Friday, December 17, 2010

Daily Painting


Pretty On Pink and Blue- 7x5
Headed to
Rowley Gallery
Below is what i painted last night. Pretty On Pink and Blue (above) shows the corrections i made.
When i looked at the painting from last night in the cold light of morning i had a few things that were driving me crazy. they were:
*didnt seem to be any difference in where the strongest light was on the table top (both pink and blue sides) so i added darker more muted paint to the top and lighter warmer light in the middle where the light was hitting the table the strongest
* softened the dividing line between the pink and blue. also made it more irregular. i had it painted the way it really looked (like construction paper with its hard perfectly straight edge) the change is more organic looking. almost looks like cloth which i'll do from now on!
*blurred the back edge making you look in the middle and foreground harder. look how in the bottom painting that soft black line is the same from the middle ground and as it hits the edge it takes you right off.
Edge treatment is huge! remember how i messed this one up and dont you make the same mistake!
the first one
If you've been around the painting business any amount of time you've probably heard the term "daily painting". But you may be asking "what is that exactly?" and may be wondering what it could offer you.
Daily painting is a movement that started years ago and is pretty much attributed to an artist named Duane Keiser. It started when he would paint a small painting (around 6x8) and post it on Ebay and auction it off, every day. If youre familiar with the online art business today that doesnt sound so revolutionary but back before there were hundreds of thousands of artists selling online, that was revolutionary. Back then just about everybody was selling exclusively at shows or in galleries. To use the 'new' technology of the internet to sell art was unheard of. Not so today. Just google "art blog" and see what pops up!
Daily painters are artists who commit to paint a small painting everyday and post it online for sale. There are also daily painter 'galleries' that post their painter's paintings online every day of the week.
Now, how can all this help the budding artist? Lets look at the benefits of painting every single day.
What would happen if you were a marksman with a rifle and shot in competitions, but you never had any target practice. Same thing goes for painting daily. Think of daily painting as target practice. They'll ultimately help your larger paintings. If you're painting daily you'll also have lots of little paintings that you can sell cheaply (compared to your larger paintings). Start a blog and put them on there everyday. After several months start asking to get in some of the new daily painter online galleries and soon you'll have several dozen potential buyers looking at your work every single day. Selling work is all about marketing and daily painting is just one really successful way to do that. Now stop reading this and go paint one!

8 comments:

Klinger Studios said...

Thanks, Mike -I needed that. The demo and kick in the butt are very helpful. I even need to just start thinking of painting as a business!

mike rooney studios said...

christine- glad i could help!

Karsten said...

Since attending your demo and visiting with you in Orleans, I have created a new blog and ordered a web site - when we get back to Maine after the holidays (in Georgia), I'll start posting to my blog. Hoping for some private lessons in North Carolina next year, and looking forward to your workshop in Port Clyde/Monhegan. Thanks for the inspiration!

mike rooney studios said...

karsten- youre welcome.thats awesome! now thats getting with it. to sell art you have to promote and you can do that with a website and blog. you'll go far and cant wait to see your stuff up on the blog. the workshop already has four students for monhegan and its going to be a blast. cant wait to paint in maine.

Shellie Lewis said...

I just completed a BA in Art + Design May 2010 at a reasonably prestigious art and media college, and I had a class where the concept of making a painting a day was abused to the extreme.

This method was used as an excuse for the professor to not offer any instruction during the whole of fifteen weeks of a middle level painting course. We did the works on our own, brought them in for class once a week; techniques and methods were never taught, and four hours were spent during class time critiquing the conceptual value of the works for everyone. One poor soul in the class had not even been told one can wash acrylic paint from brushes with soap and water and had been throwing brushes in the garbage; that's how out to lunch the professor was.

Basically, the 'daily' paintings we created were ripped on class after class. I was the only person out of about 20 to pull it off every week but had to abandon my preferred media of oil paints [we had no studio spaces; I could not transport them on the train without damage]and I defaulted to watercolor, sumi-e inks and oilstick /cray pas. The organization of the classroom environment collapsed into a highly aggressive free-for-all, we were at each others throats, and it was all very entertaining for the professor whom neither had to work [teach], had a steady stream of works to critique as if they were fully realized paintings [again, no teaching technique] and was possibly also using this concept as a basis for the professor to demonstrate [alleged] superiority over students. This professor's works were never shown to us.

I think a painting a day could be a valuable tool to someone who has a good set of skills started / developed with painting. It may be too frustrating to someone just developing a skill set, let alone a style. Nearly no one in the mid level class I mentioned had more than a month or two experience painting and shut down out of frustration within a few weeks.

Overall, I do feel that painting has a long and slow learning curve; nothing substitutes for actually handling paint as the best method of acquiring skill.

I use an adaptation of this concept where I may paint daily but do not expect to complete a fully realized work on canvas more frequently than once a week, maybe every two weeks. If I do a painting a day, I am often using ephemera such as [but not limited to] reclaimed chipboard package boaxes, book pages, cardboard, newspaper pages, brown Kraft paper and the like. It is a way to play loosely with a substrate / surface that has no value and be playthings on the side of my more serious works. I can see how daily painting is very well suited to your painterly alla prima representational style. I am focusing on Pop Art and certain forms of culture jamming and other expressions whereby the art critical / theoretical conceptual model and narrative may be equal to or possibly dominant to the physical image of the painting itself.

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Shellie Lewis said...
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Shellie Lewis said...
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mike rooney studios said...

shellie- the problem was not daily painting (better yet, turn it around 'painting daily')
the problem was the sub-par instructor. you wouldnt tell someone "to be a really great cake chef you must make a cake a day!" without showing the complete beginner how to bake the first few right? daily painting IS the very best way to improve one's painting, but only after they know how to wash the paint out of the brush for heavens sake. the professor is probably tenured, but in the real world (not academia) he'd be fired!
think of daily painting as target practice.