Spring Gallery Night, 2008

We are almost upon the Spring Edition of Gallery Night 2008 here in Ft. Worth and since I haven't written to the Ralph Art blog in forever, it seemed like a good time to mention a couple of my favorite art venues.

William Campbell Contemporary Gallery
Bill must have started the gallery when he was still in diapers, since it has been a staple of the Ft. Worth art community since I was in school. A great space, well-located, run by a couple of folks with fabulous taste. What more could a person ask? I always see countless friends, who always ask the embarrassing question: "are you painting these days?" Julie Lazarus will have paintings, mixed media and blown glass works in the downstairs space; gallery artists will have work upstairs.

Artspace111
Once an artist-run gallery in a fairly raw industrial space just northeast of downtown, Artspace111 is now a commercial gallery, showing (as best I can tell) the same stable of artists that exhibited in its previous incarnation. While still possessed of a slight hint of post-industrial funk, the space has been cleaned up, slicked up, and (best of all) air-conditioned. The current show includes pieces by Michael Bane, Alice Bateman, Linda Blackburn, Ed Blackburn, Dan Blagg, Dennis Blagg, Ann Ekstrom, John Frost, John Hartley, Etty Horowitz, Nancy Lamb, Leslie Lanzotti, Jim Malone, Sue McCans, Jo-Ann Mulroy, J.C. Pace, Chris Powell and Eric Stevens.

Fort Worth Contemporary Arts Gallery
...is a new (opened in February) space run by the TCU Art Department in a strip center at 2900 W. Berry St., just south of the TCU campus. I managed to make it to the inaugural show where a carnival atmosphere reigned. Looks like it could be an interesting addition to the art mix.

See you in Gallery Land!

Update : CVS versioning

I'm continuing to work on the updated code for the redesigned website. To simplify the task of managing updates, I set up a CVS server, which does versioning control so I can work on different machines and not get stuff out of sync as I jump from one machine to the other, as I am want to do.

Although a bit of a pain, this will be a big help in the long run. It occurred to me this morning that I could be using this to keep track of my fiction; I tend to generate a lot of versions of things. My colleague/friend Dave Davis turned me on to this tool -- thanks, Dave!

Redesign: phase 2

Okay - I'll admit it: the current Ralph Art Website Project redesign was sort of thrown together at the last minute. I successfully reskinned the old site and cleared out some old stuff, but I didn't address the bigger issue of organization.

What is really needed is a new Information Architecture. As one of my former cohorts pointed out, there's really no well-defined metaphor for the structure of the thing. Add to that new content that I'd like to add and how that will fit in.

The struggle for me is my left-brain/right-brain interests are hard to present in a orderly fashion. Probably the reason my studio/office looks the way it does.

Some features in the works:

• Expanded gallery of thumbnail/images
• Some design case-studies
• Images that can be used as desktop backgrounds
• Scans of some of my sketchbooks

Still struggling to find a way to include my random thoughts and observations.

Ralph Art Blog -- now online

As I was planning the Ralph Art website redesign, I always had as part of my master plan setting up a blog. Elsewhere I've had a Blogspot blog for several years (it shall go nameless for reason apparent for those of you who have visited it) and wanted to set one up and integrate it with the new site.

I just spent the morning (as well as a major part of last night) going in and heavily modifying the Blogspot template html so the look and feel matched the site. I did leave the Blogspot bar along the top (could have removed it, but Terms of Service and all...) but other that I've got a pretty good match.

The latest piece was my discovery last night (around 1:00 AM) that Google has created an AJAX API that allows one to insert RSS feeds into web pages using JavaScript. That may not mean a lot to non-codeheads, but it's a pretty amazing feat. I spent considerable time a couple of weeks ago around trying to do the same sort of thing, encountering considerable obstacles.

Now, loyal visitors and or the curious can see a short digest of recent blog posts right on the main page of the Ralph Art website.

Once again, Thank You Google!

New website

I'm in the final throws of relaunching the Ralph Art website. I've switched hosting services - now I'm using Polurnet, out of Montreal (now that I have a son in Canada I feel like sending even more money across the border.

I'm also linking to this blog, which I'll go through and re-skin to match the Ralph Art website.

More to come later.

Cheers!