I have a brand new website!!
For years, I have limped along, building on top of a site that I first designed when I was in college using a bug-filled WYSIWYG editor. Though my site wasn’t too shabby, when my partner installed a blog for me last spring, I realized that there was a brave new Internet outside of what Dreamweaver had to offer me. That was the beginning of a long year of learning on the fly, absorbing ever more HTML code as I blogged. This learning process culminated in a course that David taught about web building three months ago. Armed with that knowledge, I was finally ready to have a big girl’s website.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been moving my content over to the new system. Blog posts, paintings, explanation pages, everything had to be reformatted. It’s safe to say that this was more excruciating than moving my physical studio, but, now that it’s done, I’m so glad I did it! I know it may not look that different from the outside, but, if this site were any more automated, it would write my blog posts and paint my portraits for me!
All of which is to say that if you notice anything funny or not working, I’d love to hear about it. I’d be grateful if you’d email me.
From the outside, the main difference in the new site is the distinct lack of Petal. Petal is what I called this character who used to take you on a tour through the site. She accompanied every painting and appeared on other pages as well—sometimes in a tutu and dunce cap, sometimes not!
I enjoyed piecing her together from the drawings I’d make (here shown in a raw form) so that only parts of her would move from page to page or in a rollover. She was having fun and, when she debuted with the original site in 2003, I hoped she would make my site more fun.
Six years down the line, she doesn’t make sense appearing on every page with the images of the paintings. She was forcing me to make my reproductions smaller, so I had to cut her out of her tour guide role.
To honor my old friend (who does still appear here and there on the new version of my site!), here’s a brief history of Petal.
I’ve drawn pictures of myself with others for a long time. This happens to be me with my most favorite professor from college, Hess, but, if you’ve ever done theater with me, you know I loved to draw the whole cast and crew.
Petal, the simplified form of my self-portrait cartoons, first appeared in an animated short I created in the same college Computer Imaging class that taught me how to use Dreamweaver. I don’t remember the story line precisely, but it involved a big old clock and a computer mouse running out from underneath. I hand drew each frame of the animation, which is probably what made me simplify the self-portrait cartoon.
Once Petal was a regular fixture in the galleries of my site, I started to have fun with her. Behind the images of Snow Days, she threw a snow ball at herself and then interviewed herself about the injuries she’d incurred.
She played the devil with this painting and was chilly for this one. She dressed up as a police officer and a public official for Public Faces—she was meant to be a child trying on adult clothing.
In 2006, she was joined in the Mutually Beneficial gallery by David!
Over the years, the drawings of Petal have gotten more and more abstract and sketchy. Part of the logic of putting her in my site in the first place was to give a place to my drawings. Hess had drilled into us that sculpture and painting and just about any media can cover many errors and inadequacies, but that drawing fully reveals the artist’s ability and talent—or her-his lack of it. In that way, Petal is a very vulnerable part of my site, but one that I’m still glad I share.
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CATEGORIES: - Business of art -
(3) Comments / Commentaires: I have a brand new website!!
Great job and a true inspiration!
What I love best about Petal is her chin! I’m glad she’s making the move to your new site, and I only wish I had known David was doing a class!!!! Let me know when he gets inspired to do more.
Rebecca Steelman...
I am floored. This is fabulous, everything I clicked on works. Outstanding art ~ drawing and painting talent ~ I aspire to be as accomplished as you Gwenn. Love Petal, you draw her so confidently, and love your use of bold color in the portraits. Congratulations!
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