By Anna Gora
While some art galleries require a long winding bus ride, an admission fee, or an ambitious quest for a parking spot, Easel.ca is free and available at the click of a mouse.
The website, which offers both free and paid accounts, lets artists create virtual gallery spaces to display and market their work.
Pawel Dwulit and Mike St-Jean, two university students, created Easel.ca last year for artists to showcase prose, music and visual artwork in a single community.
“You manage your own gallery, you’re your own curator. It’s in real time, there’s no delay in terms of uploading stuff,” says Dwulit, a history student at the University of Ottawa.
Within a few years he hopes Easel.ca will have a real gallery space that could hold events nightly.
Being a website, St-Jean admits that Easel may attract certain types of artists, particularly those who are technologically inclined and whose work can easily be uploaded, such as music.
“A lot of [older] traditional artists we find either don’t use our site or don’t use it to its full potential,” he says.
Maureen Korp, a local independent curator and art history professor at Carleton University says she sees a future for online galleries but suggests that the artists’ mediums will change.
“They won’t be the ones who like mushing around in paint and it certainly won’t be the ones who like working in three dimensions,” she says. She predicts Internet galleries will eventually become home to artists videos, animation and graphic art.
The loss of seeing the works in person, according to Korp, is a big problem with online art.
“Part of how you know a work is taking it in with your full body, not just your eyes,” she says.
Dwulit and St-Jean say they realize that an online gallery can never replace the real thing.
Until they receive enough funding to rent a permanent space for Easel, they say they’ll try to hold live events at least twice a year.
Their first event called Easel Outside was held in July and another, Easel Inside, is scheduled this week.
Because Easel is a non-profit organization, Saw Gallery is providing free use of both its gallery space and club for this event to showcase work by both visual and performance artists.
Kwende Kefentse, a local musician known as DJ Memetic, joined Easel.ca last summer.
“To somebody like me who’s interested in all those elements of the arts it just sort of speaks pretty organically to what I like to do,” he says.
He says the website has given him exposure which helped sell CDs that he would likely not have sold otherwise.
According to Dwulit, Easel differs from other similar websites because it isn’t limited to any specific medium.
The idea, he says, came to him and St-Jean when a friend suggested the terms, “see, hear, feel” for the three forms of art that are now Easel’s theme.
The website is divided into three main sections: “see” displaying visual art, “hear” featuring music, and “feel” containing works of poetry and prose.
The goal is to spread art globally and to bring artists of different forms together says St-Jean, a musician and former band member of The Architects.
Dwulit is also personally involved in the arts as a photographer for the Fulcrum, the University of Ottawa’s student newspaper.
Although based in Ottawa, Easel.ca has already attracted artists from around the world including England and the United States. There are about 80 member artists and membership has been growing steadily by a couple of memberships each month.
Dwulit’s next plan is to approach the National Gallery of Canada about collaborating with them, linking Easel.ca directly to the gallery’s website.
“If we had somebody like the National Gallery and their board of directors behind us, we could really have this become a concise database or collection,” he says.
St-Jean even suggests the possibility of an Easel channel once Internet television becomes more popular.
“We’re crazy, we’re way too ambitious for our own good,” laughs Dwulit.