15 Best Artist Websites In The World For Inspiration In 2022

What You'll Read Here

Let’s straighten out a very likely misunderstanding from the very get-go: an article on the best artists is fundamentally different from one on best artist websites. They are measured by a completely different set of standards. Granted, they have the creativity factor in common, but that’s about it.

The former is a rather impossible task, as it is all subjective anyway, and there are so many, and you will line up an army of enemies if you attempt it, while the second, the best artist website, can be fairly more objective if you have your criteria figured out. In this article, we look at the best artist websites in terms of how they have chosen to go against the popular flow and make at least one part of their website different from the ordinary run-of-the-mill artist website and are, therefore, inspiration-worthy.

So, while being slightly kinder to some artists with a more clever way of designing their web pages, we are not picking favorites with works of art and staying friends with all the dear creatives out there. So, hang tight while we take you through a carefully handpicked list of the best artist websites in the world for inspiration.

15 Best Artist Websites In The World

These are some of the best artist websites in the world with elements that can inspire you. Stay focused as there is a lot to unpack, and take away.

1. Jon Bergman By Wix

Jon Bergman’s website has to be one of the most delightfully eccentric, and what’s even more charming because it only matches his art style: both instantly give you a refreshing blow of creativity and quirkiness.

A widely popular doodle artist, you can tell he takes pride in combining innovation and goofiness in his brightly-colored and spirited drawings and paintings showcased in a pleasantly unusual digital gallery.

The site opens into a middle point of what seems to be a gallery wall, with a message telling you to navigate towards the edges with your cursor. When you do, pictures start to move thanks to a sophisticated slider code, whichever way you move your cursor/finger, with his signature and a small, 3-piece menu bar staying put all along, made possible by a sticky menu and sticky note widgets. Pretty inspiring, right? and certainly “best artist website for inspiration” material.

2. Brimstone Creative By PageCloud

With a motto of simplicity at the core, Brimstone creative group designs exhibition booths with a touch of artistic outlook and elements. Opening the site with a slider breaking down the written messages into bite-sized pieces, the first thing the design is doing is keeping you interested enough to stay and minimizing your bounce rate.

After relaying the brand message across in the header and a short “about” part beneath, it sends you scrolling down to a full-width, multiple-dive, large-image grid layout that is a full-page-long showcase. It moves fast with your scroll and gets magnified when you hover. It keeps it simple without cluttering the showcase with descriptions and the use of white space in between.

An artist website with a full-width and full-length portfolio is a unique way of showing off your confidence in your work and keeping your audience hooked, and that is why it makes the list of the best artist websites in terms of being inspiring.

3. Tamara Halpern, Custom-Coded

One of the most inspiringly unorthodox artist websites is certainly Tamara Halpern’s. Deservingly among the top 3 of the best artist websites for inspiration, this site pleasantly surprises you with a red dot as the cursor that takes you navigating through the site, which she matches in color with the font of the whimsical, slightly poetic, epigram-like sentences she has written into the frames, describing each piece.

Dividing her portfolio by year, she uses off-white background on fully white space, creating a non-contrast contrast, flaunting the color combinations in her painting even more. Putting only one piece on a given space, she includes an exhibit-wall painting every 3 or so pictures, which is a great trick to showcasing her work both individually and collectively

4. June Digan By Wix

What makes June Digan’s website inspiring and among the best artist websites is the two-tone coloring she stays loyal to throughout her fully-width-and-length portfolio website, which matches the only two tones used in her paintings. It’s like she is using the website’s customization options to stress her illustration style, the color concept of her motifs, and her artistic philosophy.

This is a brilliant way to go about showcasing your artwork, being the exact opposite of using white space to create contrast, which is the commonality. She goes the completely opposite way, she uses the same color palette for the background and foreground to emphasize her stance and message expressed through only those two colors.

She also uses the header to give a short introduction of herself as a storyteller both through words and one of her expressive illustrations.

5. Wim Deloye, Custom-Coded

A Belgian neo-conceptual artist, Wim Deloye successfully uses the shock value to get his artistic edge and message across. He characteristically succeeds at breaking the rules of conformity in his website design, establishing it as one of the best artist websites by welcoming his audience to a header themed after a city overview from SimCity, a popular city-building video game.

