1998–2005
In February 2005, I painted a small painting. I photographed it and put it up on the World Wide Web. I did the same thing the next day, and the next, and I am still doing it—admittedly, off and on. The most recent is daily painting number 3984. Somewhere in that accumulation of days and small canvases, a project has been built that I never really set out to create.
A little backstory: I moved to France in 1998 and settled in the small village of Crillon-le-Brave. Having nothing else to do, I took up painting with a newfound purpose. I was determined to get into the BP Portrait Award. Back in England, before I left, I had already been painting small self-portraits and portraits of friends. As artists do, you often paint large pictures without ever thinking about a home—without thinking they might ever go to a living room, a gallery, or anywhere else. You are really painting them just to push yourself and see what you can do. And that is what I did.
But I also painted the surrounding countryside and the produce I bought. I made small, postcard-sized paintings. I hung them in a little gallery in my rented house. Being the only shop in a village that featured a very successful Relais & Châteaux hotel and nothing much else, I would occasionally get passersby who would purchase a little painting and take it back to Canada, the U.S., Australia, or wherever.
Around that time, I had also bought my first computer—a Bondi Blue iMac, cutting-edge at the time—and I started building websites. I built one for myself and began collecting the names of people who dropped by. Friends thought I was completely crazy to build a website. I did it all by hand and really got into the idea, honing my limited coding skills.
I also set up a blog for my family, as my four siblings are spread all around the world. It was a way to keep us all in touch with each other and keep our parents in touch with us. Those were the days of Blogspot—before I discovered WordPress. Blogger was the de facto publishing platform, though there was this thing called Movable Type too, which fascinated me partly because I liked the logo and it was clearly more sophisticated, requiring your own hosting account or server.
Even back then, before the advent of doomscrolling and smartphones, you could spend hours just bouncing around the internet. There wasn’t a lot of painting out there, but there was writing, and there were interesting things going on in design. It is really difficult now to appreciate how weird that felt: being led from one link to the next, constantly discovering new things and new people. It was the start of a revolution, though we didn't know it at the time.
2004–2005
The beginning of a painting a day
What is now generally called "daily painting"—painting something small, finishing it in one sitting, posting it, and offering it for sale—was pioneered by Duane Keiser. He began his blog, “A Painting a Day,” on December 3, 2004. Working from a makeshift easel made from a cigar box, he painted small everyday things that caught his eye. Within days, the website Boing Boing picked up the story, and Duane suddenly found himself receiving hundreds of emails a day from people in India, New Zealand, and Japan—places where, just a month earlier, nobody had any reason to know a Virginia painter's name.
It highlights a beautiful truth about that era: the internet felt small, intimate, and actionable enough that you could see a guy in America selling small oils, say "I can do that," and build a completely new life from your kitchen table sixty days later.
I didn't leap straight to the finished format. I had started an online studio diary under a domain called permanent-red.com to engage the few people on my mailing list and give them something to keep their interest. I was already a bit of a domain freak back then. This site turned out to be a rehearsal space where I could post small still lifes as I made them and work out the rhythm of things. Having seen Duane's project, I quickly adapted it into a daily painting format.
By January 26, 2005, I was running home to tell my family I’d started a daily painting update. A few weeks later, I launched what would become shiftinglight.com. I didn’t have WordPress running until March, and it wasn’t until April 2005 that I settled on the name everyone knows today: Postcard from Provence. Looking back through the Wayback Machine and Ruth’s blog, Meanwhile Here in France, the sequence is still a little tangled. But Ruth had already caught the spirit of it on January 25:
What I took from Duane's example wasn't the painting style itself. Our work looks something alike, but what truly translated was the format: the daily rhythm, and the direct, unmediated relationship with the people who end up owning the artwork.
Duane and I got in touch early on and simply exchanged paintings. Years later, in 2016, I ran a workshop in Greenport on Long Island, and Duane came out to meet me in person. We did a local public radio spot together and afterwards sat around a table with my wife and my then six-year-old son. The gallery owner who invited us out there had known Duane and hosted him before; she and her husband have since passed away, as have a fair number of the collectors who bought those first postcards all those years ago.
2006
Daily painting and the Serengeti effect
As daily painting flourished in 2006, a wonderful, supportive web culture began to form. Artists linked to one another and shared their audiences.
It was a bit like wildebeests on the Serengeti: a collective herd, making itself visible. Looking at those early art blogs via the Wayback Machine, you see sidebars lined with thirty or forty links to fellow painters. It was a generous, human-powered community network.
