Conánn FitzPatrick

There are so many great artists both alive and dead whose work has only been seen by relatively few people. I have loved art since I was a kid and like to think that I have a pretty good grasp on what is out there, but I am always comming across new stuff by people I have never heard of.

I love to spend ages looking through the shelves of the art section of big book shops, though recently I have been spending this time browsing other shelves for books on XHTML, CSS and PHP. Go into any large bookshop and there will be thousands of books about hundreds of different artists, but it does not take long to realise that 90% of the books are about 5% of the artists, Picasso, Monet, Matisse, O'keeffe, Rembrant etc. I love them all but it makes it realy hard to find new influences, bookshops and publishers are in the business of making money and catering to the lowest common denominator is the safest road. The democratic nature of the internet leads to the same problem. Search for anything on the internet using google, msn or any search tool and they will promptly return the highest ranked results. All of this makes it very hard to find fresh inspiration.

Mark Harden has managed to put together an amazingly diverse range of artists and give concise and informative information about each of them, along with a very cool way of displaying the reproductions. There are such a broad number of artists listed on this site, that there will probably be someone new for even the most versed art lover.