Posts and Notes

Meditation Painting

Many things have happened since I began, and then almost abandoned, this site. I have been working on writing throughout 2018, getting several books of memoirs and short stories ready for publication. Next year I plan to start painting in earnest again.

I had almost forgotten I had this site, even though I had paid for the original theme. (Qua). The difficulties in managing it were partly why I stopped developing it. However in the intervening time I have developed my skills with WordPress administration and came back to try and resolve some of the problems which I realise now were a function of the design of the theme as much as of my inability to understand it technically.

So I abandoned the Qua theme altogether, and switched to this one, which looks elegant and minimalist but offers familiar forms of editing and layout. It’s not a commercially-oriented site and not suitable for artists who want to sell their work. But I need it as a kind of ancillary to what I am doing in the art field. I also keep a beautiful hand-written journal with sketches and small photos and ideas, and that will probably play a major part in the further development of my work. If it ever happened that I was satisfied enough to want to sell paintings/drawings, I would go back to Artwork Archive which for a modest annual fee allows you to keep track of everything happening with the work you produce.  I subscribed for a while but after being forced to leave my Leichhardt studio and deciding to throw out many of my early paintings there wasn’t much point in continuing with it. If it ever happens that my work becomes worth cataloguing or even selling, I will go back to it. Check it out here. This is an example of how their pages look. You can keep location and sales information, exhibitions and shows entered and even generate reports using a fairly simple and intuitive software platform. I like it so much I’m almost sorry I don’t have enough work to put on it!

It has taken 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?

However I have gone this far and rather than abandon the site altogether as I originally intended  I am now going to focus more on getting the portfolio aspects to work. But I fear again 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, so if you are in the early phases of setting up your own site, maybe that is a better option even though technically that format doesn’t seem to have a portfolio element. But I could be wrong about this.

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. More on this soon.