal aesthetic vision.

Being business savvy, I think, starts with viewing marketing and selling as creative pursuits rather than necessary evils. For instance, one day several years ago I decided to have an art show in my studio of my small works. I priced them extremely cheap. I bought lots of wine and beer - it ended up being a big party. It was a great time, lots of paintings sold and many people bought their first original paintings. I sold work that was honest and meaningful to me and lots of new patrons went home with paintings that were meaningful to them. It was a wonderful feeling and it was good business.

Your powers of sight are extraordinary. Your work is representational yet not photo-realistic. How do you define that line between rendering objects accurately yet not making it look like a photo?

I generally (I stress generally) don’t like photo-realist work because the paint itself is usually dead. There is no poetry, just a rather bland description. Paint is mysterious to me - you place a mark on the canvas, then another and another until, maybe, something happens. If it is right, the paint and the subject mesh together into some unnameable third thing. You are never quite sure how or why it happens but you know it when it does and it can just as mysteriously disappear on you if you overwork it.James Elkins compared painting to alchemy in the sense that it can be a transformative process whereby paint becomes something else rather than simply representing a subject (ie Rembrandt’s paint almost becoming skin in his self-portraits.) So I suppose I don’t really think in terms of stylistic lines (ie photorealism, impressionism, etc.) but rather I try to be sensitive to how the paint feels under my brush while at the same time staying connected to what that mark is representing.

What artists - contemporary or otherwise - excite you?

The ones that excite me include: the three V’s - Velazquez, Vermeer and Vuillard. Also, Rembrandt, Corot, Constable, Chardin, Cezanne, Hopper, DeKooning,Diebenkorn. Contemporary: Thiebaud, Howard Hodgkin, Ray Berry, Robert Bauer,Jane Wilson and about a half a dozen others I can’t think of at the moment.

What’s the purpose of art?

Honestly, I don’t think I can put it into words, which is probably for the better.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’d like to thank Duane for his time and for sharing his knowledge and experience with us. Be sure to visit A Painting A Day, and forward this inspiring interview to your creative friends!

Huffington Post- First Person Artist: Duane Keiser

Kimberly Brooks for The Huffington Post

Ever since technology essentially air-lifted artists' work out of their studios and galleries and put them online, on any given evening (for those of us who prefer to work in natural light) you can find mobs of artists, usually very solo creatures, roaming around the Internet looking at other artists' work. A few years ago, during one of my nightly expeditions, I stumbled upon a freak phenomenon called the "Painting A Day Movement" (affectionately referred to as "PAD"). It started when a single painter named Duane Keiser decided to challenge himself to make a single painting a day and sell them online. He was smart about it, the paintings are small, he set up a simple group on Google, collected email addresses, threw the paintings up on Ebay, and the next thing he knows he's not only selling work, people are bidding up the price, he has legions of fans, is making a great living and has been credited with starting the movement by USA Today and the New York Times.

Curious, I signed up for his newsletter and everyday I receive a painting in my email box. The subject matter is simple and very well rendered. With an odd sort of "Being John Malkovitch" sensation, it's as if I'm in the studio, sitting in his brain and seeing what the artist sees every day, every morning. While I may have made him miss a day, I caught up with Duane in his studio and talked to him about it:


"Sunbeams and Pushpins" 4 x 6" Oil on Panel. Duane Keiser

Kimberly Brooks: What was the spark that possessed you to make a painting a day?

Duane Keiser: Several years ago I sat in my studio and looked at several small oil studies I had made and I wondered what I should do with them. Back then I was almost completely reliant on galleries to sell my work. I decided to use my studio as a gallery (complete with makeshift track lighting) and have an opening for my family and friends. The prices on my larger paintings had risen over the last decade, to the point where many of my original collectors could no longer afford my work. So I priced the work at $100 each. I called them Postcard Paintings because of their size and because, like the dime-store postcards you send while on vacation, each painting kind of says to it's recipient, "this is what I saw." I called the show "100 paintings for $100." The opening was a hit. I sold a lot of work, everybody had a great time, and a lot of people bought their first original oil painting. I had several more shows after that and started to learn my way around the web and how to present my work via zeroes and ones.


"Egg" 4 x 6 in. Oil on Linen. Duane Keiser

KB: How did that experience end up a movement?

DK: I started experimenting with a blog (actually I just wanted to find out what the hell a blog was.) I remember thinking the journal-like aspect of blogging seemed appropriate for what I was doing, so I posted a few images and called the blog "A Painting a Day." About a week later I got fifty emails in my inbox from all over the world. The next day even more. They were all emailing me about my work and my blog. I couldn't figure out what was happening until someone emailed me that BoingBoing.net did a little story on my project. And that is when I discovered the wonders of "viral marketing."

