Painting Marathon

Today I started a project inspired by Steve Keene who paints mega quantities of paintings at a time. One article stated that he paints approximately 60 to 80 paintings per day, sometimes as many as 100. His process is an assembly approach of sorts, where he lines up his painting supports in rows and paints the same design brushstroke for brushstroke. He then sells his paintings for $3 to $10 each making them accessible to the common person.

So I thought it would be fun to try it myself. I actually tried it a couple of years ago, but didn't really sell that much. This time I am going to try to publicize it more using Facebook and Twitter. I am hoping word will get around and stir some interest in purchasing art. I will be selling art in three different sizes, small $3, medium $5, and large $7. Pretty affordable, right? We'll see if I get any buyers. I am thinking of selling them next Saturday.

Here is how I am setting up my paintings. On masonite I am taping heavy paper (I think it is 110lbs.) so that the support will stretch and not buckle as it dries. For the sake of speed I am not using gesso on the paper. I have four masonite boards and so I set them all up before I start painting.










Here is the first design. It is inspired by a picture I saw on an artist's blog. Unfortunately I can't remember whose it is. Thankfully it really looks nothing like what I saw with the exception of how the flowers are placed.












This bird design is one that I experimented with on my son's 5th grade class last year. We used oil pastels in claass, but all of these designs for this project are done with acrylic. I think I am going to use this design on my students for this school year.
















This landscape design has also been done in a variety of mediums at different schools. I liked it so much that I just had to paint it. I really like the colors.













This last design was inspired from a calendar that we had from 2009. I tweaked the elements of the design a bit to make them more interesting. Unfortunately, the photos in the calendar were not very well done, mostly lacking in strong compositions. Hey, that's where an artist can come in and exercise creative license, right?












I spent 8 hours working on these paintings today and I only painted 44 pictures ("Only"! Who am I kidding. That's a lot! Steve Keene I'm not.) I was hoping to paint at least 60 pictures a day so I guess that means I need to try to economize my efforts. On Monday I plan to spend 12 hours on the paintings so that I can meet my numbers. I'm glad I'm taking a break tomorrow because I'm beat after today's painting session.