Art & Perception

Tomorrow I will discuss an art gallery/blog website based in part on the discussion we had last week. more… »

If you are an artist, what kind of website do you want to have for your own use?

As an artist:

• Do you want a web gallery? (for a some good examples, see David’s site, Steve’s site, and Franklin’s site)
• Do you want a blog, an online version of a diary?

I think many artists would like to have some kind of combination of these (unrelated) things. The problem is that the off-the-shelf solutions such as WordPress or Blogger are not designed for artists’ needs. That is why a lot of us spend/waste a lot of time tinkering with our websites, to customize them for our specific goals.

Recently Rex brought something exciting to my attention, a new version of WordPress that allows one to host many blogs. That is to say, if someone designs a good artist website template, they can allow other people to create their own blogs with this template on demand, for free — much like you can already get a WordPress blog for free.

To be useful for many artists, such a system should address the various issues that artists consider in a website.

What do you want in an artist website? Can you give examples of sites that have good design features?

I think that using Categories is key to working with WordPress blogs. By using Categories (for example, drawing, painting, photography, the art world) it becomes possible to turn a single blog into a multi-blog.

This lets me turn my tagline on zipser.nl into a functional tagline. It is not only a description of the blog, but a set of links to the content of the separate categories. The basic form is inspired by Edward Winkleman’s tagline. [Steve Durbin also has a functional tagline much like the one I describe here.]
Arthur Whitman suggested that a blog is like a home; different sections (Categories perhaps?) could be like rooms. I think the metaphor is powerful, but I don’t feel quite, well, at home with it yet.

Any suggestions as to how to take Arthur’s idea further?

UPDATE . . .

more… »

Who is the most influential art blogger? Ed Winkleman, of course. I haven’t been following his blog as closely as I would like to, but yesterday I took a look and the title of his recent post Art About Art got me excited. I’ve been working on an essay about this general subject “art about art”, and I wondered if I had been scooped. In fact, there was no connection; Winkleman’s post could have been titled “Art about making art,” how artwork depicting artists “caught in the act” of creation tells us about how artists did what they did. In my own experience this is a fruitful avenue for research, because there is much to be learned about studio practice from old paintings, (how to store brushes in linseed oil, for example, or how the palette was laid out in the 15th century). There is also much to learn from ancient art about the making, painting, and firing of ancient Greek ceramics.

Back to art about art — the concept of depicting art in art opens a lot of possibilities. The imaginary vase painting still life above is an example. I have long been fascinated by Athenian vase painting because of the potential of the vase to act as a “frame” for drawings and paintings on the vase itself. This fascination led me to a long love affair with ceramics and kiln building — that’s for another time though. The painting above is a technical study in how to paint a representation of a vase with oil colors on canvas. The form of the vase is based on studies of a stamnos in a museum in nearby Leiden, while the “red figure painting” is based on a painting on an amphora in the same museum. I studied these ancient objects by drawing in my sketchbook at the museum, then created this fantasy synthesis in my studio.

In fact, I worked out the rough form of the vase together with Hanneke van Oosterhout in a large painting we did together. I made this study to develop the technique for painting the vase before overpainting it in the large painting.

Every blog post should end with a question, right? Okay then, what do you think about Ed Winkleman’s blog? Or, what do you think about “art about art”? Or, what do you think of collaborating on artwork?

…

related post: Art about art and doing a 180

Françesca’s fifth birthday is coming up in March.

Karl: Who do you want to see your drawings?

Fran: All the people from the whole world, and also grandma and grandpa.

more… »

Not long ago, Françesca enjoyed typing random letters into a text editor for about ten minutes a day. Now that she is nearing five years old, that doesn’t satisfy her any longer. She learned how to use the mouse, and she’s beginning to understand how to use the Safari web browser. She can spend an hour on-line without a break.What to do? This is the point where Hanneke and I have a choice. We can take the computer away and have our kids grow up in a “traditional” pre-internet household. Or we can let them go online and accept the consequences.

I am of two minds about this. One view is that the kids should be able to grow up in an internet-free home, the way we grew up. The opposing view is that the kids should go online because the internet is part of the world we live in — keeping the kids away from it would be like refusing to let them learn to read or write.

I am torn between these two views, but I am leaning toward letting her go online because:

1. Our kids will come into contact with the internet no matter what we do.
2. By guiding her internet use at home, we can help Fran find and be involved in the positive things on the internet; for example, looking at artwork by other children her age.
3. The internet is intensely stimulating, of course. My response is that we need to make our “off-line” home environment even more fun, more stimulating, so that the internet is not such a magnet for the kids.

Anyone else out there with similar problems / opportunities?

If you want to write a really long post with lots of images, but you don’t want to display the whole thing on the front page, what can you do?

more… »