Wrapped in Light

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 06:25:27 GMT

Deanna's latest gallery showing opens tomorrow at the 2257 Gallery. In anticipation, I've updated her web site with photos of a number of pieces from the Wrapped in Light series. These eight works were done in collaboration with abstract expressionist painter Sondra Hersh, and incorporate metal, fused glass, and acrylic painting in a way that I've never seen before, breaking the boundaries of a rectangular canvas in three dimensions.

If you are in the area and missed The Spark Expanded at the Artisan Galley in June, this show features many of the same pieces, and the gallery is open 7 to 5 Mon-Fri. Worth a visit, maybe between 6pm-10pm on July 15th, when there is an artist's reception. See you there!

At right is one of my favorites, entitled Intent.

central-park-studio.com launch

Mon, 15 May 2006 14:13:10 GMT

Well, I haven't been blogging much lately, instead spending my evening hours designing and building a web site for my wife Deanna's metal and fused glass sculpture. And last Friday we finally launched the Central Park Studio website!

The site only contains a few of her many works, some of those which I had easy access to or already had workable photographs of. We plan to photograph more and put up new pages every couple of days.

I haven't built a website in a few years, and learned a few things:

Now I understand better why people have been clamoring for transparent png support in IE. IE7 supports it, but I had to sniff browsers and do tricky tricks to get it working in IE6.
IE is much more forgiving than Firefox. A small error (in one case a missing quote) affected IE not at all, but set Firefox on a serious tailspin.
Up front investment pays off. I generate the site from a small number of XML files using XSLT. This allows me to quickly add new artwork, as I don't even have to create a page for a new piece, just add a bit of metadata about the piece and the images associated with it. Once I got this working well, adding new images was an almost exclusively Photoshop task.
Photoshop drives me crazy. And rocks! For doing lots of image adjustment, color matching between images, sizing and so forth it does a great job. I really wish however that the adjustment controls weren't all buried in a submenu. Have I overlooked a handy image adjustment palette for one-click access to all the adjustment tools?
Buying a domain name and hosting space is easier and cheaper than I would have believed. I set aside a day for it, and the site was up and running, including email, within a couple of hours.

Anyway, check out the site, link to it ;-), and send me comments. I've only tried it on IE7, IE6, and Firefox. I'm sure there are many improvements that can be made (I've already got a list going). Enjoy!

Design by Committee: Art

Wrapped in Light

central-park-studio.com launch