VISIONARY ART GALLERY – UPDATE

Initially posted on Steemit, this VISIONARY ART GALLERY UPDATE is the first in a series to highlight the changes to the Visionary Art Gallery Website. Artists featured in this blog are the tip of the iceberg – I had fixed many more pages (but still many more to do) and will publish additional pages in the next series of updates.

VISIONARY ART GALLERY – UPDATE

Seven months ago I posted about VAG ARTISTS ON STEEMIT, such as Peter Gric

This post is about a small selection of over 500 artists from my network. The main website is the VISIONARY ART GALLERY, which I am currently working on changing the look and artist pages. This because Flash is history and the Flash features such as embedded slide shows do not work anymore, since the host site on Ning has done away with Flash. Read more about it: THE END OF FLASH. So I am working on installing HTML 5 slide shows and at the same time updating the website to a more modern look. This will keep me busy for a long time.

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some ARTISTS PAGES fixed:

GRAEME WILLIAM BALCHIN

KIM EVANS

BRUNO DI MAIO

TANYA MILLER

SLAVKO KRUNIC

LIBA WARING STAMBOLLION

MARK HENSON

HANNAH FAITH YATA

IAIN WHITTAKER

ALORIA WEAVER

DRAGAN ILIC DI VOGO

SINISHA S KASHAWELSKI

SEAN KYLE ALLUM aka ELOH PROJECTS

JACKIE EDWARDS

CAMILLE DELA ROSA

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ASSOCIATED ARTISTS

Some of our artist friends were not members of the private network on Ning, and they are listed under associated artists:

CYRIL HELNWEIN

MAURA HOLDEN

CARRIE ANN BAADE

BENEDETTO FELLIN

there are several more you find under that heading Associated Artists but I am also working on some of those pages that still need to be fixed.

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We also have a section called Hall of Fame where we showcase some artists that were influencial to many of us:

EXAMPLE OF A HALL OF FAME ARTISTS

H R GIGER

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I blogged about this cooperative project, where artists affiliated with us had worked on:

THE ANTIPODES PROJECT

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VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION

A spin-off site from the Visionary Art Gallery is the VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION, where we showcase exceptional content, but there are also guest-blogs such as DREAMS & DIVINITIES (see below about affiliated sites), and ARCHAIC VISIONS

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Some of our associated/affiliated sites:

Liba WS organises exhibitions and publishes books, her last Steemit post:

DREAMS AND DIVINITIES – CHIMERIA

we maintain a page for D&D on our Visionary Art Website:

https://www.vagallery.com/dreams-and-divinies.html

and this is the link to the official website:

DREAMS AND DIVINITIES

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VISIONARY ART AUSTRALIA

…. joined Steemit not long ago

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@visionaryart/just-joined-steemit-im-an-visionary-artist-and-film-maker-of-things-strange-and-unstrange

VAA website

BEINART

Jon Beinart, the founder, is also on Steemit:

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@beinart/our-first-steemit-post

Last but not least, the oldest site of our genre:

SOCIETY FOR ART OF IMAGINATION

As you can see, I am not idling – got much to do:
NO REST FOR THE WICKED

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Visit my website
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Updates to begin the New Year

That I have not posted for a while is not due to that there is nothing new, just the opposite - I was very busy and just did not get around to post updates.

◄ a gratuitous selfie from New Years Day - dressing up with a fez given to me by a friend that day. 

So here are some of the things I had been working on late 2017:

STEEMIT:

I joined this blockchain posting platform in late August and had been a steady contributor since (slowing down a little toward the end of the year, Christmas and New Years holydays). It is in my opinion a better way to socialize than other social platforms, in particular: where you get likes on Facebook that you cannot take to the bank, on Steemit you get upvotes that translate into earnings of Steem, a cryptocurrency.

Here is my page:

I find I had good results with my posts and am satisfied that this network, founded in 2016, will quickly develop into a major social network, with the added incentive of being able to earn money from your posts. Added bonus: no annoying ads cluttering your page, nor in the news feeds, like they do on Facebook. There are some bots that monitor content, but none of this bothersome censoring you would find on Facebook, where the nipple-police is out in full force! Here it is your option to mark your posts as NSFW. 

 

NING PLATFORM for the Private Visionary Art Network:

I used this platform already since 2009 to gather some of the best Artists of my genre. The private network is not accessible to the general public, but I used embed features to put slide shows from this platform on a public website, the VISIONARY ART GALLERY (VAG). 

