Interview with Duane Keiser

Duane Keiser is a painter from Virginia with a trend-setting blog called A Painting A Day. The title says it all. Since 2004, in addition to his larger works, Duane has created a postcard-sized painting every day (give or take a few) and sold each one through his blog. His amazing work and clever marketing strategy have earned him an international audience of collectors and a feature in USA Today. I’m honored that Duane took time away from his easel to answer some questions at Creative Journey Cafe.

How did you develop the discipline to make a painting a day?

My painting teacher, Ray Berry, was also my karate teacher. I’ve practiced, quite intensely, a very traditional and rigorous form of Karate for around 23 years (Shotokan Karate of America). In a Shotokan practice we will often perform a single, basic technique a thousand times. We try to make each technique the best we can make it until, one day and tens of thousands of techniques later, it becomes second nature to us.

These kinds of practices are incredibly demanding and they require that you make up your mind to finish them. Our personal practices often involve setting up a specific challenge for ourselves like, say, making a thousand punches everyday for a month or making a practice of some sort everyday for a year, etc. (Ray made a hard practice everyday for 14 years and didn’t miss a day!) So by the time I attempted a painting a day, that kind of mentality was already ingrained in me. I’ve also been lucky to have been surrounded by people a lot more disciplined than I am throughout my life, so when I made up my mind to make a painting a day I did so with many examples of what real discipline is. I’m generally a slacker in comparison! 

For those of us who might try a similar experiment, what challenges will we face and how can we overcome them?

As I mentioned above, you first have to make up your mind and commit to the project. You will not get anything out of it if you treat it like a hobby - like something you can take or leave depending on how you feel that day. Ray always used to tell his students that painting is blue collar work (ie if road workers can work on a hot asphalt highway in 100 degree weather all day long, we painters can certainly drag our asses to our easels to paint, even when we’re a little tired, bored, frustrated or even sick.)

Time will be a problem too - you need to plan and build your day around each session. Keep your easel, paints, and brushes ready to go at all times so that you don’t have a half a dozen little things you need to do in order to start painting. Prepare a few dozen supports in advance.

Set up a reasonable duration for yourself because everybody has a different situation in their life. So maybe say you can make a painting a day for a week, rather than a month or a year.

Expectations: if this is your first time doing this, or if you’re just learning to paint, don’t worry too much about good or bad. Just paint. Treat your paintings like experiments or meditations - you are savoring some object or scene via paint. Whether that paint forms a masterpiece or not should not be a concern. It helps if, in the beginning, you take some pressure off yourself by making this a private affair - no blog, no selling, etc. Just paint. When you are done with each painting, pin them to a wall. When you have 50 or so, sit down and take a look at what you have and then maybe make a decision about making them public or not.

Can you talk about money and art? You seem to thrive as a fine artist, selling every painting you post on your blog. How did you develop your business side?

I, like many artists, was always concerned about business mixing with my paint and muddying my palette, so to speak. I didn’t want to end up making widgets - meaningless products created for sales (ie rent) rather than as a pursuit of a deeply personal aesthetic vision.

Being business savvy, I think, starts with viewing marketing and selling as creative pursuits rather than necessary evils. For instance, one day several years ago I decided to have an art show in my studio of my small works. I priced them extremely cheap. I bought lots of wine and beer - it ended up being a big party. It was a great time, lots of paintings sold and many people bought their first original paintings. I sold work that was honest and meaningful to me and lots of new patrons went home with paintings that were meaningful to them. It was a wonderful feeling and it was good business.

Your powers of sight are extraordinary. Your work is representational yet not photo-realistic. How do you define that line between rendering objects accurately yet not making it look like a photo?

I generally (I stress generally) don’t like photo-realist work because the paint itself is usually dead. There is no poetry, just a rather bland description. Paint is mysterious to me - you place a mark on the canvas, then another and another until, maybe, something happens. If it is right, the paint and the subject mesh together into some unnameable third thing. You are never quite sure how or why it happens but you know it when it does and it can just as mysteriously disappear on you if you overwork it. James Elkins compared painting to alchemy in the sense that it can be a transformative process whereby paint becomes something else rather than simply representing a subject (ie Rembrandt’s paint almost becoming skin in his self-portraits.) So I suppose I don’t really think in terms of stylistic lines (ie photorealism, impressionism, etc.) but rather I try to be sensitive to how the paint feels under my brush while at the same time staying connected to what that mark is representing.

What artists - contemporary or otherwise - excite you?

The ones that excite me include: the three V’s - Velazquez, Vermeer and Vuillard. Also, Rembrandt, Corot, Constable, Chardin, Cezanne, Hopper, DeKooning, Diebenkorn. Contemporary: Thiebaud, Howard Hodgkin, Ray Berry, Robert Bauer, Jane Wilson and about a half a dozen others I can’t think of at the moment.

What’s the purpose of art?

Honestly, I don’t think I can put it into words, which is probably for the better.

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I’d like to thank Duane for his time and for sharing his knowledge and experience with us. Be sure to visit A Painting A Day, and forward this inspiring interview to your creative friends! 

Oh, and don’t forget - Leave a comment! Tell us what you think.