Artwork: Detail from “Hollywood” by Jennifer Davis via @thejealouscurator on Instagram.
Danielle Krysa knows a few artists. Make that hundreds. As the creator of The Jealous Curator blog, Krysa has been interviewing creative people and showcasing a wide array of their artwork online since 2009. Her reach as an arts advocate goes beyond a blog, however; she’s a podcaster, she’s published three books (Creative Block, Collage, and Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk), and her Instagram account boasts 109K followers. Suffice to say, this girl knows her stuff. It’s about time, then, that she take her art appreciation to the next level.
Enter the Fancy Schmancy Gallery, an online space where art lovers can visit any time they want to peruse a collection of work curated for, and exclusively available on, that site. “I decided to do this with hopes of making unique, original art accessible to everyone everywhere,” Krysa says of her motivation for opening the gallery on her blog. “OK, I also just wanted an excuse to give assignments to my favorite artists to see what they’d make!”
Screenshot: The Fancy Schmancy Gallery’s landing page with background artwork by Stephanie K. Clark.
For the inaugural exhibition, the prompt was simply “West.” This resulted in six vastly different interpretations, starting with a psychedelic Hollywood sign set against blue hills and a pink sky by Minneapolis-based artist Jennifer Davis. Australian illustrator Sandra Eterovic‘s “The Art of War” is a masculine, symbol-laden triptych while Jessica Brilli‘s oil on canvas painting “The Pool at Harold’s Place” is so evocative, you can almost feel the cool water lapping over your bare feet. Contemporary collage artist Anthony Zinonos contributes the minimalist “Sunsets” and Martha Rich adds a touch of the surreal with a talking tiger motif in her acrylic on wood panel creation “Go West Woman”. Last but not least, Stephanie K. Clark‘s “The West is My Favorite Color” is a cactus-dotted landscape made in an unlikely medium: embroidery. (We must admit, we’re a little disappointed no one was inspired by “West” to paint Kanye or any of his kin.)
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The art in the Fancy Schmancy Gallery’s exhibitions are for sale, though because they’re one-of-a-kind works, you have to get there fast (and have a lot of cash) to purchase them. For the rest of us, there’s the gallery’s online gift shop, which, while currently on the skimpy side as far as inventory goes, will eventually be a one-stop shop for unique art at more modest prices. (The two prints available there now are priced at $200 and $120.)
Shows at the Fancy Schmancy Gallery run for two months, which means art lovers will be exposed to new work by dozens of awesome artists over the course of the next year. Finally, something to look forward to in 2017!
