More on developing the site

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It took months to get to this point. Spending two or three hours at a time, and working across several different sites each with different characteristics has allowed some forward movement. More than anything I am struggling to get the set-up of the pages as they are written to appear in the same way on the actual site and I have come to the conclusion that you cannot. No matter how many times you resize images and move text around, when you come into the site from the search engine it never has the layout you have spent hours trying to set up.Why can’t WordPress offer a WYSIWYG design? Or have I just not found it yet? [Note: 2021 – I was still struggling with Qua theme when I wrote this. Then I updated the theme but it’s still limited. I’m looking around for other options now].

I really wanted a good portfolio site. But I fear the options are just too limited. I thought it would be possible to put grids together for each set of images, with space for commentary against each one.  This is clearly not how it works.

My writing sites, both based on a free WordPress template (2014) work like a charm. I am using WordPress.com, not WordPress.org, and don’t have an external server. so if you are in the early phases of setting up your own site, maybe you need to switch to an externally hosted site because there seem to be more portfolio-based themes which you of course have to pay for.  But I could be wrong about this. I might do it myself, but not right now.

Another idea is to sign up for an Art Archiving service. Again, it involves expense, in this case an annual fee. But you can put all your paintings on it, and track where they are, whether any have been sold, prices and such.  Plus I think there is a facility for commenting on the paintings.wordpress-art-portfolio-themes1

Do I really need a portfolio site?

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As someone observed a while ago, everybody’s shoelace has a website these days.  Does an artist really need a website? One which contains their paintings and allows viewers to see how they were created or maybe even buy one? Websites are becoming just a kind of background reference thing. But almost everyone does seem to have one.  Creating a useful and intuitive Portfolio site using WordPress is much more difficult than I imagined.  My art-writing site, a “standard” WordPress theme, is so much easier to manage than this, a paid theme (“Qua”) which I chose for its supposed display abilities and ease of management.

QUA

Apart from the fact that the images do not reproduce in clear high quality colour  it has been so difficult to manage the construction of the site. The limitations of this theme, which are not made clear in the demo. It will take a lot more work to get this site anything like up the standard I hoped for.  Apologies.

Here’s what it claims:

Change background and header images, add a logo, favicon, tweak color, create custom menus, pick custom fonts and add widgets.

How do you change font size in the Header area? It’s far too small. Maybe you can do it by going into the html code, but if you’ve never done this before, how do you do it?  Things like that.

Anyway, will keep on trying.  Would rather be painting though.

Painting Place and Memory

Memory, monochrome, painting, Uncategorized

The link between vision and memory offers a powerful way of thinking about why painting matters.  For many years I have been fascinated by the way painting brings forward the eternal return: the spaces that remain around  and enfold our human experiences, so transient and ephemeral.  Technological modernity has  fundamentally changed the experience of space and time. Photography and film  have transformed the visual world which now surrounds us with random excess.  But painting has the power to take some of that world back.  In my recent art practice I have moved between the vividness of the brightly coloured world and the sober nostalgia of a monochrome past.

Prawning at the mid-tide

Prawning at the mid-tide. Painting in black and white, based on a family photograph from  1932.

I want to explore the between link painting and photography. I have also been developing a site specifically related to photography for my art practice. Some of these photographs are available on my Image Field site here:  http://annettehamiltonimages.wordpress.com

More thoughts on this relationship will no doubt emerge as this site develops.