Art & Perception

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 . . .

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“The greater danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

Michelangelo

Just recently we had some discussion of New Year’s Resolutions. One of mine had to do with achieving some body sculpting goals. To accomplish that, I put myself on training regimen, but very soon, I noticed, “Well, I’ve done this before, and I’ve never achieved the kind of results I’m after. What’s it gonna take? What’s it really gonna take?”

So I started doing some research. I began with the knowledge that though I’ve been a jock pretty much my whole life, maybe, just maybe I did not know just exactly how to get “ripped,” and sure enough, I found that I had more than a thing or two to learn about reducing fat while increasing muscle. In fact, it was on a little motivational excerpt from one of my resources that I got the above quote.
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Here are the drawings I have been working on in the new year.

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Do you see this as
Near completion?
Destruction?
This was a color photograph from northern Michigan. Inspired by the black and white photographs recently shown here, I converted it into lab color, clicked on lightness and then converted it to grey scale. Intrigued by Colin’s luscious blacks, I used the merge tool to increase the contrast a little to get a little more black. What else should I do or have done in my first attempt at processing black and white photos?

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Pardon me everyone to come across with this interruptive out of schedule post but something struck my head today and I just can’t shut up!!!

For the readers here just have to put up with my insanity, thank you very much! Pleasure!

Why do we need criticism?
Let’s say, look at the following picture, forgetting it’s a photograph:

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Earlier we came to an informal consensus that children’s art is not real “art.” I don’t see that as a problem, but it makes me curious: what are children doing when they draw? To try to get some insight, I’ve been drawing together with Nino and Fran. more… »