500 paintings: time to take a breath and clarify some criteria

Published
by
Jaime
on August 26, 2008
in Community and General
. 2 Comments

Paintmap has just reached 500 paintings distributed all around the world including the submarine environment. During this time, the Paintmap team was more concerned about solving technical problems and improving the site easy-of-use although always paying attention to the preservation of Paintmap’s spirit and goals.

In this context, we are sorry to feel obligated to discard some paintings because of the fact that they do not conform to our basic objective: the subject has to contain some message relative to some definite geographical point. The Paintmap team realizes that controlling this requirement is sometimes difficult or ambiguous and the contribution of the artist through his/her comments is then fundamental.

A nice example of this is the painting and the comment by Linda Brachach (http://www.paintmap.com/?item=631):

treasures

“These are some of my treasures that I left behind when I sold my cottage in Lanai City. I could not take them, but I wanted to remember them.”

This comment gives to the painting the information required to be considered a coherent contribution to Paintmap.

A purely conceptual painting, whatever its artistic value could be (the Paintmap team does not include art critic members) is outside the goals of Paintmap and we encourage conceptual artists to make use of the appropriate forums for their contributions.

Finally, we would like to note that some of the initial contributions to Paintmap could perhaps be considered of this nature because at that time we were observing the tendencies of people’s interest in Paintmap. After 500 paintings we have a more clear set of criteria to manage and decide about the adequacy of member’s contributions to preserve paintmap’s character but we will always be open to your comments and suggestions about this issue. Thanks!

New paintmap server. We move to Chigago, the greenest City for a Data Center.

Published
by
Luis
on August 8, 2008
in Features and General
. 0 Comments

This week, paintmap has moved all its services to a new dedicated server located in Chicago.

We have almost doubled the RAM, improved the drive arrays and got a CPU upgrade. Furthermore, we think the new location will be a good place to have a global coverage.

This way we hope to improve our visibility on search engines and give a better service to our American users.

Thank you for your patience.

NEW AND IMPORTANT: About paintings being moderated

Published
by
Jaime
on August 4, 2008
in Community, Features and General
. 0 Comments

As you have probably detected, after finishing the “beta” version we have considered that, in order to preserve Paintmap spirit (see our blog post, july, 28) moderating submitted paintings is a necessary step before these are definitively published.

One of the most common reasons to “freeze” a painting is the lack of a comment by the artist about its painting. In relation to this, we have to recall another blog post (June, 14, “A plea for describing painting subjects” ) including JoeKaz’s statement:

“It would be great if all artists added a description to their paintings - some do, but some do not. The subject may be very familiar to the artist, but not to someone else in the world. A short text saying what the painting is of, what landmark we are looking at, or some historic trivia, or anything that the artist thinks someone else would find interesting - this would add so much more value to PaintMap.”

We cannot, however, extend the strict application of this criterion of moderation to all the paintings of those artists who started to cooperate with Paintmap since its first beta launching. This is the reason why any of you can find some paintings published without the artist’s comment while you are being asked to add your comment before your work is published. Please, understand our position and goals whose only objective is improving Paintmap and making this a friendly and useful site for all painters concerned with the world around us.

Preserving the environmentalist spirit of Paintmap

Published
by
Paintmap Team
on July 28, 2008
in Community, Features and General
. 0 Comments

Paintmap’s character and goals appear summarized in the frontal window of the site. Up to now, Paintmap’s collection includes some 350 paintings distributed all around the world and created following very different techniques and artistic styles, from figurative hyper-realistic to abstract. The basic premise was, however, always accomplished: that is, the subject can be related to some particular physical or environmental space. This is what characterizes Paintmap and makes it different from many other web sites where artists can show their creations.

Paintmap is in its first growing stage and it is now when deviations from its original character have to be careful controlled. The main problem appears to be related with the uploading of paintings that, because of their creativity origin, cannot be geo-positioned. It is important to note that this has nothing to do with the stylistic approach. A landscape can be expressed in many different ways; the important fact for Paintmap users is that they are faced up to some particular and geo-located piece of the environment (natural, urban, human…) through the creative approach of the artist. If the artistic work is of an exclusively conceptual character, it cannot serve the objectives of Paintmap independently of its artistic quality.