At the time, the paintings were sold first-come first-served for $100: the first person to email me got the painting. They started to sell within minutes. Unless you were tethered to a computer all day it was hard to buy one. So after several months I decided to try Ebay. This gives people the time to consider a painting over the course of several days and then, if interested, decide what they think it's worth. It's like having my own Sotheby's. After about a year and three months I felt like the strict painting-a-day project had served it's purpose for me. I am still making close to a painting-a-day, but now I have the freedom to work on other projects.


Video of Ice Cream Melting 4 Minutes 13 seconds. Duane Keiser


KB: What kinds of other projects are you doing now?

DK:I'm about to publish a book via blurb.com and I also have an internet project brewing that I intend to unveil soon. Lastly, I'm continueing to work on some large still life pieces (like the big doughnut on the homepage) and, as always, my postcard paintings.

KB: How do you think the PAD movement has affected your audience?

DK: I've been struck by how many emails I have received from artists and non-artists alike wanting to start their own PAD projects. Many aren't interested in selling or even showing their work publicly. They often have full-time jobs and kids. It finally occurred to me there is something going on here that goes beyond wanting to learn how to paint a pretty picture, and I think it taps into an underlying attraction to the idea of making a painting a day: We go through our lives with a perpetual cursory glance. We see but we don't notice. We simply aren't used to observing things firsthand, of investigating them, and I think we sense this--that we're missing something; that we have, to some degree, become spectators of our own lives. Cell phones, computers, TV, video, 24 hour news etc-- all of this information forms the visual equivalent of white noise. It is hard to see and appreciate the colors in a candle flame when it is seen against a fireworks display-- and if we are only looking for fireworks in the first place, we will not only not see the subtleties of that single flame, we won't notice the flame at all. In effect, the flame ceases to exist to us. Direct observation and the patience it requires has become less natural to us.

I think this is one aspect of the PAD idea that draws artists and non-artists alike to the idea of making a painting a day. Even to the uninitiated, there is the notion that painting makes us participants again. The idea of bringing painting into our life holds the promise of experiencing a moment each day when we can be still. We turn off the TV and the cell phone, and we paint. On the one hand painting is a brief respite from the electric hum of modern life but on the other it is the opposite--a way to face and thus reenter our visual world. Annie Dillard wrote, " Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away."

New York Times: Everyday Scenes, Painted Every Day

By MICHELLE SLATALLA of NYT


NICK JAINSCHIGG was having a terrible time last week trying to paint a pink rose in 30 minutes. One day he said the petals looked thick as icing, and the next he just couldn’t get the bud texture right.

“Despite my best intentions, the image of a rose on a white background will always look like a greeting card,” he wrote in despair.

But Mr. Jainschigg refused to give up. And as he used different techniques — he tried big, floppy brushstrokes, he tried painting at twilight, he even changed the background to a flat chalky gray — I found myself rooting for him. And for the rose.

I was following his progress by making frequent visits to nickjainschigg.org, the Web site where he posts results of his efforts to complete a tiny postcard-size painting every day. Each afternoon, I clicked on his newest thumbnail image, hoping to see a masterpiece.

Why did I care? There were several reasons, actually, the most obvious being the empty space on the wall in the hallway that leads to my kitchen. Mr. Jainschigg is one of a growing number of artists who in the last few months have starting selling one-a-day creations online. One of his roses could look great on my wall.

Three might look even better. And suddenly, thanks to the one-a-day art movement, buying three original oil paintings is not a budget-busting proposition. Mr. Jainschigg, for instance, sells his small paintings for $100.

But beyond my instinctive shopper’s impulse to find a bargain, I was also excited to be witnessing yet another example of how the Internet has the power to upset old ideas and reshape retail markets.

Sites like acollageaday.blogspot.com (where Randel Plowman sells his 4-inch-by-4-inch collages for $25) and dailypaintings.com (where Elin Pendleton has posted her acrylic and oil paintings for prices as low as $100) remove the middleman from the transaction, connecting artists directly to collectors.

The Internet changes things fast. By most accounts, the roots of the painting-a-day movement reach back only as far as December 2004, when a painter named Duane Keiser, who also is an adjunct professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, decided to test his discipline by challenging himself to post a new creation every day on his site at duanekeiser.blogspot.com.

“I wanted to make a ritual for myself, to complete a painting in one day, every day, without any excuses,” Mr. Keiser said in a phone interview last week. “I liked the diary aspect of it, that it was like putting a time stamp on a painting. When it goes up on the blog, I know it happened on this day.”

Mr. Keiser’s experiment soon attracted the attention of boingboing.net, a popular blog that identifies online trends.