Late in 2017, Ning eliminated Flash content, which resulted in all the embedded slide shows not functioning anymore. This in advance to the announcement that Adobe’s Flash Player will officially be put to rest in 2020. While it primarily affected the Visionary Art Gallery site, to some extend it also affected its spin-off VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION and VISIONARY ART HALL OF FAME, as well as other sites I control that also occasionally use the embed codes, including some posts on this blog. This also affects my own website, ART OF THE MYSTIC OTTO RAPP.

Subsequently, I posted a message on the VAG Homepage regarding this, with a link to a more detailed explanation: IMPORTANT NETWORK INFORMATION: SLIDE SHOW EMBEDDING DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE!

Because of this development, these Websites had become construction Zones!

There are over 500 artists on the VAG site, plus uncounted other pages and features. My own website and the VAG spin-off contain also many pages that need to be worked on. This is a project that will keep me busy for quite some time. Thus I decided to also at the same time switch the outdated templates of the VAG and my own website to a more modern look, which also requires additional work on each page to customize them (I strive to give each artist a distinct personal look). The Hall of Fame and VA Exhibition are on attractive templates already, so no need for changes to those sites, other than the changes necessary because of the problems with Flash. But there may be older blog content on my sites that might still contain outdated coding which is near impossible to fix unless I hunt down each blog entry for all the years the sites had been active.  

To all the artist members of the Visionary Art Network on Ning:

I am in the process of downloading your images from the network, and uploading it to your pages on the public VAG site, as galleries and HTML5 slide shows.

The network fees are paid up until Summer 2018. By this time, I expect to be finished with the task of updating the public VAG and its affiliated sites. Once the changes to the VAG are complete, I will delete the Ning Network, which is no longer serving its main purpose of feeding content to our public pages. This will save me a major drain on my personal finances, since the costs came out of my own pocket, only partially offset by donations. There are still costs involved maintaining the public sites on Weebly and paying for the domains of these sites, so your donations are still needed and welcome to help me keep these sites on line.

Additional Notes:

The websites powered by Weebly (on my account there) had just recently security certificates (SSL) added. While the URL's now show this (https://) there also appears a info icon on the address bar (it does so with Chrome) where it says that there are some security problems on the site - when you mouse over this icon, it leads to an information page on Google Chrome: Check if a site's connection is secure. This would be important on merchandising sites where you enter sensitive information such as credit card numbers etc. My sites are not Merchandising sites, though you will find links to secure sites where prints are sold, for example. There is nothing on my sites where you would enter any information, other than maybe the contact pages, but there you have the choice of directly contacting my email, instead of using the contact form. 

I checked on Padlock which items would trigger this warning and found that this had to do with share buttons and some advertising banners. So there is nothing much to worry about the content.

WISHING EVERYONE A HAPPY AND SAFE NEW YEAR! 

 

 

VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION

In May 2013 I started a new website VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION to showcase outstanding artists and individual works from our private network, to supplement our VISIONARY ART GALLERY.

The reason is mainly that the parent site was bursting at the seams, but also to have more space for blogs, such as ARCHAIC VISIONS, DREAMS & DIVINITIES and the VISIONARY COMMUNITY BLOG.

In the section FEATURED ARTWORK we regularly present the best works of our members and occasionally those from our other site, the VISIONARY HALL OF FAME

You are invited to visit and browse a great collection of works from our genre FEATURED ARTWORK, but also very interesting blogs and other features not mentioned here.

Picture credits (top to bottom):
WOLFGANG HARMS
TOMASZ ALEN KOPERA
MICHEL OGIER
ERNST FUCHS

this blog entry is also posted simultaneously on Steemit: 

https://steemit.com/art/@thermoplastic/visionary-art-exhibition

In Memoriam VLADIMIR PETROV-GLADKY - 1948 - 2017

It is with great sadness that I learned about the passing of our friend and member VLADIMIR PETROV-GLADKY

In Memoriam VLADIMIR PETROV-GLADKY - 1948 - 2017

Otto Rapp writes:
​I was shocked when I got the news about a good friend, Vladimir Petrov-Gladky passed away! He was a great artist and wonderful human being - here we were with Ernst Fuchs at his exhibition at the Palais Palffy. I remember both of you with fondness. RIP my friends!

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Russia meets Austria:
the first posthumous exhibition in Retz, Austria
​May 18th to June 1st 2017

VLADIMIR PETROV-GLADKY

RIP
April 1st 1948 - April 16th 2017