Nathan Sawaya calls himself a brick artist; using not real bricks you understand, but Lego blocks. It’s rather amazing what you can make with them, despite their obvious limitations (curves are tricky…) Anyway, he has made sculptures large and small, and some can be found in museums and exhibitions. (tbt*)

Museums can be awfully tiring places to wander through and most of us will never have the chance to visit more than a few dozen. You can access hundreds of museums at the World Visit Guide that offers a convenient gateway to them, complete with photos and descriptions in French and English. Some articles are comprehensive, some skimpy. To get a feel for this unorthodox but rewarding site, choose a museum you have previously visited to understand the riches that may be available here. (David Henry)

It looks rather like a giant metal worm burrowing into the ground near London’s Tower Bridge, six feet in diameter and sixty feet long. You pay a small fee and step up to the screen at one end and watch people like yourself moving around near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York; wave at them and they wave back. “Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed.“ Judge for yourself this phenomenon created by artist Paul St George by checking out the website of the Telectroscope, that was visited by the Queen in June 2008. (David Henry)

An admired friend once claimed that he never watched TV, except for C-Span2’s weekend programming called Book TV, which he never missed. Authors of non-fiction and biography are interviewed and may read from and discuss their work. They are then questioned about it by various journalists, resulting in an interesting and often humorous interaction. C-Span maintains Book notes, a permanent video archive of these programs for your enjoyment. (David Henry)

Artists are always “thinking outside of the box” which roughly means they are more creative than you and I. One example that intrigues me is Jonathan Yuen’s site that shows silhouette graphics that appear to be done with a wide black brush but with intricate detail also. The navigation is also a bit mysterious, the only clues being a few small red buttons that change things in unexpected ways. It’s well worth a visit. (Webby 2007)

The Sacred pages of the Online Gallery at the British Library offer access to artistic wonders of various religions. I was captivated by a video of an artist demonstrating how a medieval manuscript was painstakingly prepared. (I wonder what happened if the monk accidentally dropped a blot of ink on a finished page?) An interactive item succinctly compares the faiths of Judaism, Islam and Christianity while podcasts (Audio) cover topics such as Holy Lands, Unholy Wars and The Future of Faith TV. (Kim Komando)

The Etsy site should appeal to all those who like handmade crafts, whether they make them, buy them, sell them or simply like to look at them. The categories list stretches from Accessories and Arts to Weddings and Woodworking. If you’re trying to match a particular color, click Color and matching is a snap. Even for a casual visitor, this is a great place to browse.  Etsy was a winner in the About.com list of ten best sites of 2007. (David Henry)

The Banksy phenomenon has captivated Britain, including its traditionally stuffy arts establishment. His graffiti/paintings are strong on humour, tromp-l’oeil and social commentary. They usually appear unannounced, overnight, on a hoarding or exterior wall and are usually welcomed by the local Council – they add “arty”entertainment without depleting their Budget for Public Art. Banksy has now crossed the Atlantic and his indoor art commands enormous fees from the glitterati. (Guardian Weekly)

I always thought that representation of the human figure was forbidden in Islamic art. Not so, I found out, on browsing through MWNF – Museum With No Frontiers. In addition to the permanent exhibition, try Discover Islamic Art in the Mediterranean with many objects contributed by the great museums of the world. The zoom tool lets you get close up to the wonderfully rich objects on display here, and of course it’s not so tiring as wandering through a real museum… (Saudi Aramco World)

Surely Women in Film is a work of art at the Various and Sundry website! Here you have 80 years of portraits of cinema actresses – but wait! each is morphed to the next in an extraordinary compelling sequence with a cool soundtrack of music for unaccompanied cello (by Yo Yo Ma?). To get a longer look at a particular face, click on the pause button. (Andrew Conda)

Here’s another site that offers you the chance to produce paintings like a great artist, this time Picasso—at Mr. Picassohead. (Already in the archive are similar tools for Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Mondrian.) You start with a blank canvas and drag-and-drop various faces, noses, ears and the like, placing them wherever you fancy. Tweak the shapes, adjust colors and pretty soon you may have something like an original Picasso—well, who can tell? Check out other folks’ efforts at the Gallery. (Kim Komando)

At Picli there’s a nice collection of photos submitted by amateur photographers everywhere. You can get to comment on them, vote for your favorites or submit your own. The popularity of sunset shots is quite striking. Other interesting parts of the site are for computer-generated shots and Natural Media. (Kim Komando)

