Fecal Face is opening a gallery

This appeared yesterday on SFweekly's site. My favorite quote: "You can appreciate the work much better when it's seen in person" (from Fecal Face founder and editor John Trippe.)

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Fecal Face to Unleash New Art Gallery Saturday: BetterKnowanSFBlog

Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 10:40:00 PM

Every Tuesday, SF Weekly's news blog The Snitch profiles one of the Bay's many cool blogs in a segment we call... BetterKnowanSFBlog! This week, it's really more of a website than a blog, but anyways, we've got the scoop on San Francisco's freshest art gallery!

(Photo courtesy of fecalface.com)

By Tyler Callister

San Francisco's top art website Fecal Face will open a real life art gallery in Hayes Valley on Saturday, featuring the artists Kill Pixie, Jay Howell, Jeremy Fish, Kelsey Brookes, Andrew Schoultz, Hilary Pecis, Tara Foley, and Maya Hayuk. "It's nice to see work online but having a physical space to show and support artists is going to be great," Fecal Face founder and editor John Trippe says. "You can appreciate the work much better when it's seen in person." (Click "more" to continue reading)

The new 200 square foot gallery, located in Hayes Valley at 66 Gough St., will have its opening show from 5-8pm with an after party at The Uptown.

Trippe says he started Fecal Face in 1998 as a "Xerox-Kinko's style zine." In his then 22-year-old mind, the name "Fecal Face" just sounded funny. "I didn't think the site would grow to what it's become," he says. "At times I considered changing the name and then I'd be like 'ah whatever.' Now it's just the way it is."

Fecal Face gets about 13,000 unique visitors a day and hosts tons of local art info, a space where users can post their own art, and blogs by popular artists. The website says it's, "developed every day with php, html, mysql, Javascript, a hand built content management system, a canon SD800, a scanner, Photoshop, and a lot of love."

Trippe says the internet has helped local artists' careers because it allows them to easily sell their work across the world, and many collectors dish out fat cash for a painting without even seeing it in real life.

He also has some advice for aspiring artists on the net: ditch the MySpace and Flickr accounts and get a real website with your own URL. "It's nice when you can really see that someone's taking their work seriously by presenting their work in a nice way," he says.

Trippe feels confident about the current San Francisco art scene, and the new gallery, although modest in size, could become an important part of it. "It's a very creative, amazing city," he says. "There's always gonna be awesome artists here."

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Story & photo copied from SFWeekly's blog, the Snitch.