Today I got a postcard in the mail urging me to join Art Mail Milwaukee at artmailmilwaukee.com. My free membership would get me a weekly e-mail with an original artwork by a Wisconsin-based artist. The site also has an arts calendar.

I went to the site, which was easy to use, and signed up and now I await my first artwork. In the meantime, I got a link to the see the first example -- a Technicolor landscape by Milwaukee painter Jim Finnerty -- sent today.

Art Mail Milwaukee is the brainchild of Johnathan Crawford.

"(I) got the idea when I realized I had missed so many gallery nights and was frustrated I wasn't staying in tune with all of the cool art out there," Crawford told me today.

"Plus, everyone is so bombarded with messages these days, the idea of 'just a piece of art' with minimal words struck me as the 'zig while everyone else was zagging.' For me it's therapeutic to open something in my e-mail and NOT have to respond, think, worry, whatever. I can just look at art I haven't seen before and enjoy. We call it 'stepping off the hamster wheel of life' for a moment every week."

Crawford says he's received a lot of support from local artists and gallery owners but he expects that nearly half his subscribers will ultimately be from outside the area.

"The art community is really behind this as you'll see by the list of people who literally jumped in to help. It's been weird because every art, design or creative person who's seen it says the same thing, 'this is really cool.' And Neil Hoffman from MIAD commented that he thought the idea was 'brilliant.'"

The next e-mail is due to ship Jan. 16, so if you sign up now, you should be there in time to get it.

"Our hope is to help people realize this is a art-savvy town and a cool place to live," says Crawford.

Why not help him?