Artists Online

One of the best things about the internet is that you can find just about anything and anyone. I sometimes spend an hour looking for artists, just so I can see what everyone else is doing.

I think the 'painting a day' thing is just about exhausted now, swamped by wannabees, but the original and best is still worth a good long look. Duane Keiser's blog and website feature his beautiful paintings and videos. Go take a look. I'll wait.

I've never seen any other painters with the same throwaway rendering skills. Try painting a scrap of that cellophane wrap you get on cigarettes or small packages. Now make it convincing. Not as easy as you might think.

Another painter i found through YouTube is Paul Fenniak, whose work reminds me a little of the paintings of Alan Dyer, who taught at my old college. I like them not so much for the subject matter as for the way they're painted. How can I put it? The paint quality and the rendering are part and parcel of the subject.

One English painter who has made a huge success of the painting a day discipline is Julian Merrow-Smith, who paints small pictures of Provence and auctions them online. There's a book too. (Smart move.) Which I may well buy.

And the last, and my most recent discovery, is the blog of Stapleton Kearns, an American landscape painter, which is absolutely crammed with useful - and occasionally hilarious - advice.

In the recent past, I would probably never have heard of any of these people. And I would have missed out. The internet is a lovely shiny thing that belongs to everyone. Which is why we need to protect it from the depredations of special interest groups, politicians of every nation, big copyright industries, and their loathsome ilk.

This is the only time I'm going to get even slightly political on here. For one thing, I'm too lazy to be an activist. I'd have to get informed, which is agonizingly dull and takes up huge amounts of time and effort, just so I wouldn't be merely sloganizing instead of coming up with cogent arguments.

What's my point? The internet is the best thing ever. Then along comes legislation like ACTA, in Europe, and SOPA and CISPA in the US, which are going to destroy it. If you're concerned, Google the whole deal and then make your representative's life a misery until these things go away.

And disengage political mode...Now.

Done. Check out my favourite painters online.

While you still can.