Whether you’re a professional interior designer, a do-it-yourself home decorator or an art aficionado, overstockArt.com’s new iPhone application has something for everyone.
The customizable new overstockArt.com Oil Paintings application is now available as a free download from the iTunes App Store. The application is an extension of the popular online art gallery.

The overstockArt.com Oil Paintings mobile application allows people to browse through the gallery’s robust selection of fine art and use the paintings to decorate their walls and share their home redesigns on the go. Using the built-in camera, users can take photos of their space and visualize oil paintings hanging on their own wall. The application then allows users to share these images via e-mail, Facebook, text or Twitter.

“Our new application is breaking down the walls of traditional brick-and-mortar stores by allowing users to gauge how a painting will look like in their space before they purchase it – something they cannot do in their local gallery,” said David Sasson, CEO of overstockArt.com. “Now you can buy art for your favorite room without ever having to leave it!”

According to a survey conducted by Adobe Scene7 in February, 62 percent of consumers with web-connected mobile devices have purchased products using their mobile devices. Out of the consumers making mobile purchases, a Forrester Research, Inc. study found that only five percent of them are purchasing home goods.

“We are one of the few online décor retailers investing in creating tools like this to make shopping for art via mobile an empowering and engaging experience,” stated Sasson. “We hope to help increase the percentage of consumers shopping for home goods via their mobile devices with this new tool because it makes shopping for art that much easier.”

The application is free to download and can be found in the iTunes App Store.

Artist Become (ArtistBe.com), the new online community for creating, selling and buying artwork online, today announced its launch. ArtistBe.com is the latest venture by the popular online art gallery overstockArt.com, the go-to source on the web for purchasing art reproduction oil paintings.

ArtistBe.com is an online platform providing tools and resources to enable emerging and established artists to showcase and sell their artwork. The online community focuses solely on original art and its growing amount of artist members.

“With ArtistBe.com we are doing more than creating a place for up and coming artists to display original art online, we are creating a new social platform for artists and art lovers alike,” stated David Sasson, overstockArt.com’s president and CEO.

Some distinctive features of ArtistBe.com include:

• Connecting artists and art aficionados around the world – Fellow artists and art lovers can connect and communicate with other community members, comment and rate each other’s artwork and become fans of other members. The site utilizes the latest in social networking features such as sharing via Facebook and other social networking sites. Artists can create their own galleries for free and have a dedicated URL to showcase their art, biographies, exhibitions and more.
• Art purchasing options – Artwork can be purchased as an original piece of art directly from the artist, or as an affordable canvas transfer painting. Artists get royalties for every reproduction sold.
• Easy site navigation – Like overstockArt.com, ArtistBe.com has arranged its content into a variety of different galleries specified by artist, subject, style and type – artists will dictate how this online art community will look in the future. The site is extremely user-friendly and easy to navigate.

ArtistBe.com provides a unique means for emerging artist to be discovered, and to assist established professionals in finding new clients without relying on agents. There is no cost to join and members can sell their art without commission fees. Artists receive royalties for every canvas reproduction sold. Reproductions come in a variety of sizes; pricing is dictated by the individual artists.

“Our commitment to art and the art world started with overstockArt.com,” said Sasson. “Now we want to branch out and give art lovers around the world a chance to find the next great artists of our generation. ArtistBe.com gives artists the ultimate platform to become recognized for their work and to make a living out of their creations.”

Art is not an easy thing to sell, let alone online, but ArtistBe.com will have the unique ability to leverage itself with its parent company, overstockArt.com. Sasson stated, “This relationship allows ArtistBe.com to introduce and promote its member artists to overstockArt.com’s network of thousands of art lovers, which will help them grow awareness and ultimately sales.”

ArtistBe.com’s founding members come from around the world, with artists hailing from the company’s Wichita, Kan. headquarters to Calgary, Canada; Warsaw, Poland; Oberhaid, Germany; Sherman Oaks, Calif.; and Brooklyn, N.Y., to name a few places.

Google has launched a new discovery tool, called Art Project www.googleartproject.com. Visitors can explore 17 of the world’s most well-known museums. Not only can you walk the rooms of the galleries, but you can get close, EXTREMELY CLOSE, to the surface of some of the more famous paintings that hang on the walls. Fans of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” for example can zoom in on the canvas and see every detail of this paintings brush strokes and texture. How you ask?

