Dan Young, Studio

It’s nearly that time of year again. As part of my daily painting challenge/endurance/project I change styles, like a painting chameleon, on the 24th of November each year. I am a couple of months away from the 5th year of ‘Dan Young, Daily’. But this time it’s slightly different and I’m very excited. As you know every day for the last four years (nearly) I haver made, and shown the world, a concise little painting either using oil or watercolour paint or this years digital dailies. During my next daily year I will be making only one painting, one big painting with 365 elements which will be added to each day. The same deal I make the days painting then post it and some witty and wise words on my blog http://www.danyoungdaily.blogspot.com there may even be a animation at the end of the year of the painting growing, as elements get added and obscure other elements Rostand on top of or inside of other things. I can’t wait but I’ve still got 60 or so of this years to do, so I’ll have to. In the meantime I am investigating, and utilising this newfangled crowdfunding . Which is a way of using social media platforms to fund a project by getting a crowd to spread the costs and receive rewards for doing so. It means for the first time I will have (potentially) paid for the materials, and a print run, for next years project before I have started it. I explain it a bit better in the short film on the sponsorship page. In short: I will make preparatory drawings and paintings during the year and these are offered up as rewards for sponsorship. Do please have a watch and bear in mind I’m a painter not a filmmaker ;) http://www.sponsume.com/project/dan-young-daily-1-… I would love to hear of other projects, either daily or crowdfunded.

Well, well, well, on the 19th of August 2011 I will have painted 1000 daily paintings. That is one a day for 1000 days, non stop, no breaks, straight through. Blimey, not sure I thought I would do that many, the original plan was to paint everyday for a year to force me to return to painting in a serious way and utilise my new studio as much as possible. It worked. I couldn’t stop.

Here’s to a thousand more! I already have some ideas of what to do for the next 365 days painting odyssey.

But, back to this year and the 19th of August, I am planning/hoping to utilise the power of the interweb and get as many other artist’s and non artists to paint or draw a cake or biscuit and upload it to my flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/1000paintings/.

Let’s see if I get to a thousand before the rest of of the world does!

Go on and be the first….

I just read ‘Writing art and life’ by Tamarin Norwood from these very hallowed Artists talking pages. It made me want tell everyone about my green bananas.

‘You see, I bought them yesterday and they were very green, I like green, I’m a painter, I especially like things that are colours that they perhaps shouldn’t be, although bananas have every right to be green they are not nice to eat like that, even if they are nice to look at, but you are reminded of the taste of a green banana when you look at it which takes away some of the enjoyment of that lovely soft green colour. Anyway I painted them, because thats what I do, I paint things that interest me every day, I also got two yellow bananas so there would be bananas to eat today’

Art and life.

more about my green bananas and lots of other things I like here :

http://www.danyoungdaily.blogspot.com/

and here for ‘Writing art and life’ by Tamarin Norwood:

www.a-n.co.uk/p/983559/

Well, i am nearly (two years) and two weeks into my new daily painting project http://danyoungdaily.blogspot.co.uk and I don’t mind telling you that i was a bit nervous this time. Last year when I changed over from a year of oil painted object paintings to a year of watercolour object paintings I was fairly confident that all of those lovely people who had been following the project would still like the new paintings. But this time the shift in what I was painting was bigger and I didn’t quite know how it was going to work and what the pictures wouldlook like and even if anyone would like them or even carry on looking at the blog. They did and from the feedback I have recieved they seem to be being very well received. I imagine it felt like when a musician releases a new album of new material and worries that they will alienate thier existing audience. It was and is an invigoratuing experience and i am already planning next years transformation!

Phew!

Usually when you visit an artist’s web site, or show, you see finished work and the pieces the artist wants you to see. Which means you see the things they have selected from the output from their studio.

With these daily projects you see what I have painted that day regardless if I think it to be ‘one of my best paintings’ (you can visit my other website for that! www.danyoungart.co.uk) There is of course a quality control that I employ for the daily paintings which means you don’t see some of the ‘happy accidents’ that maybe weren’t quite so happy, but you still don’t witness the evolution of an idea, especially as I set up the paintings to be a series and to follow certain rules which takes away some of the decision making that I would normally do when approaching a new drawing or painting and not those important paintings that don’t quite work.

This year I am changing the format quite a bit and I really am not sure (in a positive and exciting way) what the paintings at the end of the year will look like. What I do know is that I am not going to paint objects, at least not whole objects. One of the big rules from the last two years was that the entire object must fit into the painting, including its shadow. The next 365 paintings will not feature an entire object, they may nor not even have an object in the painting at all. I am going to paint the places where objects might live or backgrounds. Which really is what I haven’t been painting for two years. I have started with the little platform that I place objects on to paint. This is always painted as a pristine white surface that the objects inhabit. In reality it has cake crumbs, grubby fingerprints, paint marks and the odd pencil mark and shadows. So, it is all that stuff I will be investigating over the coming 365 days join me and watch the paintings evolve! www.danyoungdaily.blogspot.com