A slower day, but I've labelled a few more paintings.
Every time I post art on social media I get messages and comments asking to buy it, all scams and fraud. A message via Facebook over the past few days supplied an address, a flat, which is the registered address of two limited companies, both registered in the past year, with no accounts and a director who seems to be an obscure catering student. The message came from a Czech woman, though the tone of the message seemed male to me. I expect that she and the student are victims of identity theft. The thought of a sale made me research things like postage and payment options, a useful upside, though I think generally, it's best not to sell to anyone online, merely put them in touch with 'my gallery'. Oh for a gallery!
The productive parts of the day were adding framed photographs of paintings to my website. This involved some coding to switch between framed and unframed images. This was complicated by the fact that some paintings are framed but don't have photos of the framed work, so I needed several codes: unframed, framed, framed and photographed. Only the latter should give the option to view a framed image.
The image page also shows sculptures and digital images, which are never 'framed' so I needed a fourth choice of 'none', too. The logic wasn't difficult, and after that I had to convert all of the new images and upload those too. This solves one issue my website always had, that some works, like The Love Reliquary or the God Being Killed painting, were shown in frames, and some were not. Plenty of works have important or interesting frames (like Being The Elephant Man) and it was always a toss-up whether to show these framed or not. Now I can show both.
The thumbnail link on the gallery page shows whichever is best, often the framed versions for things like The Monstrance Of Life, and the main page always shows the unframed painting, with an option to click for a framed image.
I was amazed to find that the Richard Dadd Cabinet wasn't on the site at all, only the painting; and The Love Reliquary and The Love Reliquary II weren't there either. I can't remember why, and I've added them. The Love Reliquary II is one of my best works. I entered it into about 8 competitions when I completed it, and it didn't get past any round of judgement. Perhaps I hid it from my site so that I could enter it into more - but it all seems hopeless now. It's less than 10 years old, but too old to enter into most competitions, despite the fact that it's remained unseen for almost that entire time.
I think it's only been exhibited 3 times: in Chester Art Centre in a one-night show I set up myself, in the Silver Star Gallery in Chester, at the 'Relics' exhibition, and in Warrington Museum in 2018 for their Contemporary Arts Festival. For almost all of its life it's been locked in its foam-sealed box. A saintly relic indeed.