This is why the technical team of Paintmap has opened a way to moderate uploaded paintings. The process includes three possible actions:

(1) Geo-located paintings with a comment or, at least, a short sentence describing the subject: the painting is validated and published.

(2) Geo-located paintings without any kind of comment or with an inappropriate location: the author is requested to comment or to improve the map positioning before the work is definitively published.

(3) Non-geo-located, conceptual works whose subjects cannot be assigned to some particular geographical framework: sorry, but the painting will be considered unsuitable to Paintmap goals and its publication rejected. The same decision will be applied to paintings or comments including spam or promoting web sites of products.

The Paintmap Team apologize for the unavoidable implementation of this filtering process whose only objective is to preserve the spirit of the Paintmap project and to serve that parcel of artistic community concerned with the environment in a wide sense. We encourage other kind of artists to take advantage of the diversity of web spaces open to any kind of artistic production and acknowledge the interest they have shown in Paintmap.

Last improvements of Paintmap beta version

Published
by
Luis
on June 27, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

1. The management of “Friends” is fulfilled. You can build a list of “Friends” in “Your paintings, user” window together with your list of “Favorite places”.

2. The information about “Favorite places” is now public and can be examined from any user profile.

3. The user can now delete any of his own comments.

4. Problems with painting media “watercolor” and “digital art” are now eliminated. Please test or correct some of your information saying “not set”.

5. It is already possible to contact with any user through his personal file. Information about users remains confidential since no contact details arte provided. That information is protected against spam through our Catpcha (code of human control).

6. Several problems related with viewing paintings on the map have also been eliminated (particularly when surfing with a large scale zoom).

7. Some minor changes permit a better viewing of listings as well as to guarantee the compatibility with different browsers and OS.

In absence of relevant problems, with 300 paintings loaded and 60 registered users, many of them active Paintmap artists who have helped to depurate this first version, it seems to be the right moment to take out the beta stage and go ahead with a more stable site.

Thank you so much to all of you who help us with this startup!.

A plea for describing painting subjects

Published
by
Jaime
on June 14, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

Because of its relevance, I would like to dedicate a specific post to a topic raised by JoeKaz in this blog (June, 13). Joe wrote:

“It would be great if all artists added a description to their paintings - some do, but some do not. The subject (bold cursive mine) may be very familiar to the artist, but not to someone else in the world. A short text saying what the painting is of, what landmark we are looking at, or some historic trivia, or anything that the artist thinks someone else would find interesting - this would add so much more value to PaintMap.”

And here was my answer (slightly improved):

“The comment by Joe is absolutely opportune. It is fundamental to the Paintmap goals that artists provide the kind of information mentioned by Joe. It would be also very nice that those users who have the ability to do it, go ahead from geography, ecology, history, etc and express their feelings about the subject painted or the painting experience. The posts by Sarah (e.g., http://www.paintmap.com/?item=359) are very nice examples of this ability. I realize that, personally, I lack Sarah’s ability to transmit painting feelings as she do so nicely, but many of you are surely able to go this step forward. In any case, we all should include at least some short site information that could not be derived from the map or from the pictures provided by Panoramio. This will without doubt be welcomed by Paintmap users.

Paintmap in Bravura Academy Newsletter

Published
by
Jaime
on June 11, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

Bravura Academy (http://www.BravuraAcademy.com), a resort in Arcos de la Frontera (Cádiz, Spain) under the direction of the painter Micaiah Hardison, celebrates painting workshops under the tutorial of invited famous artists. In its June Newsletter, you can read about the success of their first workshop conducted by Calvin Liangs as well as the presentation of the Paintmap project. We are very grateful to Micaiah for his support to this “paintings around the world” adventure.

Two hundred and fifty and going up

Published
by
Jaime
on June 8, 2008
in General
. 3 Comments

I was preparing some words to celebrate the 100 paintings in Paintmap when I saw that we were quickly going towards 200. Well, said to myself, we shall celebrate the “two hundred” paintings…But now we are exceeding 250 and I think it is a good moment to be marked in the growing process of Paintmap.