What he’s done to showcase his work is putting ten of his pieces on a neatly-landscaped piece of property in SimCity. It keeps you smiling while exploring each, and when you click on it, you will be taken to the page where he has categorized his work by year and style.

You can be inspired by his creative take on expressing his style through another example of his style: violation of expectation.

6. Carmen And Louisa By Wis

A Spanish artist duo with a diverse list of artwork, ranging from video installations to sculpture, performance art to 3D animation, and even some neat collage work, has gone about putting the work on display in a rather unconventional and thus inspiring way, winning themselves a spot on the list of the best artist websites for inspiration.

They have scattered their work unevenly, in different sizes: big and small; in different formats: video and image; and in different page settings: full-width to half-width, on a full page of a galley-wall-style portfolio.

What makes their website even more, one-of-a-kind is this: when you hover on a picture, it disappears, showing the piece’s wordplay of a name in white space, and only when you take the cursor away on another picture or video you can see it again.

Showing off their sense of innovation both through their art and their website design, they prove themselves as truly artistic to their audience, what any artist would strive for.

7. Smex By Wix

Smex being his stage name, Alex Weir, a Scotland-based multimedia artist, showcases his whimsical, colorful, and diverse art forms in somewhat of a unique page design. His website consists solely of a single full-width slider header that takes you through his work, photographed with diverse angles and styles, making you feel like you are experiencing a dual-edged artwork.

After sitting through a few rounds of his sliding portfolio, you can click on the straightforward menu consisting of an “about” part to find out more about him, his work, and what you can buy in his shop. He shows off his goof factor with a baseball hat as his logo on top, and seemingly simple, his website is full of artistic character, offers plenty in the way of inspiration, and is definitely worthy of being on the list of the best artist websites.

8. Zaria Forman By Wix

An environmentally-inclined painter, Zaria Forman has taken on a project of echoing climate change in her nature paintings that look like landscape photography; they are so skillfully done.

But what is outstanding and inspiring about her website is that she gives you a homepage made up of a solo image header which is a picture of her from the back painting a powerful ice-covered mountain, basically summarizing her art in one long glance.

When you know who she is as an artist, you have wide choices of what you want to see next; in a horizontal classic menu on top, you can watch her drawings, paintings, and exhibitions or follow her in the press or NASA.

She is one of the few artists that has managed to take maximum advantage of minimalism in expressing herself on a website design, and that is an accomplishment that puts her website among the best artist websites for inspiration.

9. Abang By Wis

Abang, a Korean multi-faceted visual artist, sets himself apart from the bulk of rather ordinary artist websites by subtle humorous-natured design elements, like getting playful with his domain name: www.aaaaabang.com, putting his name at a crooked angle on top, and arranging various types of comically risqué pieces next to each other.

He keeps it interesting throughout by keeping it eclectic: some static illustrations, some motion graphic drawings, and some installations, and mixes and matches them with his commissioned commercial work.

One aspect you can take inspiration from is that he doesn’t put his art in neatly categorized sections, he gives you a teasingly disorderly anti-arrangement of his different genres of art, giving it a high-spirited, mischievous feel, which is a recurring theme in his work, and a refreshing change from the usual stuffy, pretentious air of artist websites, and that is why he is one of the best artist websites.

10. Pedro Campos By Wis

Four design elements make Pedro Campos’s website showcasing his super-realistic, photograph-like paintings stand out and make it one of the best artist websites.

1. Unlike most art portfolio websites whose image section is completely apart and away from their horizontal menu on top, his images are scrolled right through the menu on top, giving the effect that the menu icons are passing through the pictures, nice touch there.

2. The photos taken of the painting are extreme close-ups, which gives it an unexpected in-your-face quality that art lovers are not used to seeing on art portfolio websites.

3. There is no traditional white space as background contrast creation, as the background of the pages is as black as the background and prevailing color of all the paintings. So, no contrast, but a monochromatic take with the elegance black provides.

4. When clicking on another page, you are accompanied by a fade-out fade-in effect, which can have quite an artistic appeal in and of itself.

11. Talia Janover By Wix

A conceptual artist, making use of technology, layered photography, and compounded ideas, Talia Janover portrays herself through her portfolio website, which is distinct and inspiring in two ways:

1. While artists typically either pick a black and white, greyscale, monochrome theme, or they go with a colorful one, she doesn’t let you stereotype her into one or the other, as you see a subtle rainbow of colors as you scroll down.