“After somebody wrote a little blurb about me for Boingboing, the whole thing just spread like, well, it was unbelievable,” Mr. Keiser said. “I would wake up in the morning and paint, say, an egg, and post it, and then some guy in India would e-mail me and it was breathtaking to realize that within a few minutes of my finishing a painting, people everywhere in the world were looking at it.”

Previously, Mr. Keiser sold most of his work through traditional brick-and-mortar galleries. “But this has allowed me the flexibility to not worry about whether a gallery will accept me,” he said.

Now there are plenty of other artists are doing the same thing. At paintingadayproject.blogspot.com, for instance, Jan Blencowe posts what she calls “small, simple still life paintings of common objects.” The artist Elizabeth Fraser sells her paintings on eBay, starting at $60; her work is online at web.mac.com/champart/iWeb.

At some painting-a-day Web sites such as justinspaintings.com and shiftinglight.com, I could subscribe to mailing lists; now I receive e-mail alerts the moment a new painting-a-day is posted.

There was a time when Mr. Keiser’s daily artworks sold for as little as $100 on his site. But since Domino magazine anointed him “the godfather of these blogs” in an article published in July, things have changed.

These days, he auctions his painting-a-day work at eBay, where last week a 5-inch-by-5-inch painting of a plate decorated with a crab got 12 bids before selling for $265. As of yesterday, a 5-inch-by-4-inch painting of a rushing river had 18 bids, and was up to $380.

But eBay frenzies turn me off. I’ve lived through too many of them.

I can remember, for example, when prices for milk-green Depression glass coffee cups were rising by the day as collectors who once were at the mercy of local flea markets’ limited inventory suddenly discovered the novelty of finding a world’s worth of collectibles at eBay.

I’m one of those people who overbid on a stack of chipped saucers. Now I look at them in the pantry and I feel the same kind of vague embarrassment that may overwhelm someone who stumbles across a Chia Pet in the attic.

Will the painting-a-day frenzy last? Or is it merely the fleeting symptom of a new Internet trend? In recent weeks, Mr. Jainschigg has sold the vast majority of the 413 painting-a-day works he posted during the last 15 months.

One of his biggest challenges now, he said, is not to cave in to the temptation to create work solely for the sake of selling it.

“All of a sudden, I realize, there are people looking over my shoulder,” Mr. Jainschigg said. “But although I do paint some fun stuff like little pretty landscapes, the occasional stuffed animal or a bug, I like to paint what I’m trying to learn. I was doing study after study of skeletons for a while when I was trying to master anatomy.”

Most of his paintings of skeletons and skulls are still for sale.

Last week, he warned his audience that he was painting his last rose for now. “This one, the final bud for the time being, was by way of declaring victory and going home,” he wrote.

Did I want to hang it on my wall? I wasn’t sure. Luckily, he’ll have something new for me to consider tomorrow.

USA Today: Artists take paintings to the masses

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY


RICHMOND, Va. — In his sweltering studio on one of the hottest days of the year, artist Duane Keiser should be sweating, but he's smiling. He sold a painting today. And yesterday and the day before yesterday and the days before that going back 18 months. What's more, he's virtually certain to sell a painting tomorrow and all the tomorrows of the foreseeable future.
Keiser once was one of those artists lucky to sell a couple of paintings a year. Now he's something new: artist as blogger. Every day he makes a postcard-size oil painting of something he sees around town or of a still life he arranges here in his studio in the warehouse district of his hometown. Then he posts an image of the painting on his daily blog, DuaneKeiser.blogspot.com, under A Painting a Day.

You like it? Want it? Click on it.

Thousands have done so, on Keiser's blog and the blogs of scores of other mostly non-famous artists who make small original paintings nearly every day and sell them for as little as $100 each. It doesn't make them rich, but it allows them to make a living as an artist, and it could make some of them famous.

In the process, artist/bloggers such as Keiser are democratizing the art world, using the Internet to change the making and selling of art. Dealers and galleries, who command 50% commissions, no longer have exclusive control in defining who is emerging or successful.

Now artists can sell directly to consumers, using blogs or auction sites at prices more affordable to would-be collectors. The result: More people are making a living as artists, more people are buying art, and more art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices.

"This is a very exciting development," says New York art collector and corporate attorney Gregory Peterson, who already had a museum-quality art collection when he discovered Keiser's blog. Now he has a dozen of Keiser's paintings. "The entire method of collecting has radically changed."

But it's more than that. This is a confluence of trends:

• The blogosphere has doubled every six months for the past two years to 51.9 million blogs, according to blog tracker Technorati.

• Online art shopping has grown as a complement to gallery hopping and art-fair shopping.

• Interest has increased in original contemporary art as an inspiration for interior design.

• Acceptance has grown of original art for gifting.

"The Internet has created a new form of art galleries, and it has allowed artists to become independent entrepreneurs," says Peter Togel, an artist and co-owner of ArtByUs.com, a new art auction site. "The consumers of the art are people who have white walls and midsized incomes, who could never pay for a painting in a gallery but don't want to go to Wal-Mart to buy a poster."

