An online Artists's Community

I love reading about artist's lives. Who they painted with, who they had lessons with, how their relationships or lack of influenced and or enabled them to work.
Artist's colonies and communities, where techniques and passions are shared are an important part of an artist's life. From lessons, to schools of art with different schools of thought, to working plein air in groups, to working in shared studios, to artist's retreats, artists-in-residence programs and finally, to online communities.

This post is about an extraordinary on-line community that sprung up via a blog.
The blog is http://differentstrokesfromdifferentfolks.blogspot.com/
by Karin Jurick a prolific and talented artist. This blog isn't Karin's main artwork site, however, it's a blog with a difference.

Karin began the blog September 2008 when her dog Jack passed away. She put online an image of Jack and posted a challenge for artists to paint Jack. 56 artists took up the challenge and their work and tribute to Jack can be found here
http://differentstrokesfromdifferentfolks.blogspot.com/2008/09/photo-of-week-my-jack.html
I found this so endearing. Most of us have loved and lost special furry friends and in some way artists from around the world came together and acknowledged Karin's pain and wished her well by painting their tribute of Jack. A community had sprung up.

Each week Karin would post a photo and artists would take up the challenge. For 54 weeks artists took up Karin's challenge. December's challenge of 2009, a repeat of 2008's December challenge; Karin asked artists to email her a photo of themselves. In return they would be emailed a photo of a fellow artist to paint. 180 portraits were produced and are online. It would have been an enormous logistical effort undertaken by Karin, of co-ordinating, emailing and posting all the artwork. In January 2010 Karin needed to focus on her work for up coming exhibitions and so informed everyone that she needed time out from 'Different Strokes for Different Folks'.

In February Karin writes...'Oh my dear God. It's not every day I wake up to snow and never have I woken up to 119 different portraits of myself...'.
How did this come about, well, Jill Polsby had secretively contacted the online community of artists, setting the challenge to paint Karin's portrait as a form of appreciation for her time and effort. Imagine opening those 119 emails. Totally blows me away!