Look over the shoulder of oil painter Duane Keiser as he paints a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the video below.
“I always tell my students, ‘Technique follows vision,’” Keiser says. “My job as a teacher is to take beginning students and allow them to develop their own way, to guide them. If I interfere too much, the works all end up looking the same.”
Keiser recommends his videos to students and wishes he’d had the same learning opportunities as a student. (You can see them on his YouTube channel.) One of his most popular videos shows him rendering a candy apple. It’s been viewed more than 30,000 times. A camera resting on a tripod poised over his shoulder records Keiser’s hands obsessively moving like any artist’s, making and correcting mistakes, his fingers gently smudging an area. He uses video to show not only how a painting is done, but how it’s not done. “I think my videos are a demonstration of seeing rather than of technique,” he says. “Painting is never ‘step 1, step 2, step 3, and voila!’ I don’t want my students to waste time looking for a magic technique.”
Learn more about Keiser on his website, and see his painting a day blog here. Duane Keiser appears as a feature artist in the October 2008 issue of The Artist’s Magazine.