So far, art dealers and galleries aren't paying much attention, and they're not really threatened.

"Traditional galleries are never going to go away. You'll always need them, but the days of them being the gatekeepers are over," says Keiser, 40, whose work has sold in New York galleries.

Keiser discovered the blogosphere in 2004, and it's not certain how many artists have joined him. But on Blogger.com, more than 1,500 blogs mention "painting-a-day," and 95 mention that in their self-describing tags on Technorati.

The idea of putting your art — literature, poetry, music, video games, film, etc. — on the Web for all to see isn't new, but it's easier to sell a painting than a poem.

"And the new thing about (the concept) is the serial aspect, that every day there's a new image, and you don't know what it's going to be," Keiser says.

That's one reason collector Peterson, 54, is a fan. "The Internet can provide something that no other medium can — real-time drama, and that can be addictive."

Because making, selling, packing and shipping the small paintings takes only a few hours a day, the artist gets a steady stream of income for not much effort. If Keiser sells five paintings a week at an average of $250 each, for 48 weeks a year, that's $60,000. Plus, he has plenty of time to work on larger, more expensive paintings.

The Internet helps the artist reach millions more viewers than would come into galleries or, say, happen upon the artist painting on a street corner.

Another bonus: Artists and buyers can establish a personal relationship. "What I like is having that direct connection with the buyer, even if it's by e-mail," Keiser says.

The concept of Keiser's blog originated in 2001 after he painted a batch of small oils and wondered how to sell them. Galleries generally aren't interested in small works because the profit margin is so low.

So he threw a party in his studio and invited all his friends to "100 Paintings for $100." "They sold like gangbusters," he says. "And everyone had a great time."

He started posting small paintings on his website, e-mailed his friends every time he posted, and interest began to grow.

In December 2004, he launched his daily blog; soon, he was getting 50 e-mails a day, then 100. Top Web mag Boing Boing mentioned his blog; so did Yahoo.

"After that, it just exploded. I would post a painting, and someone in India would buy it within five minutes," he says.

Originally he sold them for $100 each. As the daily competition grew, he switched to auctions on eBay, which sent prices up to an average $250-$400 each, although a few have sold for double that or more.

These days, Keiser's blog gets hundreds of visitors a day. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which tracks blogs based on their links by other bloggers, says Keiser's site manages a respectable ranking of 2,714 out of the top 10,000 blogs it profiles.

Meanwhile, scores of other artists, experienced or not, have started similar blogs. Some of them closely imitate Keiser's style, subjects and selling strategies.

Justin Clayton, 31, a former video game artist in Los Angeles, says he was inspired by Keiser to quit his day job last year to make small oil paintings for his blog, JustinsPaintings.com, which started in January. Like Keiser, he paints still lifes, a few portraits and some landscapes, such as a row of the tops of California palm trees. Nearly everything has sold, typically for $200-$300 on eBay auctions. He's thrilled — and surprised.

"The Internet makes it possible for me or anyone to be an artist. Just the sheer numbers out there, there's bound to be someone in the world interested in your art," he says. "But how do you get people to go to your site? I'm constantly looking for new ways."

One way is publicity. The August edition of home magazine Domino showcased seven artist/bloggers, including Keiser and Clayton, in a feature on how to decorate on a budget. After that, "I was getting 550 visitors to the site a day," compared with the usual 125 to 200, Clayton says.

In February, when The New York Times ran a small story about a website called Postcard from Provence, British artist Julian Merrow-Smith had 40 small oils of the countryside around his Provençal farmhouse that hadn't sold since he started his painting-a-day blog, shiftinglight.com.

The day of the article, "we sold everything in about five minutes," Merrow-Smith says. "I have a database of 3,000 people, and it's growing by 30 or 40 people a day."

Merrow-Smith, also inspired by Keiser, sells his still lifes and landscapes from his blog for $120 each, and now dealers have come sniffing. "It's a little embarrassing," he says. "I don't need them."

Still, for most dealers, gallery owners and museum curators, artist/bloggers are just not worth their interest.

"Most don't look like anything special," says Howard Rehs, co-owner of Rehs Galleries in New York. Dealers work with buyers "who are looking to build collections that have some relevance, importance or meaning." The bloggers are just "a little blip in the art world, something that will fill a niche for those people who want to buy something real and not just a poster."

Maybe, but it's a niche that is growing. People such as Togel of ArtByUs.com see the artists' roles almost as educators for art-buying neophytes. Buyers "can make their mistakes; they can grow, learn what is good, what isn't, what they like, don't like," he says. "After you bring art to the masses, eventually some of them are going to go to galleries to buy."