Light playing on a wall. A dead bee in a windowsill. The glistening, golden ooze of an egg yolk. These are the kinds of things that seduce Duane Keiser, and in painting them, he amplifies their sweet, often neglected mysteries. His work is careful and potent, and it gets some serious attention—a blog project he started a few years ago, “A Painting A Day,” quickly found wildly eager reception online; little wonders that Duane would stop to render in an hour or two on his cigar box easel would get posted on duanekeiser.blogspot.com, and within a couple of hours (which soon transitioned to a couple of minutes), he would get emails from people all over the world who were interested in buying them. He eventually had to start putting them on eBay, his “own personal little Sotheby’s,” to lessen the lottery effect for the buyers. “A Painting A Day” became a bit of an artistic movement, and USA Today and the Times took note. Duane was amazed. “I still think of the internet as a kind of miracle. I can paint a broken egg in my kitchen and have some guy in India email me two minutes later and say that he loves that egg. It’s like the world is looking over your shoulder.”
 
Sometimes that works on a literal level. Duane started doing live camera sessions where online viewers can watch him paint, see how the image develops over the course of a few hours. He’s done other fun, interactive things with his work as well; before his price range soared, he turned his studio into a gallery and threw “100 paintings, $100” parties for his friends and their peripheral community. On occasion, he’ll do a commission: “A nice woman emailed be about making a painting of a specific kind of bird, an indigo bunting. I only work from life, not from photos, so I told her that it would be unlikely that I could find one to paint. A few days later, I hear a knock on my door at my house. I opened my front door to find a woman cupping a dead bird in her hands. She introduced herself and told me that she had found the bird dead in her yard recently… and immediately thought of me and put the carcass in her freezer to preserve it. The next day, on the way to my house, she dropped by a funeral home where a friend of hers was an undertaker—who embalmed the bird for her. She wanted me to be able to paint the bird without worrying about it decomposing. So, of course, I had to paint it; it was a lovely specimen, actually.”
 
It seems that painting is a way to study, to meditate upon things, for Duane. And to appreciate the mundane as extraordinary. “It’s a way to savor things. It triggers you to want to find out about something, to get under its skin—so you paint it, over hours or months or years.” Find his work at http://www.duanekeiser.com.
 

Greetings,
This podcast series offers information relating to “ A Painting a Day Movement.”
-Hall Groat II
Professor of Art
Broome Community College
http://www.hallgroat.com
http://www.hgroatii.blogspot.com/
http://www.paintingadaytheory.blogspot.com/

A PAINTING A DAY – OVERVIEW OF MOVEMENT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7v1idm-ns0

DAILY PAINTING MOVEMENT – ART CURATION AND EXHIBITION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mjT6W3cspE

A PAINTING A DAY – IMPACT ON ART MARKETING BY HALL GROAT II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8n5YgtcPWs

PAINTING A DAY – IMPACT ON ART EDUCATION BY HALL GROAT II http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZuASkbW1Xw

DAILY PAINTING AND ART HISTORY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sKTowBHGDM

DAILY PAINTING AND BLOGGING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erkS56mvzsM

PAINTING A DAY EDUCATION THROUGH THE INTERNET
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypWCBQGKVtQ

DAILY PAINTING MOVEMENT BY HALL GROAT II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-O-zy9Ea3g

A PAINTING A DAY MOVEMENT

In 2006 Hall Groat II became involved with the new international contemporary art movement called “A Painting A Day” which originated in the United States and emerged on a global scale in 2004 through the confluence of various cutting-edge cyber elements, including free public auction sites, blogs, video sites, pod casting, and message boards. The initial model has evolved into a global view of fine art painting, nurtured by the Internet’s public domain status and free from the influence of traditional institutions. There exists a renewed sense of ethos among artists internationally. Artists that have been oppressed geographically and socially historically are now being liberated through their ability to both communicate with, and impact society on a global scale. Through the public domain of the Internet, artists are now working autonomously and managing the traditional practices of art education, curation and exhibition, marketing, criticism, and historical documentation. The Internet has democratized the manner in which these 20th century institutions are practiced.