Exp-Art – Art Opening/Website (2001)

July 16th, 2009

Back in 2000, I was looking to get my artwork out into the public, when I came up with the idea of putting together a website for my paintings. At the same time, all of my friends that were artists, were creating really great pieces that I felt should be out in the public as well.

So I decided to start a website called Exp-Art that would showcase not only my work, but my friends work as well. I put together a crappy website and made some flyers to post around town to promote it. A few other artists joined the group by way of the flyer and my good friend Steve suggested that I talk to one of his friends about doing a show at a gallery that his friend’s uncle ran.

The show would consist of a few painters, an illustrator, a fashion designer, and a photographer. All was going well until the owner of the gallery caught his friend’s uncle shooting gay porn in the back and got a boot to the kool.

As you might imagine, this created a lot of problems. The biggest one being that we had created and passed out all of these invitations that had the dates of the show, a date for the opening reception, and a location on it. Luckily the fashion designer knew a warehouse space called Superstitious that had recently started doing some art shows. They saved our asses and the show went better than expected.

A few months later, I killed the site due to the lack of participation by all the artists. I was busting my ass promoting everyone and not getting any help at all with anything that had to do with the site or the group. As you can see lesson learned.

The images above are a few different things from that time period. The first two images are part of the invitation for the show. I took a photograph by Valerie Jayne and an illustration by Dan Ortiz and Photoshoped them together to create the image for the invitation. Dan and I transferred it onto the back of one of my paintings (second image). It was our limited edition invite.

The third image is from a review that a guy name Randy Woock at the Houston Other wrote about the website. I had always hoped that I would have gotten the opportunity to meet him and say thanks for his kind words.

Entry Filed under: Exp-Art,Mixed Media,Paintings,Photography,Photomontage,Transfer