Artist Revises Her Own Website, Creates a Masterpiece

March 5, 2012 - PRLog -- One of Fast Smart Web Design's long-time clients, Naima Rauam, revised her website with a little help from the website design firm. The company offers training on Adobe Contribute and basic web skills to its clients who want to manage their own websites.

This month, Naima's site, http://artpm.com,  is featured on http://fastsmartwebdesign.com.

Features of the redesign include:

* A personal invitation from the artist to view and enjoy her artwork
* Reorganized gallery pages that are organized by media rather than subject matter (she noticed at a recent live show that people gravitated to prints or originals rather than subjects)
* Thumbnail images of Naima that introduce three pages: about the artist, how she makes a watercolor, and upcoming shows
* Thumbnails of individual artworks at the top of each gallery page to make it easier to move up and down through the galleries
* Detailed descriptions of the paintings, including details about how she chose the scene for the painting

Naima Rauam is recognized for her watercolors of the Fulton Fish Market, which she has documented with her artwork since the early 1980s, and the South Street Seaport historic district.

Naima's fish market paintings have become known for their luminous light. She says:

"During the fish market's nocturnal hours, it is thrilling to walk along dark streets and suddenly encounter oases of light among the old and well-worn buildings of the seaport neighborhood. This is a rich environment of color and texture, a splendid foil for light's mystery and drama.  I'm particularly drawn to light at night, and am eager to explore it and find what secrets it holds...The watercolor medium is ideal for expressing light's elusive qualities.  Brush strokes of wet pigment coax sensuous luminosity from ordinary white paper, allowing extraordinary moments of light to linger forever."

From 1984 to 1997, she shared space with a wholesale smoked fish company, living and working in the same building where cod was smoked and sold. The ground-floor sales area became her studio-gallery, Art in the Afternoon (fish in the morning). When the fishmongers, who operated in the early morning hours, left each day, Naima set up her art display and started painting in the afternoons. The art gallery was dismantled each evening to make way for fish again the next night. The building was sold in 1997, ending the unusual arrangement.

Scenes of the New York waterfront also figure prominently in Naima's work. Hitching rides on tugboats is her favorite way of getting close to nautical subjects and obtaining interesting views of the harbor. Her new studio at the South Street Seaport overlooks the East River and the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, a source of never-ending inspiration for her.

While exploring the harbor, Naima developed an interest in painting construction sites. She documented the progress of several projects, including the North Channel Bridge across Jamaica Bay, Queens. A series of watercolors of this bridge, done over a two-year period, is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Naima exhibits in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad. Her work is in private, corporate and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, National Air & Space Museum, American Merchant Marine Museum, Farnsworth Museum, Pfizer, and the Bank of America. She also lectures, teaches, and curates art exhibits.

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Fast Smart Web Design creates websites and consults on website design for non-profits, small businesses, faith-based organizations, artists, and schools. Knowing that many small companies and organizations can't afford to pay yearly maintenance fees, the company specializes in showing their clients how to maintain their sites themselves.