Art.Net: About: How Art.Net (Art on the Net) began...

Art.Net (Art on the Net) came into existance in June of 1994. The idea of having such a site came to Lile while she was involved in an open studios event in April. She was displaying many of her new oil paintings in her studio when a friend and young entrepeneur came through and wanted to purchase an oil painting entitled "Art on the Net". They talked about how wonderful it would be to have art up on the Internet for viewing and he offered Lile internet access for a WWW site that would help artists share their art. So like many things in the art world, the site began with a barter with Lile trading the oil painting, "Art on the Net" for an Internet connection for one year.

Then Lile got an old unix machine together (being a unix systems administrator, this was fairly simple) and registered art.net with the Internic. Once the domain was created, with the help of friends, she brought up art.net onto the Internet. Lile started contacting artists about the San Francisco Bay Area who might be interested in showing their works on the Internet and helped them come up on art.net. She visited many cafe's to see the local artists works and enjoy the coffees. When she saw works she liked, she contacted the artists and offered to help them come up on the Internet and the WWW via art.net. Many artists took the plunge and are now resident artists here at art.net.

Artists from around the net started hearing about Art on the Net or would discover the art.net web site via the WWW. They would then submit works to get studios here on art.net. And in the process of it all, the artists began creating a community where artists supported one another in their efforts to understand the Internet and the Web. Artist have begun to use the Web as a medium in and of itself just as if it were an oil paint or watercolor medium.

Currently we represent over 450 artists on our site who are from around the world thus making art.net an international site. Thank goodness for places like Babelfish! We have poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, digital artists, performance artists, animators and much more residing here. Each of these artists maintains their spaces which makes our site possible and even more interesting. :)

We accept donations from people and organizations that would like to help us in offering this service to artists around the world.