Located in Sarasota on the west coast of Florida, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is now restored and expanded to its new position as a major American museum. Following a long period of neglect and decay, a substantial effort by the community has resulted in a major complex of three museums: the Museum of Art, the Circus Museum and the Cà d’Zan (“House of John”) Museum, plus the jewel-like Asolo Theater and some beautiful grounds. The virtual tours will give you the flavor. (St. Petersburg Times)

Picture postcards have been featured in David’s Links before, and here is another collection at the Bathtub Museum, showing babies or ladies in tubs and dastardly looking men peeking though peepholes or windows.  The garish colors gave the artist a chance to think of some mildly titillating words to accompany the pictures. You’ll have a good belly laugh at some of these. (Netsurfer Digest)

“Sunday on the Pot with George” surely qualifies for a prominent page in the Museum of Bad Art, along with a number of other doubtful masterpieces, some of which were acquired from the Salvation Army Thrift store. With the slogan “Art too bad to be Ignored” here’s your chance to get rid of that ghastly painting Aunt Agatha gave you. No repros or paint-by-numbers or paint-on-velvet accepted. (Tourbus)

I think of PBS as somewhat staid rather than wacky, but Off the Map proves me wrong. You are invited to Tour Backyard Paradises where you can visit the work of ten untrained, visionary artists who have transformed their part of the world in rare and startling ways. They live in India, South Africa, France and the United States. Be sure also to click on the link to What Is Visionary Art? (Webby 2005)

Any idea where is the world’s longest art gallery? Stockholm claims that honor for its metro system that has architectural and art masterpieces at every stop. You can enjoy them, and samples from many other fine international subway systems from Athens to Zurich, at Metro Arts and Architecture. Here in the USA you can see shots from Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland (Oregon) and Washington (DC) metros. (Netsurfer Digest)

Douglas Keister Photography has thousands of images for sale, but what intrigues me is the research required to produce the “backing story” of many of the photos in the cemeteries part of the site. You’ll find subsections on mausoleums, statuary, famous people, stained glass, symbols and angels. Some of these stories are pretty strange, like that of the youngster who wanted a Mercedes, who died young, and whose tomb is now a $250,000 marble Mercedes. (Netsurfer Digest)

Art exhibitions are typically presented for a few months in a specific city, and then the exhibited paintings or sculptures are crated up and returned to their owners across the globe. If you missed it, that’s too bad. The Internet has succeeded in democratizing this world and has made exhibitions accessible to the rest of us wherever we may be and whenever we wish. A typical example is the BBC’s online exhibit Painting the Weather; by all means start by taking your own narrated audio tour. (Netsurfer Digest)

Puppetry is a very old art form, but the Dutch artist Lejo has modernized it into a minimalist format. The several video clips on this site demonstrate what can be done with only the human fingers  and a pair of wooden eyes. Click on GB for the English text. (Netsurfer Digest)

Isfahan the Movie is an animated film inspired by Persian architecture. It's a beautiful computer-rendered three-minute tour through temples and mosques, accompanied by a haunting score. It requires Quicktime. (Netsurfer Digest)

If, like me, you have thousands of old black-and-white photos, you might be interested in Colorization Using Optimization. By some miraculous process involving a few scribbles on the photo these three Israeli scientists convert them into beautiful color photos. They are even able to colorize a video clip by scribbling on a few frames. Unless you are a math expert you won’t understand how it’s done, but you can enjoy the sample results nevertheless. (Netsurfer Digest)

Give a creative artist a PC with Flash and you will be amazed at some of the creations on view at Andy Foulds Design. Click Amusements and try the fourth square; you can pretend you are Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko for a start. Then see what you can do with George Bush or Tony Blair just by clicking or moving your mouse pointer. Don’t forget to click the New Photo button from time to time; it’s all fascinating. (Netsurfer Digest)

You can also imagine you are another famous artist at My Data = My Mondrian. This is a bit weird, because you start by filling out your demographic data and a few preferences. When you submit it, lo and behold, there is your personalized rectilinear Mondrian before your very eyes! I was shocked to find mine contained none of those brilliant colored panels I had hoped for; I quickly changed one of my parameters and felt better with the second result. (Netsurfer Digest)

There are a number of virtual museums on the Web, but surely few are so well done as the Virtual Egyptian Museum. It is so much less exhausting than going through a real museum, and in some ways more accessible, with close-ups at the click of a mouse, and as much or as little information as you wish. After you click Enter, click the Highlights button to get a foretaste of this wonderful collection. (Netsurfer Digest)

When a man abandons a career in Aeronautical Engineering to wander the globe as a gypsy, with only his cameras for company, you may wonder what he is up to. Based on the evidence of this compelling site, Sacha Biyan is a gifted photographer. He has lived among the indigenous Indians of Latin America and captures their lined, worn faces with great sympathy, usually in black and white. You’ll also admire his spectacular landscape photographs in color. (Netsurfer Digest)

