PORTFOLIO WEBSITE

Client: Bjorn G. Amelan (Artist)

Bjorn is a visual artist whose paintings, made on antique French hemp bedsheets in Sumi ink, acrylic, and vinylic emulsion, have been exhibited at New York Live Arts, The Garage NYC, and Longhouse Foundation, with works held in the collections of Agnes Gund and 21c Museum Hotels. He came to me through a personal connection, introduced by my brother Jonathan, who photographs for both of us.

The ask on the surface was a portfolio website. What it actually required was translation. Bjorn had strong instincts about how his work should feel but no framework for getting those instincts into a site. That gap is exactly where I work.

I started with feeling before structure. His work is intimate and monumental at once, made from the sheets he and his husband sleep on, hung like tapestries, dense with imagery that rewards the longer you look. The site needed that same quality. Unhurried, material, serious without being cold.

Everything followed from that. EB Garamond for the typography, warm off-white and near-black for the palette, a single scrolling home page with the full body of work presented chronologically. No decorative accents. No color beyond the artwork itself. The work speaks for itself and the design gets out of the way.

The build is hand-coded in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no frameworks, no CMS, deployed via Netlify. I also developed a full photography brief for 19 works that needed reshooting, including a shooting guide diagram, and coordinated the reshoot with the photographer.