Hello friends,

Frequent visitors to the site may have noticed that things haven't changed much the past year or so. I’ve somewhat regularly added content to what used to be the recent work section, and I’ve been keeping the events section up to date, but my best of 2016, 2017, and 2018 pages were starting to get pretty stale.

This here is a Squarespace site. My previous few websites were Wordpress websites. There is a pretty fundamental difference between the two systems, in that Wordpress is much more of a Content Management System (CMS) and Squarespace is better at just building nice web pages. The problem with that is that while in Wordpress I could easily make a page for each painting and then sort of sort those however I wanted, grouping things together or creating gallery views of primary images, it was never as clear to me how to do that in Squarespace. What I have wanted for a while now is a way to display a bunch of paintings grouped by some shared feature and to have it so that if you click on the painting you get a page about that painting with detail images and maybe some links and text about the painting.

I’ve been using a service called Artwork Archive for a couple years now, mainly as a means of keeping track of what paintings are where and what their status is. You only ever have to accidentally sell a painting that’s already been sold or get a painting into a show when it’s already booked for another venue once to know how important it is to have some kind of system for this. Especially when you have hundreds of paintings and participate in things like art loan programs that borrow dozens of paintings for a year or two at a time. I had been using a Google spreadsheet, but that sucks. I mean, it’s better than nothing. Anyway, Artwork Archive is great! You can put in multiple images for each piece, you can give each piece a location, enter its dimensions, price, add tags, assign it to collections, mark it as sold, etc. Fantastic. All web based so you can get to it anywhere. And today I discovered that they’ve gone and done a terrific job with the public view option!

The public view is pretty much what it sounds like. You turn it on and then you get a URL to a page that’s got all your work on it. The amazing thing is, this is very nearly exactly what I’ve been wanting. What could be better? The fact that they also have provided an integration so that you can access that public view from your own website. So, as of today, I’ve retired my old “best of” pages and even my “recent work” page and have instead just replaced them with an “archive” page that honestly back here in the Squarespace backend is just a copy and pasted chunk of javascript on a blank page. I had to do very little in Artwork Archive to turn this on and make it do what I wanted. I would like some better sorting tools, but I’m pretty happy with it as is. What do you think?

I’m filling in the back catalog of work as I go. So you’ll notice that some sections like “Entanglement” currently don’t have much in them. There are nearly a hundred Entanglement paintings in my catalog that I haven’t put up on Artwork Archive yet. Knuckle Bombs aren’t up at all yet. Very little work on paper / Yupo is up. That’s one reason I’d like a better sorting feature. When I go into Artwork Archive, I can sort by date added or by date created. On the public view it’s just by date created, so it’s going to be difficult for repeat visitors to get an idea of what’s been added. I’ll try to post more often with updates, and hopefully Artwork Archive will add this feature.