Artist Website – Portfolio with Galleries
When an artist has an extensive portfolio, it is important to organize the images, so website visitors can see the paintings they are interested in with ease.
I am going to demonstrate such a set of galleries in a website I developed for Agnes Jorgensen and her website, JorgensenArt.com.
Home Page
We will start with her homepage, which features her beautiful piece, Prima Dancer. The styling of the website was inspired by that painting. The light background color with the maroon lettering and sapphire backgrounds pull together a look that is both powerful and delicate, just like Agnes’ work.
Her home page starts with a lovely quote from Agnes. Part of my job is to take the information that the client wants to convey and find ways to display it that supports and further communicates its meaning. Placing this quote in a deep sapphire just under her painting brings it to focus and allows the visitor to better understand her as an artist.
- Below that is her artist statement and a nice picture of her in her studio.
- This is followed by a quote which beautifully explains Agnes as an artist and the qualities of her work.
- Next we have a slide show of paintings that Agnes can curate anytime she wishes through my hosting service.
- This is followed by a contact form embedded on the front page.
- I love the painting that is used for the footer. It grounds the website, and pulls you into her fantastic work.
Portfolio Gallery
The portfolio is organized into galleries. Each gallery has a name and a selected painting as the cover. Each gallery can be clicked to move to that collection of paintings. Each painting includes the title, price, size and any information about the framing. In addition, I used an icon to distinguish paintings that have won awards. If a visitor clicks on one of the paintings, it zooms to fill the screen, and from there, they can click to move through the rest of the paintings. There is also a breadcrumb menu along the top that allows the visitor to move easily through the galleries and explore her work.
A painting can be part of more than one gallery. For example, let’s look at the colorful painting, Bring in the Referees. Since it contains prominent zebras, this is both in the Travel gallery and the Animal gallery. Organizing the portfolio into galleries allows the visitor to easily find the paintings that interest them.
Resume and About
Let’s move next to the resume and about page, which provides detailed information about Agnes’ career. The Resume page lists all of her exhibitions, the publications in which her work was highlighted, and her memberships. Because of the use of bullets and the large amount of information, this was a nice opportunity to display the information in two columns. One of the difficulties of a website is that you can’t display a paragraph that is too wide.
When reading to the end of the line, the eye struggles to find the next line, and this slows down the reader, this is why books are sized the way they are to allow for one column per page that is sized appropriately for the eyes ability and promote smooth reading but in this case we have clear listings on narrow columns that are easy for the eye to scan back on her about page you can see that I used columns here as well since a visitor would read only one of the two columns the French or the English.
Testimonials
Agnes has very happy clients who have written descriptive testimonials we decided to dedicate a page to these endorsements and show the entire text along with the painting the client had purchased or commissioned this helps the website visitor understand what it’s like to work with Agnes furthering their insight into her as an artist.
Contact Page
On the contact page we were able to bring much more interest to a standard contact page by using this bright and colourful painting about a pleasant conversation to set the tone for contacting Agnes.
Exhibition Page
Agnes and her husband Andre Chatelain created a collection of thirteen oil paintings for a museum. On the website, these pages create an online version of that museum collection. First we have an introduction to the exhibit and then the visitor can click on any of the paintings to see both the piece and the accompanying text that was posted on the museum walls they can click on any painting to look at it and read the text replicating how they might walk through the museum
Commission Page
Her Commissions page discusses all the information you need to commission a painting from Agnes this includes the categories of the Commission she paints examples of each one and a sample gallery of some of our commissions from the past in addition there is an embedded contact form to allow for easy communication with her if you would like to start the commission process.
It was a joy to create Agnes’s website to help communicate to the world her beautiful work