Sigrid Olsen Art is the Groovy Link of the Month for September. Sigrid Olsen started out in textile design, creating handmade printed fabrics. Her work then evolved into fashion design, her clothes being known for their bright colors and prints as much as their chic, yet comfy, shapes. She was bought out of her company by Liz Claiborne in 2008, with a non-compete clause that forbade the commercial use of her name in anything relating to textiles, including fashion and homewares.
This site showcases her work in watercolor monoprints and its application in stationery and other 2-d and 3-d products. The artist also offers weeklong art/yoga retreats in lovely locales, and runs 2 galleries in the Gloucester, MA, area.
Her work is refreshingly colorful and uses hand-carved rubber stamps to create relief-print patterns that are both naïf and graphically sophisticated. The site seems to be based on iWeb templates, yet still professional and easy-to-navigate, which gives hope to those of us who are intimidated by “professional” web-design software. She also utilizes iPhoto’s book and calendar products as part of her online mail-order store’s offerings. This site demonstrates that you can use pretty simple means to run a small creative business online, and still retain individual control over your sales and customer relations.
I especially admire Sigrid Olsen for continuing to use her creative skills and business savvy and pursue her goals as an artist/entrepreneur after an event that would cause many creative professionals to either retire or run off to southern France to paint plein-air and exhibit only in “little” galleries.
