Lots of really cool stuff in our Nerd/Cool show, and a great opening last night. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to post a preview before the opening, but better late than never, right?

We’ve got another great group show coming up in April. It’s called Nerd/Cool, and it’s packed full of great artists, including Jen Oaks, Maggie Hurley, Beca Irizarry, Steven Chunn, and Billy Darr. Drawing on video games, scifi, comics, and the more fun post-apocalypse, Nerd/Cool is really just kinda awesome…see for yourself.

Hey, kids.

We’ve been working for a while now on our new wordpress site – I’ve spent dozens of my own hours massaging content and migrating blog posts from our old blog and art blog, creating new promotional slides for events, updating and formatting our menu for the site, and on and on.  It’s been a fairly big project, in the middle of a couple other big projects, but worth it, I think.

The new site gives us lots of capabilities that we didn’t have before: it allows us to prominently feature events and other announcements, and keep them sticky (unlike facebook, or twitter, which make it really easy to miss what’s going on if you don’t happen to be glued to your monitor).  It gives us a text version of our menu, which makes it easier to search and to update.  It brings our two blogs together in the main site content, and gives more control about how they appear.  It’s easier to modify layout and content in general.  I can create and maintain new pages without hand-coding or getting a programmer involved.  This means I can focus on things that I’m better at.  Wordpress seems like a good platform to do this, and I’m generally happy with how the site looks and functions.

The graphic design of the site still owes much to the original design done by eshutter creative, and the bulk of the wordpress migration was done by our customer, David, of colorgrooves.  Thanks to both of them for their help.

I hope you like the new site.  If you find any problems (bad links, things that just don’t look right, etc.), please let me know.

back to my day job…
-sal

We just opened an excellent new show of portraits in several media (photos, drawings, paintings), by a really talented group of artists: Chloe Crossman, Ashley Eberlein, Sage Redclay, Stephanie Sarley, Daniel Salo, and Jeffrey Chung. Apologies for not getting this stuff up before the opening, but the show’s up for a full month, so you’ve got some time to come check it out. I’ll do a few posts over the next couple weeks focused on each artists work, but for today, here’s a quick overview…enjoy!

Alison Tharp, who’s been coordinating our Live Drawing parties (and drawing in them herself), sent on some new photos of last month’s event. For those of you who have never been to one of our Live Drawing Parties: a group of artists come out and draw/paint/whatever, and sell their art over the course of the night for not much dough. It’s a great opportunity to watch the creative process of lots of great local working artists, and also collect their work for peanuts.

For now, enjoy the Live Drawing Photos!

A photo of our new Live Art wall, with lots of awesome drawings made at our party last night. Thanks to David Seiler for the photo. Sorry I don’t have all the artist credits for this one, but I’ll pull together and post some more photos of the event and the art soon.

We had a Live Drawing event last month, and it was such a hit, we’ve decided to make it a regular monthly occurrence, starting this month.

Every Third Thursday from 6-10pm, come hang out with some great local artists, watch them draw, and buy their work right out from under them…drawings are priced super-affordably – from $15-$40, and all the money goes directly to the artists – we take no commission on their work.

Artists will rotate – we’ll have a dozen or so at each event. Participating artists include such rockstars as: