Thirteen Galleries

DeviantArt.com is a place where new artists can post their work and get feedback from other artists. It is also where established artists can connect with others in community and build a fan base. When the artists make such things available, prints, mugs, or downloads can be bought and the website takes a cut. My art is there. Not only do people post their own work, but they collect links to other works so they can share their favorite artists with everyone. I have organized my favorite works of art from those on DeviantArt.com into thirteen galleries:

Ideas

​In Ideas, I place those pieces for which I value the description and the ideas contained therein. These are generally not works of art in themselves, but are part of something greater. These are mostly speculative biology diagrams, but I also collect works in progress or rough sketches on bad paper that show great creativity, though not always great talent.

Curiosities

​In Curiosities, I collect creatures or artifacts of interest to me. I value things that are creative, strange, cute, and make you wonder just what it is and what it is for. This gallery is mostly for aliens, but there are also photographs of sea creatures, kittens, carvings, and furniture.

Majestic

​In Majestic, I collect those creatures that seem to be indwelled by that elusive property I call majestic. They don’t necessarily have to be big, but it helps. This is where horses and dragons usually go. I love dragons. There is something about the shape and texture of the average dragon that somehow resonates with me.

Creepy

In Creepy go those things that are not merely strange or scary, but exhibit a lot of “unknown.” There are ghosts, zombies, shadow beings, and what look like the mineralized remains of mutant people.

Fantasy

In Fantasy go not things, but whole places. There may be people or things in the picture, but they are either incidental or just there just to help show the strangeness or the beauty of the place. This gallery is where I place imaginary places of interest.

Reality

Photographers are artists too. It takes skill to capture an image properly. Even if they did not make the canyon, spider web, or flower themselves, reality is still art. It is God’s art. In the Reality folder, I place photographs of real, beautiful or interesting places.

Surreal

Reality contains real places and Fantasy contains imaginary places, but at least they are still places in the sense that they have spatial continuity. In Surreal, I place those places that show evidence of wormholes, confusion over dimensionality, inconsistencies of scale, ambiguities of distance, or places that are just plain weird, yet have a sometimes indescribable pattern of order to them that speaks to me at some level allowing me to treat it as true art and not mere confusion. I also place here any impressionistic or symbolic pieces that catch my eye.

Abstract

​In Abstract, go abstracts. Most of them are fractal, but not all. I like to imagine some of them as nebulae in deep space or as agate formations. As with most surreal places, most abstracts are ugly or boring because my brain doesn’t make sense out of them. On the contrary, those few that my brain does make sense out of are among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Action and Emotion

Places and things are nice, but it is people that make the most interesting art. People have dreams, goals, histories, and can interact with things and places in complex ways, including making their own art. In Action and Emotion, I place those people that capture an essence of something meaningful to me, such as bubbly happiness, or those people that seem to be engaged in some sort of interesting action, such as a magic battle. Action and Emotion is also a catchall category for any people that I like but don’t fit in any other category.

Playtime

​One of the largest subsets of those essences of meaning is that which relates to childhood and play. Playtime is where I put pictures of children, babies, adults engaged in child’s play, and any artwork that makes me feel playful or nostalgic.

Barefoot or Nude

Another large subset of essences of meaning is that which relates to nudity. Nudity means many different things to me. Uncovered skin is able to feel so much more, whether waves, rain, sun, wind, or the brush of grass. My favorite pictures are those that show naked humans walking into uncharted forests, heads held high, with nothing to protect them from danger but their wits. In addition to sensual enhancement, vulnerability, and confidence, nudity is also about connecting with nature and being what we are in a sense meant to be. To a small extent, nudity is also about childhood nostalgia, since we are all born naked and have to be taught as toddlers to cover up. Children have a certain lack of self-awareness that holds a special place in my heart. Nudity is also central to my idea of art. Art is a form of expressing oneself – usually the expression of the ideas in our minds – but display of the body is the purest form of self-expression. In nude art the models are at least as much true artists as the photographers and painters. Most of all, in a world wherein real-world nudity is so rare and commonly condemned, it is refreshing to find artwork that tries to hide nothing. Artistic nudes are the purest form of art there is, and apparently I’m not the only one to think so because they are also among the most common forms of art I happen to come across. The Barefoot or Nude folder is where I collect pictures that illustrate any of the above values. Unfortunately, most pictures in this folder are marked as mature content, so in order to see them you must first make a DeviantArt account and then toggle the settings to “show mature content.”

Self Expression

As alluded to above, the purest form of self-expression is the expression of the self, by which I mean body art. In Self-Expression, I collect pictures of those showing off creative dresses, hats, fingernail polish, hairstyles, makeup, and body paint.

Just Beautiful

​All of the pictures I collect have some beauty in some form, but some pictures have raw, unmodified beauty. Of all things in the universe, living things are the most beautiful. Of all living things, humans are the most beautiful. Of all humans it is adult females that have the most beauty. Of all the parts of the adult female human body, it is the face that can show the most beauty. Faces are special because this is how we connect to others. In Just beautiful, I place beautiful faces of adult female humans. They are God’s best works of art. It is my favorite category.