‘A Painting a Day’ and ‘The Day Itself’

The “painting a day” movement among artists was discovered by the media – including USA Today and The New York Times – in August 2006. According to the published reports, the practice had begun with artist Duane Keiser of Richmond, Virginia, in December 2004, when he set out to paint every day as a kind of discipline. As he told the Times, “I wanted to make a ritual for myself, to complete a painting in one day, every day, without any excuses. . . . I liked the diary aspect of it, that it was like putting a time stamp on a painting.”

When I finally stumbled on this bit of news, in mid-’08, I was of course interested to learn that a practice I’d begun in 1995 and turned into a series of daily paintings in 1997, had actually started more than seven years later. But I couldn’t complain – the reason I hadn’t heard of them was the same reason they’d never heard of me. As a self-taught painter who hadn’t gone to art school and who spent much of his time fulfilling writing, editing and design contracts, I was basically an art recluse. (And, my spouse would probably add, a bit of a recluse in general.)

Just as the painting-a-day movement allowed me to feel a certain kinship with some of my peers, it also provides a foil to this series – to painting, not just ON every day but painting something OF every day. 

Most of my sunsets are painted the same day, at sunset. Every one, regardless of when it’s painted, is done “in real time” – in more or less the time it takes to watch a sunset. Just as Keiser started by wanting to find a certain discipline, I began painting sunsets both for the ritual of going out and painting every day, and to discipline myself to paint more freely – to paint each day’s sky alla prima and accept the result as finished, no matter whether I felt it was awkward or stunning. Up to this point, I was likely to spend months if not years on a single canvas.

Ultimately I think that painting the sky daily at a certain time is one of a truly infinite number of ways to submerge one’s artistic ego in something much greater, in order to find a connection with that something. It could be sunsets, it could be paint splatters, it could be trees, or straight lines, the way in could be anything.

I started the series worrying that painting the sunset every day was probably kind of dumb – and even though I never stopped worrying, I also never stopped painting. In the process maybe I managed to outsmart myself. I kept doing it even if I didn’t know why or even if, as was often the case, I didn’t feel like it.

One of the more instructive developments took hold when I decided I would paint the sunset every day for at least a year. That’s when I realized that I wanted all the paintings to be the same size (14 x 18 then, currently 16 x 20). This meant that if they were displayed, perhaps calendar-like, on a wall, there would be no distractions caused by changes in dimensions – just the changes over time. Hanging the paintings like a calendar is to see not the dates, but the actual days – a very strange, almost disturbing feeling. There’s a mystery here involving the observance of time and perhaps, paradoxically, a certain freedom from it. Somewhere in that mystery lies “The Day Itself.”