Painting a day
Duane Keiser experiments with alternative way to sell art
Duane Keiser poses with one of his larger paintings of an ordinary object
BY DAN PETTY, ’09
From crayons to clouds, cities to cicadas, and plums to pretzels, Duane Keiser paints almost anything for his innovative “Painting-a-Day” blog, which features original postcard-sized paintings he posts and auctions online.
Keiser, an adjunct faculty member who teaches art at University of Richmond and Randolph-Macon College, is a pioneer in uniting blogging and painting, radically altering the way buyers and artists interact.
A blog—short for Web log—is a regularly updated online journal that allows readers to comment on the subject of specific entries. Some blogs are diaries, while others analyze and comment on different subjects.
On a whim in December 2004, Keiser launched his “Painting a Day” blog— duanekeiser.blogspot.com —and posted several of his small paintings as a way to experiment with selling online.
“I was going to make a daily ritual for myself,” says Keiser, 39. “I’d get up and no matter what, I would notice something in my life and I would paint it. I did it as a challenge for myself.
“I thought it was an appropriate format for what I was doing because it was a diary,” says Keiser, who spends about two or three hours working on the oil paintings. “You make a painting each day, and it’s got a timestamp on it, so it kind of measures the passage of time.”
Boingboing.net, the second most popular blog in the world, according to Technorati, a Web site that tracks trends in the blogosphere, picked up on Keiser’s idea and posted a link to his blog. E-mails from people all over the world—Japan, Australia and India—soon flooded the bewildered artist’s inbox.
Keiser originally sold the works for $100 to the first person who e-mailed him after he posted the paintings online. But as the blog’s popularity skyrocketed, he began auctioning them through eBay, usually selling paintings for between $300 and $700, though one painting, “PB&J No. 5,” sold for $1,525.
“For the first time, painters have a venue for their work that potentially the entire world can see,” he says. “You have tools at your disposal to charge credit cards and send a painting anywhere in the world for very little money. You can have a little bit of ownership over your work, how it’s presented, and who you sell it to.”
Nearly two years after the initial buzz, the blog ranks 2,640th out of more than 36 million tracked on the Neilson BuzzMetrics Blogpulse and receives nearly 3,000 hits a day. The ratings are based on the number of other blogs that link to Keiser’s site.
“That’s where I learned about the viral nature of blogs,” says Keiser, whose work also has appeared in New York City galleries.
Keiser does not rely on galleries to sell his work nearly as much as he used to since the growth of his idea, and says he likes the additional income and the flexibility to work directly with clients that he can’t be guaranteed with galleries.
“Galleries are no longer the only game in town,” he says. “To some extent, they’ve got to start rethinking some things, but they aren’t going anywhere.”
Keiser paints still life images like small objects, interiors and landscapes, preferring to make ordinary scenes and objects the subjects of his work.
“We all walk through our lives with a perpetual cursory glance,” he says. “We never stop to be still to just look at something—like a light beam on the wall. If you’re prepared that day to paint something, your eyes open.
“Painting becomes a way to get under [an object’s] skin and savor this one moment,” he adds. “And you leave this little thing behind just for that day.”
Keiser’s popularity has generated hundreds of imitators—many who uniquely twist the original Painting-a-Day idea—and dozens of people cite him as their inspiration for experimenting with painting. Keiser says that he doesn’t mind people using the same idea, but cautions newcomers against the lure of painting only for profit.
“What you do at the easel cannot be affected by business decisions,” he says. “It becomes less spiritual and turns into making a product, and then dies.”
Keiser no longer paints as frequently for the blog, choosing instead to spend more time on other pieces and “investigate some new thoughts about painting,” he wrote on his blog last April.
“You’d be crazy not to take advantage of this,” he says. “We’re just now in the beginning of painters and visual artists starting to understand what the Internet can do.”