On A-Painting-a-Day (Part 1)

Over the last few years I've been asked a lot of questions about my Postcard Painting project and how it got started etc so I figured I'd write down some of my answers in this blog from time to time:

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. The galleries that represented me at the time were not particularly interested in them and I didn’t have any room in my house to hang them. Back then I was almost completely reliant on galleries to sell my work. I decided I would 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/party was a big hit (probably owing as much to the large qunatities of beer and wine as to the paintings.) I sold a lot of work, everybody had a great time, and a lot of people bought their first original oil painting. It was very exciting for me and it was the first time I realized that galleries aren’t the only way to present and sell paintings. 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.

At that point I decided to challenge myself to make a painting each day. I knew this would be much more demanding than simply painting everyday. To make a complete painting means starting AND ending a painting, as opposed to painting for awhile and picking up where you left off the next day or next week. I liked the idea of getting up each day and looking, and finding, and savoring something through the process of painting. My subjects could be anything: read this Annie Dillard quote. I consider it to be a meditation, a discipline that requires me to be STILL (mentally and physically) for a few hours regardless of what else is going on in my life. I also felt it would make me a better painter. I had a desire to reconnect with the paint again and this seemed like a good project for that (my teacher Ray Berry had us do a lot of small studies on gessoed paper which really allowed us to play with the paint and get comfortable with moving it around.) So I built my life around this experiment. On vacations, holidays, sickness and in health etc, I made a painting each day. It was difficult but exhilarating. After a while I felt like I was always painting, even when I wasn’t painting. I have to admit there were some days when I felt I’d rather dig a ditch than paint. But that became part of the process… to get my mind into my painting and rise above the clutter that a day can throw at you-- not in a superficial “let me get this over with” way, but to truly and honestly savor what I was doing. After painting I always felt… clean.

I started experimenting with blogs… 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. Apparently a LOT of people read BoingBoing.net And that is when I discovered the wonders of “viral marketing.” People started linking my blog on their blogs (word of mouth x100.) 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. I still have body of work that I sell for the set-price of $100 now. I call them oddments.

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.