I have finished my painting challenge to paint an oil painting every day for a year visit here; http://danyoungdaily.blogspot.com
and have promptly started a new year of making drawings everyday! If you like there are now over 365 paintings to look through and find out what i got up to last year!
I may have an addiction because I dont feel like I can stop…Blogging or painting! I have a little seasonal project planned next month so keep following my daily pictures and watch out for more daily doings!
‘How blogging helps you make paintings you wouldn’t normally make’
Through making a painting everday you have to be pretty creative in the things you find to paint. This will sometimes lead to some expected subject matter, like a lemon or a sweet pea flower. Sometimes an object will present itself that might be unrecogniseable without the title, #253 beetroot root for instance. I love those ones! I find myself wondering if other people find things like beetroot roots that have two ‘tails’ and a wierd shape and dont do anything about it? If you do, take a deep breath and a moment to think about it, then you can throw it away..whatever!
http://danyoungdaily.blogspot.com/2009/08/253-beetroot-tail.html
I thought I would update my small part of the web with some new paintings. I completed these paintings far too close to the deadline date for the Threadneedle Prize last week. But I got them in on time and they were dry! Thank you Mr Siccative!
I have used the library of objects that I have built up over the 200 odd days of my current daily painting project http://danyoungdaily.blogspot.com to select from. Some of the objects I painted during this project I have kept on various shelves and pots around the studio not really knowing why but always wondering how they would work together in small groups or even large groups of all of them. 365 objects in one painting, oh boy!
These three pictures grew out of a selection process based on sympathetic or contrasting ideas. So, the soft kangaroo head gets paired up with a sharp mussel shell and (for added anticipation and excitement) an unpopped popcorn kernel. Three very different and, other than their previous selection by me, completely unrelated objects.
I have spent some more time over the weekend creating small groups of objects limiting myself to things I have already painted. More soon I hope.
I thought the most difficult days to make a painting in my odessey would be family holidays. The christmas day and boxing day paintings were hard to fit in but eventually nephews who are under four years old do sleep so you take adavantage of the quite time and paint a sprout or one of their toy boulders. But making this saturdays painting while camping was slightly tougher. First of all you have to make sure you take everything you need and pick a limeted pallette of colours, while at the same time not knowing what you will paint. You also have to find time in your busy schedule of laying out in the sun, BBQing all your meals and using the wash up facilities on site. It's a tough life. But I was blessed when we spent the afternoon at cleawell caves in the forest of Dean which is now an iron mining museum but used to be a working Iron ore mine. The red oxide in the caves is quite spectacular in some areas and it was a piece of iron oxide that I painted that day. I also made my own oil paint out of some pigment they sell there made from the rocks from that very mine! Brilliant.
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I cant believe it was a month ago I started this blog as an adjunct to my daily painting project http://danyoungdaily.blogspot.com/ . Apologies for leaving you all hanging like that.
Painting a complete painting every day is fast becoming secong nature to me at the moment, I have been doing it for 186 days straight now. I love the way a project like this snowballs. I began it merely wanting to force myself into finding a bit of time every day to do the thing I love, painting. I made the decision to try and sell the work on ebay as a way to make the endeavor pay for itself in terms of paint, brushes and materials. Plus if a lot sold I didnt need to find storage for 365 paintings! To date I have sold all but 7 paintings, a satisfying amount for any artist in the current climate.
As the popularity of the site and the paintings has grown I have discovered followers in most corners of the globe from Slovenia and Australia to America and Japan. This is extremely exciting and I love hearing from people who like the work. Its also interesting to find out how people found out about it, one chap is a self confessed lichen and succulent 'nut', he discovered the painting of a lichen covered twig in an ebay search for 18th Century engravings of lichen and is now an ardent follower even suggesting some plants to paint!
I have just passed the halfway mark and am already thinking about how to continue next year. I plan to retire the size, 16cm x 12cm to keep the first year cohesive feel. But as to the direction I will take after the 23rd of November…..who knows. I do know I will continue my daily doings!
