In my coverage of “painting a day” blogs, I’ve been remiss in not covering painters who are painting less frequently, but basically following the same paradigm — creating small paintings from life on a regular basis, posting them to a blog and offering them for sale through eBay or other means.
A nice case in point is Mick McGinty. McGinty has worked as an illustrator for many years, largely doing commercial illustration in a detailed and highly rendered manner. His main site includes galleries of both airbrush and hand painted illustration and digital illustration.
In his paintings from life, McGinty has made a deliberate choice to move toward a much looser, more immediate and painterly style. (For an interesting comparison, see my recent post on Bob Eggleton, a science fiction illustrator who has made a similar move.) In the past year or so, McGinty has been posting small paintings (about 5×7″, some at 8×10″), either from life or from his own photographs, of both still life subjects and landscapes, to his blog. The blog is titled, appropriately enough, Twice a Week.
While these paintings sometimes carry some of the feeling of paintings done for illustration, exhibiting a level of finish and control not often found among painting a day artists, particularly when viewed at a smaller size; clicking on the enlargements reveals them as quite painterly, refreshingly loose and beautifully confident. His regular web site includes a gallery of these small paintings as well as larger works, but I think the best of them is to be found on his blog, particularly if you browse back through the archives.
His still life subjects often include food items, dishware, jars and utensils, the kind of things painting a day artists often find their attention settling on when looking around them for small, immediate subjects. These are contrasted nicely by his landscapes, which are often of dramatic and colorful rock formations from Sedona, Monument Valley and other locations in the West. Some of my favorites, though are his less frequent subjects of rural houses and small creeks and streams.
[Note to other painting a day painters: McGinty’s choice of images sizes, and the immediate link from the posted blog image to the enlargement, with a separate link to the eBay auction, is in my opinion a good model for how to both entice prospective buyers and show them enough detail to give them some confidence about purchasing art over the web (just my opinion, of course).]
