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About IgnisArt

I should be sorry, my lord, if I have only succeeded in entertaining them.
I wished to make them better. George Frideric Handel

The Company

IgnisArt actually started in 2000 as a name for my business cards. Prior to that I had always used Ignisfatuus for my various personal web forays. I've been working in web design since 1996 but nearly always as a company employee. Like many people, I often found myself doing side jobs here and there for friends or organizations, and as I also was beginning to draw again the thought came to me that someday, maybe someday.. down the path of futureness, I might want to have a company. At the time I chose the name there was nothing fixed in my mind about actually starting a company or branching out on my own. It was just groundwork being laid down for someday - a future someday.

In 2003 things started to change in my perspective. Things had been a little rough job wise and the job market didn't seem to be opening wide to receive people in my field. Knowing that it would be hard for me to find something with a company I made the decision to become an independent contractor, using the IgnisArt name along with my own to make it more businesslike. More official. It also made things much easier for me as I was starting to create art and trying to sell it and the name was far catchier than my own.

When 2005 began I took the final step and committed to the decision to make IgnisArt real, and after much work and setup, by the Fall of 2005 IgnisArt the business had been born. IgnisArt is the place where I can sell my art, offer my creative services, and share with others on the web.

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The Artist

My name is Rachel Wilcox. I draw, paint, and design websites, though I fear that much is painfully obvious if you are reading this already. I like to think of myself as a productive adult who attempts to support herself and contribute to society at large, and who appreciates art and music and books to a somewhat obsessive extent.

As far as the art goes, I work in a variety of mediums: pen & ink, marker, watercolor, charcol, fabric paint, ceramic & glass paint, colored pencil, computer digital art, and occasionally jewelry making and murals. Watching ink flow is one of my all-time favorite hobbies. My favorite artistic subjects are human or animal, and I am particularly interested in Jewish art and Judaica items. There is also the Sherlock Holmes fixation that's begun leaking through here and there, which has now achieved it's own section as I expect it to grow.

I have been designing webpages since 1993 - professionally since 1996. There are so many wonderful and delightful things I can do now that were not available then due to technology limitations, but at the same time, I lament the general loss of focus on design ease of use and elegance that has leaked into the web mindset. Many sites just look cluttered to me these days. Cluttered and full of blinking moving screen spam. Everybody with a graphical html editor fancies themself to be a web guru of the most competent degree, and there's this disturbing trend towards, "More is better!" that seems determined to squeeze as much as possible, preferably animated in some way, on a page.

Yes, you may visualize me banging my head on the desk here.

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So... What Is Art?

Some years ago I decided that art, like people themselves, is not something that's easy to pin down and can have a multitude of meanings. Skill in rendering is a factor, but not the only factor, and it's impossible to take out meaning even when the artist actively claims that they don't have any meaning in mind with their image. The thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the artist invariably slip into the choice of image, the colors, the angle, the feel... Art has the power to reveal truth but also the power to mislead, so when the time came to ask the question, "What should I call my company?" I wanted to choose a name that embodied that.

I settled on ignisfatuus, and after a time it was shortened to IgnisArt, not only to make it a catchier name (and easier to spell), but because I think the shorter name embodies more of the positive aspects of ignisfatuus as opposed to the negative ones. Ignisfatuus with an emphasis on the ignis, the fire and the passion, the ability to illuminate.

You know, this explanation is starting to sound tediously pretentious, all the more so in light of the fact that I've recently discovered a paper someone else wrote years ago that uses the same word to describe art and the experience of making it.

Aside from all of the big words and deep thoughts above, ignisfatuus (and ignis) sound pleasing to my ear and are not, to my knowledge, widely used which allows me to be unique.

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Thank you for visiting IgnisArt. Thank you for being interested. I love to hear from visitors, so as long as you are not offering a bank account in Nigeria, body parts, or anything similar, feel free to contact me at any time. :)

ignisfatuus
Etymology: Medieval Latin, literally, foolish fire

a light that sometimes appears in the night over marshy ground and is often attributable to the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter.
a deceptive goal or hope.