2. We are used to reading about an artist either at the beginning of entering a website or on a separate “about” page we have to click on. It’s a rarity when we go through their portfolio, and at the end of the page, we see an “about” part, telling us in words what we just saw is about.

Going a different way in two eye-catching ways is certainly enough t make a website one of the best artist websites in terms of being inspiring.

12. Ashaaung Helmstetter By Pixpa

An abstract portrait painter from Seattle, Asha’s art portfolio website strays from the typical in two fashions: the content arrangement and the photos of her work.

1. The orthodox way of laying out pictures and text on a website is usually either a halved vertical setting, where text is on the left and the portfolio is on the right, or it’s a fully horizontal, sometimes alternating arrangement, with text following pictures below or above. This website puts the portfolio in the middle, and two columns of text on the sides, which is a small difference but a distinction nonetheless.

2. Her website is one of the few cases where all the pieces are photographed with her in the picture, either painting them or showing them. In addition to making her femininity-themed art personal and relatable, she adds another level to her self-introduction through her artist website.

Asha’s website strikes you like a breath of fresh artistic air, thus rendering it one of the best artist websites to be inspired by. Read more here: 40+ Artist Portfolio Websites From Pixpa

13. Jason Arkles By Squarespace

A sculptor based in Florence, Italy, Jason’s combination of three elements, all ordinary on their own, makes his website inspiring, and one of the best artist websites for those looking for newer ideas:

A static horizontal menu stays still in the middle of the page while a fast-changing slider takes us through a loop of his white sculpture pieces on a full-page black background.

His brilliant mixture of contrasting concepts in these three elements jumps through: he contrasts the static menu with the dynamic sliding pictures, he contrasts his white sculptures with a black background, and he contrasts the horizontal arrangement of his name and menu with the vertical position of his sculptures.

It’s a brilliant technique of creating a contrast to keep your content engaging and dynamic, both literally and figuratively.

14. Magnolia By Weebly

Going straight to the point by giving you a fast-moving slideshow of her photos right when you arrive at the homepage, she tells you how her website is different and one of the best artist websites for inspiration by putting a miniaturized array of all the slides right below them, and the menu at the very bottom.

The contrast between a fast-moving large image and the static small images gives the user two different experiences of the same photo, while the bottom menu maintains a promise of finding out more when you are done.

This website gives you an idea of how playing with traditional and mainstream ways and places of presenting the elements of an artist’s website can make your website memorable for more than your artwork.

15. Ellen Von Wiegand By Wix

A contemporary print-make, Ellen has done her slideshow differently. It IS a slider, but one that doesn’t actually slide on its own, but it puts a small horizontal album of the photos underneath for you to click on and turn over to the next. In other words, you get to slide it at your own pace and discretion, enhancing your autonomy and, thus, user experience.

Another clever trick she has used in presenting her work in a more unique light is using different stages and positions of a single work as her homepage portfolio. One picture is when she is painting it, one is when it is on the wall, another is on a wooden table, and another is hung as part of a series from a line.

This is a brilliant choice of presentation: instead of a variety of her pieces, she shows one in a variety of ways it can be artistically appreciated, which is an innovative way to go, and certainly inspiring, and deserving of being called one of the best artist websites.

Best Artist Websites, in a nutshell.

There are more than a handful of successful artists with inspired and inspiring works of art, but sadly there are not too many artist websites that are inspiring, as most artists go with rather mundane ways of portfolio websites. If you are one of the artists that care about being creative all the way through, with every single part of what represents you, you would want your website to stand out and impress, along with your art.

In this article, we have gone through the best artist websites in the world for inspiration, each of which has chucked conventionality in at least one element of their website design, and it has made all the difference. A difference has been acknowledged by giving them a place in the list of the best artist websites.

Read through again, see if you can draw inspiration from a couple, and put together one of the best artist websites yourself that speaks to your individual brand of creativity as an artist. You can also give WordPress themes for artists a read, where have listed some more inspiringly different and hence best artist websites for inspiration.

15 Best Artist Websites In The World for Inspiration in 2022