Duane Keiser is a contemporary American musician and artist, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Duane created the “painting a day” trend. Every day he paints one postcard-sized painting and posts them on his website, where collectors can bid. Bidding starts at $100 and varies up to $1500.
“When I started painting in 2004, I did one painting a day for a year and a half. I wanted to create a ritual for myself—to finish a painting in one day without any excuses.”
It’s a great principle, by the way, applicable in any field. The second great principle is to share knowledge with others (which is why I started this blog). You can’t follow it unless you love what you do, and once you start following it, you can’t help but develop at the maximum possible pace. In the case of “a masterpiece every day,” you raise the bar for yourself so much that it’s just embarrassing to post something worse than what you posted before. And so it doesn’t turn out worse. Partly because so many hours of practice contribute to quality on their own. It’s partly the same when you regularly write articles for a blog—the “bar” rises, and so do the standards you set for yourself. But something else kicks in: you simply can’t leave things unfinished. If you need to talk about X, you will dig into everything around X to ensure there are no gaps in your understanding. This helped me a lot to master topics well.
I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes section, you can find all 73 (as of now) posts (unlike Facebook, which forgets (ignores) almost half of them).
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 