Commissioned

Well for now I'm going to hold off on doing a painting a day. I have been commissioned to paint for two different people! Who knows how long they will take to complete, I imagine months, but meanwhile I'll be working on some smaller paintings partially for practice and partially to break up the monotony.

Hope these still work.

A Painting A Day

Lately I've been thinking about doing a painting a day. Cara introduced me to http://www.newdressaday.com/ a few weeks ago and i've been checking it out ever since. In 2006 one of my college roommates knew a guy named Justin that did a painting a day and was published in the New York Times. I really liked looking at all his little paintings, still do. This is him - http://justinspaintings.com/ . This is the New York Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/fashion/31online.html . It also has some other artists doing the same thing. Here's one more lady that I found and like http://carolmarine.blogspot.com/ .

So the big question are:

Would my attention span be long enough to keep this up?
How long would I do a painting a day?
Could I make that kind of commitment?
Has this already become too popular?
Would I forget I was doing this on occasion?
Would I be able to keep coming up with the necessary supplies?
Does it always have to be a painting, could it be a drawing sometimes?
What if I lost touch with the internet for a day here or there, would my adoring fans riot?

Ok so I'm not actually worried about that last one, well the rioting fans part. So I guess I'll think about it and we'll see what happens.

Devin's Painting

Devin requested a painting a few months ago. It's the least I could do, after all he built me a tree house. I asked him what he wanted it to be and he left it up to me, no hints of what he had in mind. The only discussion about it was the size. He bought a 5'x 5' canvas and after it was stretched turned out to be 4'8" x 3'6".

I've been milling it over for a while and have had several ideas but nothing seemed right...and then one day it started coming together. I wanted something abstract and thought that was going to be the whole of it but then when things started piecing together I threw in some detail too. It's pretty much complete in my head but here's what I have so far.

Why a painting is like a pizza.

I've been browsing through the book, "Why A Painting Is Like A Pizza" by Nancy G. Heller and thought I would share some of the thoughts on this. Nancy says that, "both depend on visual balance for much of their overall appeal and, though both can be judged by established standards, pizzas and paintings must ultimately be evaluated in terms of individual taste." I believe this to be true. While my personal individual taste for pizza is cheese, just plain cheese, my individual taste for painting takes on a much boarder range.

In chapter 4, Paintings that people love to hate, she talks about comments that people make like Marcel Nicolle, a french journalist, and his response to a group of radical new paintings. He says, "What we see here has nothing to do with painting. Formless streaks of blue, red, yellow and green, all mixed up, splashes of raw color juxtaposed without rhyme or reason..." Sounds to me like he just likes the cheese pizza of the art world. She goes on in this chapter to talk about artists such as Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Yves Klein and the creative and talented way they portray art.

If you're looking to broaden your horizons in the modern and abstract art world than this might be the book for you. Then again I can't be certain of that as I only skimmed through it.