My own little site had taken shape before that interlinked world developed, and I carried on much as I had begun: at my easel, with my computer and a small list of patrons. It wasn’t a calculated choice.
I have never thought of any of this as a competition. I own a painting of Carol Marine’s myself, along with one from Justin Clayton and a small handful of Duane’s. We were all, in our different ways, doing the same odd, wonderful thing in different corners of the world.
2005–2010
When the world found us
By June 2005, still eight months before the New York Times ever found me, I was busy enough that I had to tell someone in an email that I couldn't get to their request straight away. I had commissions to finish, an exhibition coming up, and the daily postcards themselves. I told them I was selling paintings like petits pains—hotcakes. Around 400 people were on the mailing list by then. It was already working. It just wasn't yet the kind of working that changes your life.
That change came in 2006. Barely a year into the project, the New York Times ran a piece on the site in their Home & Garden section titled "Currents: Paintings; 19th-Century Art Sold the 21st-Century Way," written by Donna Paul and published on February 23, 2006. Donna had warned me at the time to be careful what I wished for.
Ruth and I spent that entire weekend at the kitchen table, plugging and unplugging the connection as we tried to keep up with the messages. As the emails flooded in and the paintings sold one after another for something like six hours straight, the sheer scale of the global audience became real. My neighbour, a sculptor, looked at the sudden whirlwind and told me afterwards, not unkindly: “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you now.”
It went on for the next twenty years. It is still going.
I wasn't the only person keeping track of dates like these. Mara Liasson, NPR's national political correspondent, had actually been buying paintings under her own name for some time before any of that media storm hit. To her, the site was a daily escape from the intense political world she reports on for a living. Eventually, fellow collectors started writing in and asking, "Is that the Mara Liasson?" out of pure curiosity, prompting her to ask me to take her name down from the public buyer list for a while.
Years later, by choice, she put her name to the project again, writing the foreword to my 2010 book, Postcard from Provence. In it, she playfully thanked the arrival of broadband in the Vaucluse and credited me with having the imagination to know what to do with it. She noted that there were already 4,000 of us daily painters out there in this together.
2005 — 2026
By the numbers
A daily painting practice,
one small canvas at a time.
- Paintings
- 3984
- Years since the first postcard
- 21
- Pages in the archive
- ~5,000
- Following on Instagram
- 93,000
- Daily email readers
- 5,500
- Average auction price
- ~$400
Painting count at publication: 18 September 2026. Other figures are from the original essay.
Over the years, the paintings have found their way into The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph.
The long-running art blog Lines and Colors, which has followed my site since 2006, recently returned to the project: an early daily painting practice still continuing two decades on.
Why a painting a day still suits me
Why choose this regular practice instead of something else? A daily painting is small on purpose. It has to be finished in a single sitting, which means there is absolutely no room for second-guessing. You commit to a decision, live with it today, and try again tomorrow. Over twenty years, that routine adds up to something a single, large, heavily deliberated-over canvas can never give you: a genuine, dated record of how you were actually seeing one ordinary day after another.
My wife, Ruth, thinks that explanation sounds a bit too high-minded. From her perspective, one of the most interesting things about the project is that I am notoriously bad at finishing things. We have countless unfinished projects scattered all around the house. My website, for example, has just been redesigned after ten years of failed attempts to rewrite it.
This daily painting lark, it turns out, fits perfectly with my natural proclivities. I can sit down for an hour and a half, do a painting, and it is completely done. If I had to come back to a canvas the next morning—and even these days, if I fail to put a piece up for sale on the night it's made—I'll look at it the next day and think, "Oh no, that's not quite right. There's something that needs changing." This system acts as a protective boundary that suits my personality perfectly.
What might be useful to other painters?
Over the years, artists have often written to ask about the other side of this daily painting lark: how I run the auctions, sell paintings online, and keep the website going alongside the work in the studio.
Those conversations have led me to begin exploring something called Painters Pages. I’m wondering whether the auction system I’ve built, and some of what I’ve learnt from using it, could be useful to other painters. What form that might take is still an open question. For now, it starts with listening to what other artists need.
Ultimately, it is a strange thing to be doing this now, in a world where so much of what fills our screens took no time at all to create and required no one in particular to make it. But there is something profound to be said for a practice built entirely on a physical human being actually standing in a room, actually looking at a bowl of cherries or a Provence hillside, and actually making a definitive decision with a wet brush. Every single day, a painting a day, more or less, for two decades running.
Thank you for being part of whatever stretch of these twenty years you happened to catch. There is no reason to think day 3,982 will be any different from day 1—which, if you have read this far, is probably exactly why you're still here.
— Julian