Lately, some artists have figured out how to make the internet work for them.  The One Painting A Day story - case in point: all artists could paint something every day, maybe 20 minute sketch, and then post it online and sell it for 100 bucks.  Why not?   Lot of people would be happy to buy something original for 100 bucks and everything looks good online. I heard about a Squidoo Lens called A Painting A Day, yesterday, from Amy Crehore.  A Squidoo Lens seems to be a good way of organizing and presenting information - it's an idea and creation of Seth Godin.  Squidoo Lens appear to do well in Search Engines as well and you can run AdSense ads on your Lens and pick up some money that way.

This painting is now on EBay and selling for 127.50, it's by Jeff Hayes. By the way, your not buying from an unknown, using EBay's reputation system, you can lookup what others have said about buying from Jeff hayes.

Can you imagine - if Van Gogh were alive today - problem solved, just paint something ..... anything, quick, and put on line and you maybe sell it right away.  Let's see. 365 x 100 = 36,500, not much money, but more than some bus drivers and police make. Yesterday I wrote about David Nevue - a Mogul of New Media over at Webmetricsguru.com, my Web Analytics blog.   For every musician, songwriter, painter, writer that use the internet to promote their art, there's a thousand more that can't or won't - or lack the imagination and skill to make it work.

"Sites like acollageaday.blogspot.com (where Randel Plowman sells his 4-inch-by-4-inch collages for $25) and dailypaintings.com (where Elin Pendleton has posted her acrylic and oil paintings for prices as low as $100) remove the middleman from the transaction, connecting artists directly to collectors. The Internet changes things fast. By most accounts, the roots of the painting-a-day movement reach back only as far as December 2004, when a painter named Duane Keiser, who also is an adjunct professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, decided to test his discipline by challenging himself to post a new creation every day on his site at duanekeiser.blogspot.com. “I wanted to make a ritual for myself, to complete a painting in one day, every day, without any excuses,” Mr. Keiser said in a phone interview last week. “I liked the diary aspect of it, that it was like putting a time stamp on a painting. When it goes up on the blog, I know it happened on this day.” Mr. Keiser’s experiment soon attracted the attention of boingboing.net, a popular blog that identifies online trends. “After somebody wrote a little blurb about me for Boingboing, the whole thing just spread like, well, it was unbelievable,” Mr. Keiser said. “I would wake up in the morning and paint, say, an egg, and post it, and then some guy in India would e-mail me and it was breathtaking to realize that within a few minutes of my finishing a painting, people everywhere in the world were looking at it.”

I like to do the same thing with my paintings at BrooklynArtistsGym.com - when I get over there (which is not often enough) I make myself paint something and then post it here or on Webmetricsguru.com.   The idea of what a gallery is, what a dealer is, what an artist is, what art is.......is rapidly changing.  While art as we know it will continue to exist and prosper - it's quite possible that in 5  years, Artists as we know it, Art as we know it, and Galleries as we have known them will evolve to be much more direct, immediate and real.  Personally, I think that is a good thing.