“I Have The Hobby Of Color” Gian Luigi Ruggeri
ABOUT
This “about” page will try to explain you the story behind the website Art-Galleries.org.
The oldest content of the website dates back to 1999, the past century. It was when I decided to become a webmaster (yeah, deejays are cool, but I preferred to learn how to become a webmaster on my own instead).
The times were very different, PCs had incredibly less power and memory than now, and the software we used were also less powerful.
The PC monitors we used had a standard resolution of 800X600 pixels so the images of the graphic art galleries were created with those PCs and for those PCs and their standard resolution.
The internet was something new and not for everyone, the connection speed was a fraction of the current one, we had 56 kbps modems and no wifi, while today the average connection speed is 1000 times that one or more.
In 1999 I created the site GraphicArtGalleries.com, which became quite successful with top results on all the main search engines for the following years, but it was a hobby site, for one of my passions, not a work. (View Wayback Machine of 2001)
I made the mistake of letting the domain name GraphicArtGalleries.com expire, I contacted the new registrant of the domain who asked for thousands dollars to sell it back to me, I gave up and registered instead Art-Galleries.org and moved there my old site in 2005 (View Wayback Machine of 2005 or you can visit Art-Galleries.org/old where I uploaded a backup copy of the old site). I learned a lesson from what happened with GraphicArtGalleries.com, now I own hundreds of domain names.
Art-Galleries.org remained one of my hobby sites for some time, but the time came I had to devote all my time to other matters such as studying and working and decided to stop providing my content online as I had no space in my agenda for my graphic art hobby and its website management.
But graphic art has always been a passion and it found the way to keep popping up at times when I had some free time and needed to relax a bit.
Now, at the beginning of 2022 I decided to put my digital art works online again. And as you can see visiting the different galleries of the site I am also adding new content I am creating nowadays.
ARTISTIC APPROACH
I would say that my work can be defined as digital pop art, deeply connected to pop culture.
This is not pop art in the sense of imitation or homage to Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein, although they remain undeniable references, but rather pop art as a living, evolving language, tied to its own time.
I am also influenced by street art and artists such as Banksy, whose work reflects contemporary society through powerful visual symbols.
I believe my art reflects the pop culture of the late 1990s, when the project began, the evolution of digital graphic art as a whole, and the current pop culture of the 2020s, shaped by social media, digital identity, and contemporary visual aesthetics.
I often work with images of models, actresses, and public figures, especially those who are followed and reinterpreted through modern social platforms.
I am particularly drawn to black and white photographs, because they represent a neutral, timeless base, a canvas that in my eyes is waiting to be transformed.
Color plays a central role in my process.
I use color to disrupt, reinterpret, and rebuild the image, turning something familiar into something new.
The goal is not decoration, but transformation: creating a visual tension between photography and digital painting, between realism and abstraction.
I usually select high-quality, artistic photos very carefully. Each work is meant to stand somewhere between portrait, pop icon, and emotional symbol.
Art-Galleries.org is therefore both an archive and an evolving project:
a bridge between early internet creativity and contemporary digital pop culture.
I hope you enjoy exploring these galleries, from the oldest works to the most recent ones.
Gian Luigi Ruggeri