News Page
March 21st 2025:
I have made the decision to retire my old website, that runs under my own name. PaintandPastels.com will replace it, as it has been doing this past year. However, PaintandPastels will be moving from its current webhost provider to the one that has hosted me here for ten years. I am now in the process of setting things up; so at some point christinederrick.com will cease to operate. This may well happen by or before 7th April this year as I make the changes. The reasons are purely financial. The company currently hosting PaintandPastels is good, but their costs have risen. I am not prepared to pay the extra. The domain name however will remain with me, I am not yet ready to relinquish it.
March 30th 2024: info updates.
Transition complete. PaintandPastels.com is now live and willbecome the main website taking over from my old one. For the time being I'll keep my old site operating but will sort out the redirect after the holiday period; there will also be a new 404 error page for those coming into the old site from other various directions. Please don't use the https in front of www in the url, otherwise you may end up on an insecure page; the hosting service (Crevado) is in any case providing full security for pages.
March 26th 2024: info updates.
Well, things have moved quite fast, a lot of images have now been transported over to the new hosting platform and it's just about ready to go. The new website is called PaintandPastels.com.
Everyone visiting ChristineDerrick.com url will (or should) be redirected to the new website. I know there will be some problems; I've never had to do a re-direct before, so any problems will have to be solved on the fly, as they say. If the redirect doesn't work too well (or at all), then I will have notifications up here to give directions. I'm hoping the changeover will be during the Easter holiday.
March-April 2024: info updates.
I am planning to move my site to a new hosting platform. It will take a while to restructure but will eventually save me a lot of time in terms of coding, which, though I'm happy to do it, isn't really what I wish to spend my time on. The platform will be the same one that currently hosts my experimental abstract pieces. When all this will be completed I don't yet know, but I will say so here. The current webhost for this site still has just under a year to run, on account, but the increase in spam and abuse of the mailbox system is now increasing, so the sooner I move things the better, probably.
I plan to retain my current domain name but the actual title of the new website might be different....all still to be worked out.
Februaryy 2024: info updates.
January 2024: info updates.
I've made a difficult decision over the holiday period. I am not going to do much more now with this news-page, mainly because the web-stats indicate a notable reduction in true visitor numbers and a greater increase in spam. In addition, I'll be trimming the size of the website down to just a few pages; retaining a Sold page, plus a small landscape section with a few of the newer works. To balance this, I am keeping around 12 or so artworks at ArtGallerySW, which is a much larger platform and gets more visitors. See link at bottom of page. This reduction may already have been done by the time this update goes online.
Last year's local exhibitions suffered enormously from the economic climate and it isn't likely to improve for some time to come. I'm also getting older and often rather less productive than in past years, so having a smaller website will mean fewer spaces to fill, with pictures. We'll see how it goes, but I think that 2025 (or maybe even 24) might be the last year that I run my own site. Many years ago there was far less competition from other painters and also from bigger platforms such as the major online galleries that you now see. It all adds up to someone having to spend more and more time sat at a computer trying to promote a personal website...and it is now becoming more and more complex to do (and expensive). There are a number of well-organised website-portfolio providers online that provide good quality designs and templates, whereby you can simply upload your pictures plus text and get something that looks good. I'm using one for the experimental and abstract paintings, it keeps them separate from my usual work and costs nothing.