To raise awareness of fine art globally, through establishing personal connections between professional Artists and people who love Art.
From our perspective Artists are often under-valued, under-exposed, and under-appreciated. Through our membership base of over one million people, we are able to bring immediate and lasting attention for Artists who would otherwise remain under-exposed. Very simply, if we can expose one person to a work of art they would have otherwise missed, we have made a contribution to the art community. With a million people, that contribution grows exponentially.
We are selective of the Artists we showcase, and the body of work we represent. In fact, we only showcase one or two works by the Artist that serve as an entry point for our members to explore that artist further, both on and offline.
What clearly distinguishes AAD is that any of our members can rate, comment on, and directly impact an Artist's success. This provides an unparalleled connection between Artists and people who love art. All it takes is a account to influence and make a contribution to the art community as a whole.
Geoff launched Artistaday.com along with Dave Pitman in Feb. 2007. Since then he has hand selected every artist you have seen on the site. After nearly 1900 consecutive days of posting artists, he still gets excited to find a new artist.
"Dave and I started Artist A Day because we love art. I'm an engineer so I guess it's one of those things where you admire those that have talents you don’t. I'm certainly don’t consider myself to be visually creative so getting to meet, and help artists is really something I enjoy. The goal from the beginning was to help artists gain exposure to a global audience of people who love art. Since most artists have a difficult time marketing themselves, I'm happy to apply what I know to an area that I love."
Dave Pitman graduated from East Carolina University with a BFA in Painting and Drawing. Today Dave still paints but uses this same passion for combining color, composition, and fine art photography at his Charlotte based design firm 485,inc.
"I never liked Math. Math is black and white and absolute. Everyone will always arrive at the same answer. There is no discussion. No different perspective. In art, 100 people can look at the same piece of art and come away with 100 opinions–each unique to that individual. There is discussion in art. There’s emotion and passion in art. An artist has the unique ability to create something that causes a reaction in it’s viewer. It could evoke an emotion, recall a memory, a thought or change someones view entirely. Art is a powerful thing. Sadly, artists are often under valued, under exposed and under appreciated."
The first artist we featured was Los Angeles, CA illustrator Jordan Crane.
We only had 398 visits in the first month. More than half of those were from Geoff and Dave.
We launched our iGoogle gadget. Eventually the gadget would reach 850,000 installs.
By the end of 2007 we had over 1.6 million visits. A much lower % of these visits came from Geoff and Dave
Visits grew by 2,042.13% in 2008, and another 463% in 2009.
Our first tweet was on April 22, 2009. It read "Looking for the next batch of artists to feature. Really into paper cut artists lately...know of any good ones?".
We relaunched the site with a brand new design and features such as "My Gallery" which let users save their favorites to a personal gallery.
Our Facebook page surpassed 30,000 fans. There was much rejoicing.
We launched our guest curator series, giving some of the people we look up to the opportunity to share their favorite AAD artists with our users.
We posted our 2000th consecutive artist, Eric van Straaten.
One of our favorite publications, Communication Arts, made us their Webpick for the day.
Our Facebook page surpassed 40,000 fans.
Surpassed 1,000,000 shares/re-shares across social networks.
