The SoHo Art Gallery was created by me, myself and I, I being Amos Joseph Shen. Its my "baby". I can only dream of one day owning my own art gallery, perhaps in downtown Toronto, or maybe Victoria, but definitely in Canada. No offense to the States, but I love it up here.
One of the first tricks was the geoguides and pop-ups. I didn't want a separate page for the gallery because then viewers would get those annoying pop-ups or have to load up those slow geoguides. So I used my own geoplus website, firmly believing that anyone viewing the site would prefer to have the option of looking at my loathsome face and horrid (according to one art critic named casandra) poetry (in which case, what does she know? she's an art critic, not a poetry one) rather than having to deal with pop-ups and geoguides. lucky you that i have geoplus and don't have to worry about those. the only place you'll find a geoguide is the main page. thats it. final. finit. stopo.
The next was the trick of finding those wonderful people. I used every trick i could think of, forums, browsing sites and emailing prospective people, using my geoguide banner to bring more people to my site with a nice fat link to the gallery itself from there. i emailed friends, started off with a handful of people and here we are now.
we still desperately need more sculptures though. even little clay things, provided you didn't get them from a mold and simply paint them, would be perfectly welcome. i had an ashtray around here that would almost be suitable, but since i don't smoke i gave it away. none of my metal sculptures fit on my scanner. they're simply too big.
the first submissions you'll notice don't have their names above them. when i first started getting submissions i was overjoyed to finally have submissions (yes, i even did a little dance...) and didn't care whether the pieces actually had names. since then i've tried to contact some of those people in order to get the names, but with no response.
i started the gallery around february 1998, and didn't actually put a counter up until september the 9th 1998. since then however we've had about 2000 hits. thats about 9 hits per day. which frankly isn't bad, although i must admit me constantly checking the number of hits once per week adds to the number.
and yes, that's my piece on the main page. and no, its not for sale. it was a gift to my girlfriend, the goddess of love and passion (and chocolate!), cynthia. i only have three pieces in the gallery myself, although i could easily flood it with another 50 or so pieces. the pieces present are my old "eternal struggle" featuring a tiger fighting a cobra. it has religious meaning, so feel free to take your guesses. after that is "bottle of feminity", which is an ink stippling. i still have the bottle upstairs in my room that i used for the original drawing. its a bright yellow bottle and is particularly beautiful when the light shines through it. and lastly, on the main page is "the lovers". its a second version of an earlier work called "loveripple". you can see the similarities.
The Loveripple was my first great masterpiece, and one of my all time favourites. The Lovers is one of my other favourites and is no less great. Its strange how I am constantly striving for perfection, painting portraits like my recent "Autostopowicz" which is so lifelike it shocks me, and yet i am always drawn back to the abstract. oh well. i like variety.
at the present, the gallery is about to go through an overhaul, in which i'm planning on separating some of the paintings into different wings. likely north, south, east and west, for lack of better names, but i'm open to suggestions. i would like to separate them according to suburbs, but there isn't that many at present.
I have my favourite pieces of course. they are:
I don't have a favourite sculture, because frankly the gallery doesn't have that many to make it a contest. In truth, who cares what I think? I'm just the curator after all and my opinion doesn't really matter compared to the rest of society's.
I wish we had more people from SoHo prime, that way (since i do the listing alphabetically) i wouldn't always be the first one at the top. It almost makes me feel guilty like I'm hogging the spotlight.
If you're still reading this, you must be awfully bored! Get out there and look at the artwork, because the junk I write in here simply isn't worth it compared to the talent out there.
That sunday was incredible. The gallery received over 2000 hits in a single day and brought the total number of hits past 4000, more than doubling what had taken 8 months to accumulate the original 2000 hits.
With Val's consent, I hope we can have another Chat Critique in two months, perhaps on July 4th, but i haven't asked her yet so i don't know what she'll say.
I'm also getting new submissions at the rate of about 5-10 per day, in addition to the 30 or so that i got sunday alone.
Lastly, I cannot express the need for more links to the SoHo Art Gallery, please, even if you don't have any artwork in it, or don't feel your worthy (in which case i think you should go ahead and submit it anyway!), go ahead and add a link to the SoHo Art Gallery.
We're even thinking of having a logo design contest, but that can wait til next month.
I've added the geoguide (sorta, you just see the top part and you can ignore the rest!) to the menu just because it would create extra hits. Maybe we could get an extra geoguide banner just for advertising the gallery? We could combine it with the logo design contest and thus hit two birds with one stone. Sounds like a plan...
i'd also like to my list of faves: The Dancer by Davena Abioye is a painting after my own heart.
KEEP 'EM COMING!!!