Happy Holidays

Just a quick note to say Happy Christmas and New Year to everyone who has been reading my blog in 2007.

I really appreciate the comments, feedback, and just the fact that you've been reading.

Things are moving pretty quickly so I'll have lots more blogging to do in 2008. Hope to see you back here.

Thank you all so much! Cheers, Ben

Jacky Winter Group

In the last few months I've managed to clock up quite a few gallery visits here in Melbourne. But I'd have to say that the Jacky Winter group exhibition/party tonight was probably my favourite.

The Jacky Winter group, if you haven't heard of them, is a fine collection of Australian illustrators that was put together by Jeremy Wortsman. And the collection of artists was astounding. I'd came across the Jack Winter website before, and I have been looking forward to this exhibition since I first heard about it.

We got to see some excellent work by Timothy Molloy, Lilly Piri, Cailan Burns and Pandarosa, among many, many more. And I was tickled to be able to meet some artists that will hopefully be part of my little online art project.

If you missed the show tonight, there is another opening tomorrow (Fri 21st) ... more details here. I strongly recommended that you take a peek.

Left Hand Side

I have just found a great site called Left Hand Side, a website devoted to left handed artsists.

The LEFTHANDSIDE collection was created by MARCELA RESTREPO (Colombia) in November of 2003 intending to bring together talented left-handed artists and designers that are actually spread arround the world.

This site is our lefty place for showing our pride of being left-handed people in a
right-handed world.

(Link Via Little Chimp Society)

On-line Gallery? Or on-line store?

I'm sitting down tonight, writing the copy, the actual words, that will appear on the website.

My designer is 95% finished what e has to do, and the web developer is making the whole thing work. My job is to think about what should be written and how.

So to start with, I need to ask - Is my online 'gallery' actually a gallery at all, or is it just an online store that sells art?

My old friend Wikipedia tells me that:

An art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art. Paintings are the most commonly displayed medium; however, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, installation art and objects from the applied arts may also be shown.

So, technically, my website will be a space that exhibits art - meaning I can call it a gallery.

But do you think an art gallery can actually be on the internet? There are hundreds of websites calling themselves an online art gallery? But is there really such a thing?

So what should I do? Call it a shop or a gallery?

On the lookout for artists

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was on the lookout for artists to be a part of my art website. I thought it might be a good time to share just a few of the artists that I've been contacting.

From the north shores of Canada comes Yuka Yumaguchi, aka plastique monkey, has been a flickr contact of mine for some time now, and I just adore her work. 'All I can see', pictured left, is terrific.

Yan wei, aka kokomoo is a myspace friend from China that I found back in October ... definitely worth a look.

Scott Bartlett was an illustrator whose work I found while playing on Threadless.com a little while back. Scott is from Melbourne, and also has a fairly impressive portfolio over at deviant art.

Steve Bartlett (no relation to Scott, i don't think) came into my periphery two weeks ago when he was featured in Juxtapoz's "reader art" section. I'm sure you'll agree that his work is amazing ... K & S rescure pictured to your right.

No sign ups just yet - but I've only really started to contact artists in the last day or so. But hopefully I'll have some positive responses soon.

If you might be interested in becoming involved, please contact me either via the blog's comments or at roweben[at]yahoo[dot]com[dot]au. Thanks.

Rubiks Cube Art

I'm quite besotted by the latest Space Invader exhibition at the Jonathon Levine Gallery in New York.

Instead of using just tiles, Space Invader is now branching out to use Rubik's cubes to create his latests pieces.

Wonderful pieces for children of the 80's like myself.