Micaiah, Martin, Dough, Epifanio, Vivien, Sarah, Dazza, Erika, Csich, Julie, Joe, Donald, Lindsay, Jim, Rob, René… The enthusiasm that many of you have shown with the project encourages all us to attract more people to show their artistic views of our common environment. I know that there are other colleagues interested in participating but different technical problems are delaying their presence among us, so we expect to see an increase of the Paintmap community.

Some of you are intense travellers that move around the world and produce artistic descriptions of very diverse environments. Most of us, however, are centred around more or less concrete spaces, may be at the scale of a country (e.g. Holland), different size regions (e.g. Mid-Whales, Margaret river area, Lambertville-New Hope, Cornualles…) or small places like Mawgan Port, Cape of Gata Natural Park and cities like Málaga or Almería. This is why, at this moment, the identification of “cool places” is rather difficult and it is closely related with the geographical distribution of Paintmap members. We should expect, for the future, to see the geographical (and subject) coincidence of different artists on a common space or environment, something that will increase even more the interest of Paintmap. We have to be patient and, first of all, to be convinced that the site runs properly, that users have all the tools necessary to make exploring Paintmap an easy and funny experience and –very important- that contributors feel free to extend the information about the values found in the environment selected as a painting subject. This will surely be an stimulus to reach the global environmental goal implicit in Paintmap.

Thanks to everybody!
Jaime

Coming into Paintmap (II): managing your paintings

Published
by
Jaime
on May 29, 2008
in General
. 1 Comment

Let suppose that you have uploaded a certain number of paintings. Now it is the time to visit your particular area within Paintmap and manage the information content.

After loggin you have the window below, where the click now is on “manage your paintings”

After clicking, a new window appears:

(!) First of all, note that Paintmap adscribes a subdominion to you : http://username.paintmap.com which represents your particular gallery within the site. When somebody writes that address or find it and click on it, he will be directly presented with your collection of paintings in a window that we will see later.

1) You have the possibility of including your avatar: browse your pictures or images, define a size 100×100 and load it.

2) You can also write some information about you as well as to introduce a link to your particular website if you want.

3) When you have defined your profile, simply send it.

This is what will appear if somebody is directed to your subdominion http://username.paintmap.com: your profile, your world distribution of paintings and the miniatures of all of them:

You may need to scroll down when the number of paintings starts growing:

And, then, you can edit or delete any of your uploaded paintings:

There are other possibilities in the “Managing” window: you can build a list of favourite places or friends. Please feel free to explore these possibilities that surely will contribute to make your artistic travelling even more enjoying.

Coming into Paintmap (I): registering and uploading images

Published
by
Jaime
on May 29, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

In the following pages we shall introduce Paintmap in a step-by-step way.

Once you enter http://www.paintmap.com the first thing to do is sign in:

Then a window appears:

As a New User, you have to define a user name, a password and give and email, then Register. You will receive a prompt answer telling that you have successfully registeres as (your user name) and ask you to login.
Once logged, Paintmap open the following window:

The green line says:
“Now you can upload a new painting, manage your paintings or explore de world.”

Let start by uploading a new painting: When you click on that option, a windows like this will appear:

Now,

1) Search the place where your painting is located: write a place (e.g., Crystal Cove, California) and you will transported to that place.

2) Playing with the +/- scale button and moving the map you should be able to place the red marker upon the location of your particular painting (ot course, this is only approximate when the subject is a landscape but the goal is to bring the user to the area that attracted your attention as an artist. You can explore other’s contributions to see that).

3) Click on “Examinar” (browse) and look for your image file and open it. Its route will be indicated in the box next to “Examinar”. IMPORTANT: the image has to be a JPG file and Paintmap admit images up to 5Mb size (this is a rather large format in comparison with most painting sites)

4) Now there are several boxes to be filled with information that would be interesting for any user: title of the painting, size, technique, a short description of the subject if you will, its availability and your name as the author.

5) Clik “Send image”. Your painting will appear next to a Google map which indicates its geographical location in a window like this:

(To be continued)