Cool Artists

Personal websites of artists of all varieties. I especially like pop surrealism. Some favorites are bolded.
Jump to: photographers | painters | mixed media artists | print makers | illustrators | comic artists | graphic design | dimensional art

Also see: blogroll | interesting people | neat websites

2D Art

Photographers

Painters

Mixed media artists

  • Janelle Lile – paintings of women with nature ephemera (Washington)
  • Kristen Meyer (Salvage Design) – photos of flatlay compositions made from natural elements (Connecticut)
  • Chris Berens – soft surreal fantasy scenes (Amsterdam)
  • Frank Moth – retro digital collage (Greece)
  • Ulla Thynell – fairy tale forest paintings and mixed media

Print makers

Illustrators

Comic artists

Other

Design

Lettering artists

Graphic designers

Dimensional Art

Ceramists

Sculptors

Muralists

Textile artists

Paper artists

Other

  • Christopher Marley – mandalas and compositions made from insects and other specimens
  • Ememem – “flacking” filling potholes with tiled designs (France)
  • Nick Terrell – woodworking

10 replies on “Cool Artists”

I’m a book lover, sci-fi writer, and native plant nerd. Learn more about me, and see what I’m up to now. This is my personal site — you may be looking for my professional sustainability consulting services. Explore my site Join me in pondering my big questions (my approach to organizing my learning and thinking…

Updated 12 April 2024 This is more of a “following” page than a curated blogroll, but I decided to go with the more is more approach 😄 I maintain this page manually so I don’t update it often — also that probably means I’ve missed some feeds I follow 🤷‍♀️ My websites | Personal blogs…

Over the years, I’ve followed hundreds of artists and interesting people on Instagram and Twitter. Social media platforms don’t make it very easy to see everyone you follow, even as they constantly change the way they show you information so you don’t know what updates you’re missing. They also reward frequency and recency. The idea of an algorithm is nice — ‘it’ll show me posts I missed from people I care about!’ — but in practice it’s more like ‘ok thanks for showing me that five people I follow liked a political meme’.
As I move away from regularly using Twitter and Instagram, I don’t want to lose track of everyone who I followed there. So, I made my own lists of people who I follow — their own websites, not their social media accounts or profiles on other platforms:
Cool Artists – artists and craftspeople of all varieties
Interesting People – people with interesting and helpful things to say, from a range of backgrounds (science, art, advocacy, interior design)
Some of these people may also have newsletters and blogs that I don’t know about or am not following, or may have no way to follow their activity at all outside of social media — but at least I’ll always be able to find them. (Presumably anyone who’s bothered to set up a personal website will keep it?)
And maybe a list is a way other people can find new folks to follow too. The main bummer is not having images to represent everyone’s art, but that sounded like a helluva lot of additional work 😉
How I collated these lists
I went through my Twitter and Instagram following lists — which were much longer than I had realized 😨 — and opened bio links to personal websites for everyone who had one. There was probably an easier way to do it, but I manually opened everyone’s profile to remind myself who they were. Instagram’s interface to see who you’re following is Terrible if you’re following any large number of users.
Because I’m into the IndieWeb and everyone having their own website, I decided to be a stickler and only include personal websites, not BigCartel shops or platform profiles or linktrees. That meant a number of artists did get excluded — but honestly the lists are plenty long anyway 🤷‍♀️
I also didn’t duplicate my blogroll, so the websites of people whose blogs and newsletters I’m following aren’t currently on this list… I may go back and add personal websites of people who write newsletters instead of blogs.
When we in the IndieWeb talk about owning our content, the focus is often on the things we have posted ourselves, or saving our likes and bookmarks — but keeping track of who we follow is also useful.
Also posted on IndieNews

I like to support independent shops, artists, and craftspeople, as well as shift away from Amazon and other chain stores when possible. Artists and small business owners have shared how much it’s hurt their business to be at the mercy of the algorithm. Organic reach has tanked, targeted advertising blows, search results suck — small…

Liked How to Weave the Artisan Web by John Scalzi (whatever.scalzi.com)

1. Create/reactivate your own site, owned by you, to hold your own work.
2. When you create that site, write or otherwise present work on your site at least once a week, every week.
3. Regularly visit the sites of other creators to read/see/experience the work they present there.
4. Promote/link the work of others, on your own site and also on your other social media channels where you have followers.

I’ve got 1 and 3 down — it’s 2 and 4 that are the hard part for me 😉
I post here multiple times a week, but don’t write something on my blog Cascadia Inspired every week, nor my pen name website.
Here I link to a lot of other people’s blogs and sites as I bookmark and comment on articles, but not so much on my blog. I post mostly original content there — photos and essays. For visitors to this site, I do have a blogroll plus my new pages of artists and interesting people.
Almost never do I remember to share work from any site — mine or others’ — on social media. Lately I’ve been trying to share my blog posts on micro.blog, though Twitter or LinkedIn would theoretically reach more people 🤷‍♀️
Note to self: offer on LinkedIn to help anyone who wants to set up a new website.

I have too many pages to fit in my nav! Here’s a sitemap of all the pages on this website. Blog Mind Garden Index Links to blog about Big Questions Big Questions Balanced Lifestyle Effective Creative Processes Writing Fiction Thinking Better Information Diet Future of the Internet Resisting Fascism Building Community Transforming Capitalism Collections Cool…

Also see: cool artists | interesting people | indie shops | blogroll Fun projects It’s Post Day! (Sarah Avenir) — email art project How Not to Make a Book (Robin Rendle) — documenting the process of creating a book about typography Werner’s Nomenclature of Colors (Nicholas Rougeux) — A recreation of the original 1821 color…

Replied to 100 things you can do on your personal website by an author (jamesg.blog)

One of my favourite things to do in my free time is to tinker with this website. Indeed, this website is the culmination of years of tinkering.

James has a fun collection of ideas of things to do on one’s website, some of which I have done and some of which I have not. Here are a few more things I have on my website that weren’t on the list: Yearly listening pages to supplement last.fm’s tracking Recreated playlists A page listing…