I have a gallery again.
It would be so easy to say ‘I can’t tell you what that means to me’ but part of my thing is that I do tell you what things mean to me, all the time, so I’m going to try.
Let me start by telling you about the original Stardancer gallery, which many of you remember and an even larger number of you weren’t around for. Because in an era before big sites like DeviantArt, when personal websites were still linked by webrings and coded by hand, I had a website that used a database to show visitors not only the latest thing I’d uploaded, but the comments left by dozens of people on that offering.
It’s so hard to explain how crazy that was. There were no Wordpress packages, no visual editors, no gallery plugins. There was no user validation by Google or Apple, no social media, no expectation of interaction or community. Everything had to be coded by hand and installed by someone who wasn’t afraid of a UNIX command line. And from 1999 until mid-2012, the Stardancer gallery served, on average, 5 pieces of art a week, with over 175,000 words of commentary from me, for thirteen years, and those pieces accrued between 5 to 40 comments from visitors. When it finally went down, there were 2906 distinct pieces of art in the database, and of those 253 had multiple versions—I uploaded them as I worked on them with commentary on each stage. Some of those pieces had 9-10+ stages where you could watch me wrestling with them (complete with titles like “OMG Ugly Stage” and “needs a background”).
For context, 175,000 words is probably about 700 tightly-packed paperback pages. That’s how much commentary I wrote. And that’s not including 1993 keywords and 60 projects I was tagging everything with.
I wanted that gallery so I could share my art with all of you. But it was also functioning as an organizational layer for me. When I was trying to remember a story, a character name, a forgotten piece of art I wanted to finish, I would search my own gallery. It was my backup brain, and my sketchbook index, and it kept me focused. It even had basic project management tools, since each of those 60 projects had a status: complete, in progress, ongoing, on hold, trunked.
The sunsetting of the original site was inevitable. You can’t run software with visions of enterprise-level functionality on a friend’s personal computer. But I was in the very unusual position of having started out with a system custom-built for my idiosyncrasies, and nothing on the market was good enough. I kept poking and not loving any of my choices. Host all my artwork on some aggregate gallery site or shoehorn it into a cookie-cutter Content Management System? No thank you. So I never replaced Stardancer, and for fourteen years, I’ve been running without that second-brain infrastructure.
And now, I have it again.
Now I can think ‘what was that thing I said about that one character in that one sketchbook?’ and search and find it. I can mutter, “Where is all the Ai-Naidari language work” and pull up the notebook. I can think ‘Didn’t I want to finish that picture of the dala fox? What sketchbook is that in?’ and I know.
I know!
And unlike the first gallery, this one can have everything in every sketchbook. Because I streamlined the parts I hate (editing, watermarking, uploading, making thumbnails, importing into the database) and left myself only the parts I enjoy (writing comments and tagging). And while some of the original Stardancer’s features aren’t online yet, like multiple versions of the same image, they’re designed and in the queue… and this version can have cool new features, like user favorites, and requests from users who love something and want me to finish it.
I’m so forgetful. I keep trying to explain to people how much of a cheesecloth my brain is with just about everything. Without rigorous documentation, lists, and notebooks, I would be completely useless. Art is one of those places I document my thoughts and keep myself pointed in the right direction. The fourteen years I didn’t have a gallery are literally gone in my brain, artistically. I have to dig up the physical books and thumb through them to remember anything about them. So I think you can imagine my relief that this is now available… not just for you to enjoy. But for my sake, to keep myself from vanishing because I am no longer observing myself.
Right now the new gallery has 2644 images across the 42 sketchbooks (and one unfinished language notebook) I’ve scanned and uploaded… of the nearly 200 I have. I’m only just getting started. I am crazy excited, I can’t even tell you.
I have a gallery again.
I have a gallery again!
Anyway, this is the part where I talk about how you can enjoy the gallery:
If you make a free account, you can favorite things, make requests, and view 50 images a month at full size.
If you’re paying here on Locals, you get unlimited access to everything in the gallery via a seasonal access code, and every three months I pin the new one to the top of the feed.
If you prefer to buy a single year-long pass, I’ve got you covered on the shopify store here: $65 lets you fire and forget for twelve months, if like me you hate subscriptions. That's here: https://studiomcah.com/products/the-stardancer-gallery-one-year-pass
Every subscription and purchase helps keep the gallery open and supports our free users, so thank you so much for chipping in!
What can I say? Welcome home, my friends. Welcome back!
