Dennis Hollingsworth

Website, Finally.

The past few weeks have been consumed with the spring art fairs, friends visiting NYC with concomitant gallery tours, all fabulous but also with little time to document and reflect all of this in the blog. During this time, I was persuaded by a friend, who happens to own a gallery in LA, to build a website. She asked to see my recent work, and I flipped open my blog and photo library and scrolled for images. She became irritated by the time lapse and asked why I didn't have a website. Well... I never liked the canned nature of standard artist websites... standardization should be repugnant to artists... I wanted people to dive into the blog archive to glean the context of ideas and experience in my art work... I plugged a sort of archive of paintings into the colophon of the blog, anyway (but the most recent work would have a year's delay, naturally)...

"Cut the shit, Dennis.", she said. "Build a website. I want to see your work as fast as possible, I don't have the time to go through all that." She had a point. While I might have had reason ten or fifteen years ago, now I need to strap on a website in order to remove any impediment to seeing who I am as an artist. Grease the entry.

So for the past two weeks, I researched the best services, assembled my archives and learned Squarespace's build engine. It has been a slog, at times fascinating, at times nostalgic, most times necessitating the capacity for endurance, focus and determination.

I've lived an artists' life mostly in the future tense, the horizon properly set on the the posthumous. Now that my years as a productive artist have clocked 27, 39 if you clock a formal education, 44 as an adult set firmly upon a fixed objective... the past tense can get quite vivid once the archive has been sorted out. Now, my rear view mirror has grown in size in relation to the windshield, and any driver knows that one should only check the traffic behind you with furtive glances.

But oh, what a scene!

The mechanics of this activity crumbled a bit at the switchover from analog to digital. Back in 2003, I bought a proper digital camera once my wife and I began to travel out of LA and into Texas (for a year), Spain and later NYC; as access to professional photography became difficult. For the period between 1991 (grad school graduation) and 2003, much of my work exists in slides and transparencies, much of this awaiting digitation. And then there's the learning curve of digital archives: how to shoot a proper image, how to process them in Photoshop, how to arrange filing systems and preserve them. The deeper I got into the past, the trickier it was to manage the thicket. Often I found myself mired in iPhoto, cross referencing my files, the archives of the weblog, scrolling endlessly; discovering crappy photos, corrupted files and metadata along the way.

The website is ready for public viewing, with some tweaking and modifications to come. I plan to include links to image galleries to previous exhibitions, shots of all my studios that I've had, various but not too many elaborations, to shake the gimbal of the off-the-shelf standard cookie cutter artist website that I've always avoided.

Cue the Sinatra "My Way".

https://www.dennishollingsworth.art