Marcus van Soest - some delightful emails
No sooner do I write about an artist in Holland who has a show in NYC, Marcus van Soest, than I get an email and salutation from him over the internet via real time video.
Aside from liking Marcus’s paintings, which I do, he is a new breed of artist that knows how to use the Internet to foster online communication, totally eliminating distance. I feel like Marcus van Soest just became a friend of mine - and we haven’t even met yet (I missed his opening last week at MonkDogz).
Marcus does something that I have heard about and seen hotels do (an online cam of his studio) but not an artist. I think that’s a great idea to foster communication and fans!  Think about it…what it the Internet if not “instant” ….. things need to happen fast, communication is “instant” and sales are often “impulse”.  Communities can form quickly and you can find out you have fans and followings from all over the world….if you know how to foster use the medium, partake in it.
I was talking to Amy Crehore about just that, the other day. When Amy tried to explain her large swings in traffic and internet fans to some fellow artists she exhibits with …they did not understand …. they could not follow.  The internet changed EVERYTHING…and many people haven’t realized it yet….but luckly for those that do, like Marcus van Soest and Amy Crehore.
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Dear Marshall , have you seen that I published your rss-feed on powerpainter.org?
http://powerpainter.org/ArtNYC/news
My auto updater doesn’t work properly, so I update it by hand on a daily base… Never mind , it’s fun to do and this way I read your articles…
By the way, nice artworks on your page, I especially like the atmosphere in the one with the lady in front of the mirror…
To thank you for writing these articles I ‘ ve created a businesslink to ART NYC from http://POWERPAINTER.ORG , hope you get a lot of traffic from Europe through us…
Sincerely
Marcus van Soest
By Marcus van Soest on October 17th, 2006 at 11:00 am
i am online with my cam fooling around with effects,
i am in the image, the view reaches a point of abstraction,
mixing quicktime clips with almost realtime image..
if you’relucky you can see me play with these camfx,
sometimes i place prefab photoshop iconimages on
strategical positions within the composition.
Look at two films mixed to become psychedelic,
oh yeah and then the mushrooms…
Anyway, one can spot me doing my art thing,
painters work in hiding, alone, sometimes soundless,
see the guy hunting for images, concentrated, the
world vanishes, travelling without moving…
Square wheels drive better…
But if you’re unlucky i am in this boring nerdish pc position,
or asleep, don’t thinki let myself being watched as an act of
narcism,it’s a way to create a site with a visible living being,
you can see you don’t just act with a machine, but with a realtime
living creature that interacts on movements on the web..
well sometimes the cam is offline whenever i choose to do so,
i have a private life too!
http://powerpainter.org/webcam
By Marcus van Soest on October 21st, 2006 at 3:09 am
Dear Marshall, POWERPAINTER.ORG has some technical problems I can’t solve at the moment, the database is corrupted, the navigation was changed and more, possibly done by some stranger hacking in my admin pages, bad luck!
Damage control: I redirected the entire site to the main index page and linked that page to my personal webpage at exto, this way the hits coming from google and other search engines don’t get lost ! What I did more: I created a page on my EXTO site in which I copied the above article including links and stuff… This is great publicity and I am quite happy with it.
Hope you like what I did, there’s also a link at my linkspage…
Oh yeah the path to the webcam changed, it is http://powerpainter.org/cam/powercam.html
greetings
Marcus van Soest
By Marcus van Soest on November 10th, 2006 at 1:30 pm