Many artists use Galeryst to augment their existing online and offline presence and one such artist is Maya Hirasawa（平澤）Brauer. You can see the link to the virtual gallery on the homepage of the HRSWstudio site.
Maya Hirasawa Brauer of HRSWstudios is a visual artist working across a diversity of media, with a foundation in drawing and painting. Born in Tokyo amongst the bright neon lights and character faces, their work lies somewhere between cute and unsettling.
Maya Hirasawa（平澤）Brauer
Maya describes this work Play with Me:
Created as an extension of a drawing I created at a residency in Netherlands, De Ateliers, “Play With Me” currently lives in Florida with collectors. This painting is an exploration of human sexuality and power dynamics, hidden under the sunny disposition of vibrancy and pulsating lines on a green field.
In December, Galeryst launched something new, Creative Coding, an add-on for Adobe Express that allows anyone to create graphics in Adobe Express with a block-based coding tool. Adobe Express is an easy-to-use web-based design tool that can help you create anything from a flyer to an Instagram post, from a website to a video. If you have a gallery on Galeryst, you can easily access it in Adobe Express to get images of your gallery and artwork in it using the Galeryst add-on for Adobe Express.
Creative Coding runs inside of Adobe Express and provides blocks (built with Google’s Blockly toolkit) that represent many of the visual elements and operations that you can do within the graphical canvas of Adobe Express.
Creative Coding workspace
In addition to blocks specific to Adobe Express and general programming concepts, we have added a category of blocks to access imagery and artwork details from galleries on Galeryst. This would enable you to create a catalog of artwork, a series of Instagram posts highlighting your artwork in your gallery, or any sort of graphics for your artwork that you are displaying in Galeryst.
Galeryst Blocks in Creative Coding
Here is a simple example of how you might start coding a page that lists all the artwork in your gallery:
Creative Coding Blocks
Though Creative Coding is meant for beginner programmers, it creates JavaScript code that could be used directly in building an Adobe Express add-on. With a guided learning plan (with a printable certificate created at completion) and lots of help content we wanted to make something that can be used in classroom, at home, or by anyone who wants to learn how to code with graphics. We released it for free to enable the next generation of creative technologists with the super-power of coding and hope you give it a try or share it with someone who might want to learn programming.
One option for artists who share their artwork on Galeryst is to have their artwork included on the Artwork Map page. I added this page to Galeryst because I have done most of my artwork en plein air in my journals when traveling and I thought that seeing it on a map would be interesting. Anyone can have their artwork shown in the Artwork map if they take the following steps:
Add location data to your artwork either with a location, city, state, and country or with latitude and longitude coordinates. Given a location, city, state, and country Galeryst uses Bing mapping services to look up location coordinates.
When you customize your gallery, check the Display map of artwork locations option on the Details tab and then click the Update gallery button.
The update to Galeryst is that we are changing the mapping service from Bing Maps to Azure Maps – as we got a notice that the Bing Maps service was being retired soon. Changing the service required some work and while doing that we improved the experience to load all the artwork locations much more efficiently.
galeryst artwork map
One of the improvements was to handle artwork that are in the same location as shown below, picking the pin at Barcelona shows a list of artwork that I created there – one of the most inspiring places in the world to create artwork. Selecting one of the artworks, opens a small card with an image of the artwork. Clicking on the artwork will then take the visitor to the gallery and artwork in it. It is a fun way to discover galleries. Give this new map a try and please share any feedback. We have tested it on computers, tablets, and phones!
Map artwork selector
We encourage you to add locations to you artwork and enable maps in Galeryst so people can find all the inspiring locations around the world to create artwork!
On Galeryst, it has been so inspiring to see the range of artists who have chosen the platform to share their artwork. We have seen many students and young people use it. One talented artist is Xuanfei, a New York-based high school student who uses Galeryst to showcase her multimedia artworks and the photography of her elderly relatives. In her own words, “I like to use multiple mediums to create art from sparks of creativity that come to mind, allowing myself to also indirectly address enduring issues through brushstrokes.”
The Perfect Mix of Scenery by Xuanfei
As she describes this piece in her gallery Vivid Vistas:
“At first glance, this artwork seems simple like the capture of a moment in time. But the bigger picture behind this work is that not everything in the world has changed to fit industrialization as the efforts to preserve nature still exists but in smaller parts of today’s world. To me, the view of a mountain is a safe space of astonishing natural beauty with its dense, evergreen forests, lucid and sparkling streams, and rugged peaks. In 2024, I visited “The Pink Mountain” online, which inspired me to create this artwork from my imagination and creativity using sand to evoke texture. This is a piece of sand art on canvas that I created in 2024, one of my favorites, as it depicts a stream unpolluted and grimy but healthy due to the presence of algae, diverse and colorful flowers, and pink peaks that got their hue from the sunset above and the mineral composition of its mountain. Mountains allow for an ecosystem of wild animals to thrive and give off a sense of spiritual realm, Mother-nature, confidence, determination, and the embodiment of life.”
