The Art Attack is an organization dedicated to supporting visual arts of most media, styles, and subject matters. We make every effort to support and nurture visual arts online and offline. Currently, the Art Attack is primarily Internet based. However, we hope to achieve non-profit status soon. Once we attain non-profit status, we aim to extend our support of the arts to hold gallery showings, community projects, scholarships, etc. Our main goal is to cultivate artistic skill and spread the arts.
About the Website
The Art Attack website is a online artist community dedicated to providing its visual artist members of all skill levels an interactive environment to develop their talents through, among other things, constructive criticism, collaboration, and group learning. Learning and getting constructive feedback are the main goals of the website. Therefore, the Art Attack is not a gallery to simply display work and get complements. The gallery portion of the site is more of a critique environment than a gallery in the traditional sense. While many artists, especially of higher skill level, may find constructive criticism of any kind insulting or annoying, especially from those of a lesser skill level, we believe that artists of all skill levels have room for growth and that even the minimally trained artist has intuition to see areas for improvement. We believe artists should never be content with their skills, and should always strive to improve them.
The Art Attack believes its members benefit more from exposure to a broad range of media, styles, and subject matters. Therefore, we support art of all visual media with minimal restrictions on subject, content, and form. Additionally, the Art Attack does not attempt to cater to nor exclude specific media, styles, or subject matter.
Likewise, due to the lack of geographic boundaries imposed on the internet, the site contains artists from all over the globe. The international nature of the site only adds to the diversity by including other’s cultural and social context into the art creation and critiquing experience.
Brief History
The Art Attack website was started in 1996 as the personal gallery for founder Blaine Flynn Garrett. As a developing painter and illustrator with a varied range of styles and subject matter, Blaine searched the Internet for art communities to receive feedback to improve his skills.
In 1999, Blaine mostly stopped his search after finding that most art communities on Internet were special interest themed communities that discriminated against his varied style. As a reactionary response to the restrictive guidelines of these themed communities, Blaine extend his own website to display artists’ work in addition to his own. The website was small and contained only a small number of artists-most of which were personal acquaintances of Blaine.
In spite of the small size, the site attracted many artists from around the Internet because it offered sanctuary to visual artists of all skill levels, media, and styles. In early 2001, the website moved to its current domain name and began accepting application portfolios from new members.
Since then, the community has grown to over 300 members strong. In spite of increasing number of members, the website retains its community feel while continuing to serve its intended purpose as a communal learning environment for artists of all skill levels, media, and styles. Blaine still solely administrates and programs the website in his free time as a side project. However, the plans have been made to try to make the Art Attack a non-profit organization in order to better organize and better help the art community the site serves. The future of Art Attack should prove to be a quite exciting journey.