Google provided the same cameras that were mounted on cars to capture the street views of cities all over the USA for this project. Team members then pushed these cameras around each participating museum to make an interior map of each location. Then to add another diminution to a visitors experience samples of art from each of the 17 galleries were selected and photographed with one super high-resolution image. Each image containing around seven billion pixels, for those who do not know how large that is, it provides you the same close visual as if you were shrunk and standing on the surface of the canvas itself. IT’S REALLY COOL!

One down fall with the program is the navigation of the rooms. It seems a bit limited compared to actually being there and you find yourself outside the museum if you get too excited with your clicker while walking the rooms, but for those who can’t travel to experience the work in person it is a close second.

Two big thumbs up for this ingenious idea for Art lovers everywhere!

According to research issued today by the popular online art gallery, overstockArt.com, Pablo Picasso’s Facebook® fan page was the most “liked” artist page in 2010. The list is a compilation of the top 10 most popular classic artist fan pages from 2010.

The top 10 artist fan pages on Facebook are:

1. Pablo Picasso – 4,754 fans
2. Vincent Van Gogh – 1,604 fans
3. Salvador Dali – 1,024 fans
4. Claude Monet – 940 fans
5. Pierre Auguste Renoir – 818 fans
6. Amedeo Modigliani – 714 fans
7. Edgar Degas – 704 fans
8. Paul Cezanne – 670 fans
9. Frida Kahlo – 655 fans
10. Wassily Kandinsky – 602 fans

“Facebook is a wonderful tool to use to engage with consumers, and is also an effective tool for keeping an eye on consumer trends and practices,” said David Sasson, founder and CEO of overstockArt.com. “By monitoring artist fan pages on Facebook and determining which ones are most popular we are provided a great indicator to what is hip and the most desirable art on the market, which helps us identify some of the best selling oil paintings we want to be sure to offer to our customers.”

This weeks game board is all about the circles, see if you can find these well rounded paintings and their artists.

How well do you know your Art? Above are images of paintings from overstockArt.com currently available in our online gallery.  If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We will provide the correct answers  in two weeks (on Friday, Oct. 22th), along with our next ReproduceTHIS: Know your Art challenge and mystery box!

Special thanks goes to Drew for playing. This weeks mystery box will need to stay a mystery, but I do have a nice runner up prize for you…

STARFISH KEY CHAIN!!!!  :-D

Will the next players get to see what’s in our mystery box? Leave your comments and then come back in 2 weeks for the next game and prize.

Inc. Magazine recognized overstockArt.com (www.overstockArt.com) as one of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The Wichita-based online art gallery ranked 1,106th on the 2010 Inc. 500|5000 list.

overstockArt.com also ranked 55th out of a multitude of other companies representing the retail sector. The company’s 271% percent growth rate from the past three years was one of the largest contributing factors to its high ranking. This is overstockArt.com’s first appearance on the prestigious list.

“We are incredibly honored to be recognized among the nation’s elite private companies,” said Sasson. “overstockArt.com’s growth is directly attributable to the talent and commitment of our team, the high quality of our art and the degree of confidence customers have as they shop with us.”

Co-founded by David Sasson and Amit Yaari in 2002, overstockArt.com began as a small home-based business with only a handful of unframed oil paintings to choose from. Today, overstockArt.com is one of the web’s most successful online art galleries. Headquartered in Wichita, Kan., the company has more than 20 employees in 3 continents. overstockArt.com offers the most comprehensive selection of oil paintings and frames to choose from in the online oil painting industry — currently more than 100,000 decorating combinations — including works by Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Klimt, O’Keeffe, Munch, Dali and much more.

As an Inc. 5000 honoree, overstockArt.com shares a prestigious pedigree with such notable alumni as Intuit,
Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Jamba Juice, Timberland, Visa, Clif Bar, Patagonia, Oracle, and scores of
other powerhouses.

The 2010 Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2006 through 2009. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by the first week of 2006, and be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies. The top 10 percent of companies on the list constitute the Inc. 500, now in its 29th year.