Looking back through the years, I do not remember when I started painting with oils and watercolors… maybe I was about 13. To be honest mostly of I know today has come from my own experiences of try and error.

To me, making a painting was never an issue but something that happens naturally with whatever materials come to my hands. Oils are my favorites, but recently I’ve been painting in a very quick method and found out that a mixture of acrylics, oils, glitter and others mediums work better for my new style.

In the past 3 years I decided to do a Fine Art degree as a nice “add on” to my previous qualifications. To my disappointment, I have learn nothing new but of a chaotic, hypocrite and delusional world from the Art teachers.

If you an artist with already some success and experience I recommend you to aim higher and not to go back to an educational institution. You see, despite your good intentions you setting yourself back and giving your own murder sentence to the chances of being ‘stepped on’ and muffled by the tutors, who also called themselves artists. You must have no previous artistic experience because no matter how you try to please and befriend this so called “artist teachers” you will always be seen as a threat rather than a student.

Unfortunately we live in a world that demands all this qualifications to be taken seriously. I have learned from my own mistakes, maybe because I was a bit naïve, full of dreams and hopes that a new qualification would push my career further, but realize that I brought this to myself to the point I had nothing but verbal abuse, bullying, harassment, intimidation and discrimination from lecturers. In the end I felt from as high I dreamed and have gain nothing but a new pretty BA words in my cv and an awful demoralizing experience I must rather forget!

More new painting in my redesigned website www.magicpaintings.com

Part of my motivation was to learn about blog design by working with my own WordPress site. That’s been fun so far, and I may not be done yet. But I think it’s stable enough to present in public, and I welcome any comments you might have.

But my main question is whether you know of good examples of blogs devoted to specific projects. I enjoy reading quite a few blogs–must post on that sometime–but none have such a degree of focus. One can, in principle, achieve a similar effect by creating a blog category for the project and choosing to view only posts in that category, but that still doesn’t allow the freedom of a separate design for the project. True, such personal project blogs may often be password restricted or unlinked to, so there might be many I’d be interested in if I knew of them.

I’ll spare you the technical details, though I’m more than happy to go into anything there’s interest in. Here I’ll just illustrate a couple of features of the current version. The following screenshots show that, for a given browser window, other elements don’t move around when switching among images of different aspect ratio, or to the text associated with the given project. They also shouldn’t move when switching projects or to an image with a caption (currently only Sourdough Trail images).

The next screenshot (at the same scale as the others) shows the re-positioning that takes place when the browser window is reduced in size. I want the site to work with small windows, but be able to open up and breathe a bit when the window is larger.

I’m still working on a number of details, plus getting ready to update existing projects and add new ones on Cottonwoods and Gallatin Valley (my local landscape). Meanwhile, I’d appreciate any comments you might have on the new site. I’d like to hear about even the tiniest, niggling frustration or dislike! There are several things that I suspect might come up, but I’d prefer not to direct your attention to anything particular, and see what strikes you. In general, what features do you like in an artist’s web site? Any favorite examples?

I say the design is bold is because, by departing from expectations, Regnerus takes a risk that visitors may be confused and leave the site before they see anything. For those visitors who do look more closely, the simplicity of the layout serves the intended role of providing a quiet context for the artwork.

Is minimalism inherently good for the internet?

Is Regnerus’ site a model for other internet sites?

First posted April ’06 [note some interesting comments there by Arthur].

The minimal approach, Regnerus’ model in particular, has influenced my thinking about website design; the Art & Perception layout reflects this. Could we use more eye-candy? My thinking is that the minimal layout allows the latest post define the site visually — ideal for an art site, as I see it.

So it may be time to think about ways to make more of the most interesting content more easily accessible to everyone. That would require some change to the site, so everyone’s input is needed, including any readers who haven’t posted or even commented before. We do have a category system, which could use some work to improve its visibility and usefulness. But that seems to work better for narrow topic areas, whereas people coming to the site may be more interested in some diversity and serendipity potential within broad topic areas. Think of a well-honed medium like newspapers with sections for main news, local news, sports, classifieds, etc.

So to give us something specific to consider, I’m throwing out the following very tentative proposal. Possible broad topic areas might be:

Painting | Drawing | Photography | The Arts | Artist’s Life | Notable

They could be presented this way under the blog title, each being a link to a set of posts, presented like an archive list. Selecting posts to include under each heading could be done by a rotating editor who would receive suggestions from anyone. Or there could be such an editor for each topic. Or each “editor” could be a team of two or more. Other arrangements are possible and your ideas are invited.

I had fun looking over the posts in the last month or so, thinking of where they might be placed. Here’s what I came up with in a quick first pass as my recommendations:

Painting

Juxtaposition (art about art part II)
Purple grapes (continued)

Drawing

New pencil drawings
Figure Drawing from Imagination

Photography

Please Move On
To dance or to photograph?

The Arts

Chatting among the frames – art that talks to art
Isn’t Criticism a ridiculous stupidity?

Artist’s Life

Ambition

Notable

Visualization aids in the artistic process: an experiment
Words of Artists

Well, what think you on’t? Would something like this be a good addition to A&P? If so, are we ready for it? I would like to hear your comments, refinements, topic ideas (especially a better whatever topic than miscellaneous or notable) or counter-proposals.

[update 2:. . . Here is how I see the Art & Perception text:

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Here is the text from my site using Sans-Serif:

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Aside from the size difference, the font difference is fairly subtle.

I looked at both fonts on a PC earlier today. They were also slightly different there, but equally legible.

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Please take this quick survey to help us improve this site…

Above is how Art & Perception looks on Angela‘s computer (font-wise). Can we choose a better font?

Here are some samples to begin the search:

#1

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

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#2

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

. . .

#3

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

. . .

#4

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

. . .

#5

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

. . .

#6

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

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Which do you find the best? Which is the worst? Is the best better than the current Art & Perception font for text?

I haven’t been able to develop the individual sites as much as I would like to (in terms of adding content), but there is enough there I hope to give the basic flavor, and to hopefully get some critical feedback.

Here is Hanneke’s new blog.

Here is my Mother’s blog — she filled it up herself, which shows that the software works for others as well as for me ;-)

Here is our family blog (a variation designed for a group of people).

Here is where you can go if you want to make your own blog. Here are some configuration instructions (without which it won’t function like those above).

I’d be happy to configure some of these blogs for others as well (it takes only a couple of minutes).

I’d be interested to see a screen shot of Hanneke’s blog from a Windows computer. I think there is a difference from what I see on my Mac.

The new sites are free. The software is all Open Source, based on Open Source software distributed by WordPress MU. You can download it from the site mentioned above and do what you like with it. Everything will get much better. This is only version 0.2 of the template Theme. The functional core is solid WordPress, however. I only adjust the layout and display organization. The blogs should function as solidly as anything on the internet (famous last words?)

The Theme is compatible with WordPress 2.0, so you could try it on your own regular WordPress installation if you have one.