Where do you find artsists?

Everywhere, that's where.

Starting up an online gallery (which I've kind of hinted at) means that the first place to look is, well, online.

Here are just a few places I've been going to discover a mountain of great new artists:

Flickr - not just the home for photography, it's full of amazing artists that are using it to promote their work. In particular I'm finding great artists through flickr groups.

Myspace - Two months ago I'd hardly ever been on myspace. Now, I'm in love with it. Even though people are flocking to Facebook by the thousands, Myspace is still the place for up and coming artists to put together a portfolio of their work.

Blogs and Online Mags- Of course, I'm finding heaps of inspiration though the blogs I've been reading. Creepmachine, Lost at E Minor, Little Chimp, and Juxtapoz are just few of the many feeds I'm hooked on.

Deviant Art - I mentioned this site before, but didn't realise just how huge it is. Plenty of great artists with their work on show here.

The next step (other than to build a website) is to get enough artists involved in the project. That's gonna be the hard part.

Art Magazines

Just wanted to the word out about a few good art magazines that I've picked up recently, at least since I started this blog.

Juxtapoz - Juxtapoz mag is somewhat synonymous with the pop-surrealism style of art (at least according to Wikipedia), and created by painter Robert Williams

One thing that's nice about this mag is that subscribers get their own cover. One reason I might be subscribing any moment now.

Juxtapoz can be found at Magnation, and probably plenty of other places too.




Next up is Hi Fructose. This is a reasonably new mag, as volume 6 has just been released.

Founded by two artists, Annie Owens and Attaboy, I've picked up a few editions of this. It's the magazine that opened my eyes up to a whole host of great artists and galleries.

They've also recently ran an exhibition, Bitters and Sweets at the

Outre sells this one.

And finally, there's Giant Robot. Just celebrating their 50th issue, Giant Robot was launched with no budget in 1994 by Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong, and has grown ever since.

Labelled the magazine for 'Asian and Asian-American pop culture and beyond', Giant Robot is another great way to discover great artists and other general, radom stuff.

Now I'm sure there's plenty more art magazines worth reading - these are just the one's that I've bought so far (excluding the art almanac). Anyone else have some suggestions?

Canvas is everywhere

Something that people will either love or hate about art in the 21st centurt is that it can be anywhere, on anything.

I've just stumbled upon popcling, a website where you can purchase art from several established artists (including Jeremyville and Sauerkids) ... although not on traditional media.

Instead you can buy their work on skateboard decks, wall decalls, t-shirts and the like. It's a cool site.

And when you look around, nowadays anything can be a 'canvas' for art. Even mobile phone wallpapers, or the lid of a laptop, as shown here.

Art purists may pronounce this as the death of art, where everything artistic is nothing but capitalist product. But I see it differently.

A lot of today's artists are getting there work out in a variety of ways.

And people consume art differently these days, methinks. Just as people have much greater choice about the way they consume media, they have choices about when, and on what, they consume art.

Love it or hate it, I think that's the way things are moving. Perhaps it's younger people driving this trend. But art no longer belongs to an exclusive few. It's all part of the greater democratization of art,

Art produced in the 1900's and in centuries before was (speaking very generally) produced for walls in galleries. Still true today - But not always the way things work anymore.

(Photo Credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jundulate)

Long time no blog

Sorry that things have been so quite on this blog in the past few weeks.

I just got married, and have been away on my honeymoon. So life's been rather hectic in the last month.

But I'm back now and keen to get back into the blogging, and working again.