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Artspan:
June 2011 Newsletter
Written and edited by Eric Sparre
New Templates Are Live
We introduced the new template websites in the first week of May and then launched them officially a week or so later with a press release. At this moment, we are adding some design options to the templates and these should be live within a few days.
The new template websites are truly ground-breaking, with 320 basic layout variations, 14 fonts, and unlimited colors for regions of the pages, and for all text and links. There are simply millions of variations. You can also insert your own logo. Best of all is that the tools are really easy to use: you preview your changes each step of the way in real time, even before saving. We have also been adding to the pre-set “Ready Mades” – where colors and fonts are already set for you.
You will not have to change your old site design. But we strongly urge you to try out the new tools. Particularly, if you have one of the Artspan Classic designs, which, in our view, are showing their age (10 years plus), and will no longer be offered to new members. The new templates have a very clean and contemporary look and, as they are completely customizable, should work well with all art.
Give your website a unique look that reflects who you are and what your work is about.
Some Sample Sites
We have been delighted by how many members, 10% or more of our total membership, have already taken advantage of the new sites, and without our even giving notice of the official launch. We are also pleased at the creativity that their site designs are giving voice to, and how well the sites are working with the artwork. Here are a dozen or so new template sites:
Kristen Hawkes (Painter)
Barbara Cromer (Jeweler)
Amanda Fruits (Photographer)
Diane Dale (Painter)
Silas Breaux (Printmaker)
Ron Levin (Painter)
Gary Postlethwait (Photographer)
Harold Joiner (Painter)
Kathleen Wyllie (Photographer)
Annie OBrien Gonzales (Painter)
David Hill (Ceramics)
David Lidbetter (Painter)
How about you? Have you done something really good that you would like to share? Let us know.
New Control Panel
You should see the New Control panel within a few days. It will have a contemporary functional look. We have moved some things around to help you in your site management. We have also added a very useful navigation bar on the left making it easier to go from one function to another. For the moment we are removing the video tutorials as they don’t work with the new setup. It may also be that with the new templates, the tutorials are less necessary. The Updating Your Site documents should provide all the help you need. And there is always the Help Desk.
Referrals: Best Ever Program
Most of you are aware of our regular referral program. Recommend Artspan to someone who could use our service and both you and that individual would receive a free month each (for the new member, that means they actually receive two free months – including the regular free trial).
For the summer months, we will run a first-time ever version of the referral program: if you have two referrals sign up during the months of June through August, you will receive three months free. The new members will continue to receive one free month in addition to the 30 day free trial they get automatically.
Ask your referrals to mention your name as they are signing up (or enter your referral number which is in the upper right corner of the Control Panel)… that is all that is needed.
Our New Marketing Director
We were very sorry to lose John Foster as our Marketing Director at the beginning of May. He always put the strongest creative and professional effort into his work, and it was a pleasure to work with him.
We undertook a search for a new marketing director and are delighted to announce that Joan K. Smith will be joining us in that capacity on June 6th. Joan has a strong visual arts background, most particularly in the Philadelphia area, as an artist, organizer of arts events, gallery manager and commentator. For the past 10 years she has been Associate Director and Marketing Director for Inliquid.org, a non-profit offering a service somewhat analogous to that which we offer. She currently also serves as a consultant for a company providing mobile apps for arts and cultural organizations. And she is an art and culture blogger on HuffingtonPost.com (see some of her posts here)
She will no doubt want to share her ideas with you. Thus, we hope to see her as a regular contributor to this newsletter.
Featured Members
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Colin Hunt
Surrealist and other paintings
I see these paintings as excerpts from stories; pages torn from books that have not yet been written. They are populated both by people engaged in activities of looking: eyes peering, fingers reaching out to touch and the objects they find. The paintings talk back and forth with each other across a shared landscape. For me the subject and the process of making the work are the same. As I search though my own mind, culling from the images and experiences of my life, the paintings search through their own images looking for meaning in the mash up.
Each image is a word, each word a part of some larger tale. The smallest unit of measure in language is the phoneme, or brick of sound. What are the smallest indivisible pieces of a story? Here: a gesture? An isolated object? The sky? If all stories are like matter, neither created nor destroyed, in constant use, it is human nature to look for understanding where it can never be achieved. One person’s gesture is another’s sky, another’s sky an object.
I try to fix a point in an ever-changing universe, to stop time, to find truth where there is none. My daughter is two. She is dying of cancer. She walks in a parallel universe where she shoulders such things and yet finds a way to connect. The world of these paintings lies somewhere beyond our own and yet could not exist without ours. They hold hands across gaps of understanding, they are ribbons of meaning in the void.
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Recently the Gulf Coast has been a stage for the confrontation between the most powerful forces in nature and the order we have imposed upon our environment.
My work is an observation of the resulting relationship between the natural world that the oceans, bays, and estuaries have shaped and the fabricated order that we have imposed upon the land that has been left for our use. By employing the use of common construction materials to create the plates from which I print I am referencing this order we have imposed, as well as our attempts at repair.
The end result is a visual study of containment and the eventual failure of these attempts at control.
Legal and Other
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