One of the more scary things I've seen on the Net can be found at Access Project, an initiative of a graduate student at NYU. Just look in the archive and click on Ars Electronica 2003 for an alarming demonstration of something like Big Brother watching you in a public place, constantly following you, and sending you messages, including instructions.  "There is no escape..."  This may be only a test demo, but there is enough here that could be exploited to make us feel that some day there will no longer be any privacy at all. You'll need the QuickTime video viewer. (Netsurfer Digest)

Julian Beever is an artist who doesn't seem to have a personal website; he knows there are numerous sites that reproduce his pavement art, for which he is something of a celebrity around the world. When he has finished a pavement drawing, and it is viewed from a certain angle, you would swear you are looking at a solid, three-dimensional object. The resemblance to, for example, a giant coke bottle lying on the ground is uncanny. The technical term for this is called an isomorphic view; anyway, I urge you to take a look at examples of his remarkable work at this mirror site.

Geoffrey Hiller is a photo artist with a mission: to open our eyes to different cultures and, yes, injustices through his multimedia photo essays. They are technically much more than a mere collection of photos from around the world; together with his writing and design collaborators, he has produced several visually compelling projects that deserve our thoughtful attention. Take your time in viewing Burma: Grace Under Pressure or my favorite, Canto do Brasil with its haunting background music. Navigation between projects may prove tricky; be prepared to adjust the URL to get home again. (Netsurfer Digest)

Worlds apart artistically from Geoffrey Hiller, Paul Smith is a remarkable artist who creates his images using nothing but an old typewriter. Paul suffers from severe cerebral palsy and has to steady his one usable hand with the other as he searches for and punches a key. Despite this huge handicap, a lifetime's laborious work has resulted in over 300 pieces of typed art more or less indistinguishable from typical quality artist drawings. In case that is not enough, he is a first-class chess player, too. You've got to hand it to a guy like this. (Netsurfer Digest)

Are those who do industrial design for a living considered to be artists? I think so, especially after browsing through IDEA, the website for Business Week's 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Awards, where there's a lot of originality on display. One hundred thirty awards were given in twelve categories of which my favorite was Design Explorations. There I found Samsung's Circular Printer (brilliant!), the Devo Underwear and Packaging (throw it into the wash where the package part dissolves and is rinsed away, a great idea), and Intel's Florence Concept that might represent the future of the laptop. (Netsurfer Digest)

What kind of pictures do you take? Ho-hum ones? There's no doubt that by paying attention to some rather simple rules, you can make your photos so much more interesting by using just a few of the tips at Digital Photography Composition Tips. They are easy to understand, from The Rule of Thirds, to Filling the Frame, to Having an Eye for Detail. Gathered from all over the Internet, they represent sound advice from professional photographers and can be applied equally well by those of us still using film cameras, or by those who sketch or paint. (Netsurfer Digest)

Although not Art in the conventional sense, Dear Aunt Nettie is so creative and imaginative that I believe it rightfully belongs here. "Aunt Nettie is one of the Internet pioneers of the 19th century", and has a dry, wry sense of humor. "She" answers a new question every day; I fancy she invents the questions to allow her to answer with a humorous piece about practically anything. Just to show she is no fool, check out also her Museum of Depressionist Art, the Gallery of the Unidentifiable, The Redbone Fables, and Other Cautionary Tales. It's also a technically sophisticated website. (Tourbus)

M.C. Escher is one of those few modern artists I can relate to, because I see what he is driving at, admire his draftsmanship, and even get a chuckle from some of his works.  An admirer, artist, and web designer named David Annal has collected many of the master's works at Tesselations, and they look a bit like a completed jigsaw puzzle, only more ingenious. He also has samples of his own efforts in the same genre, plus a step-by-step graphical explanation of how the repetitive technique works. (Netsurfer Digest)

What are contemporary artists up to these days? No, wait, don't switch off... there's some interesting stuff to be found at PS1, an outreach program of New York's MOMA. Take the online tour of Volume - Bed of Sound for artists working with strange sounds; you'll need Flash 4 or better for this ingenious player. As each one minute sound clip plays, you watch a pointer move across a graphical image of the sound recording so you know what's coming, volume-wise, but not surprise-wise. (SeniorNet Newsline)

Artists have used all sorts of media for their portraits down the years, from oil paint to watercolor to acrylics. Jason Kronenweld however has chosen chewed bubblegum on plywood as his medium of expression, and the results are on display at Gum Blondes , a heads-and-shoulders gallery of a baker's dozen lovely ladies. The colors come from chewing mixed gums together; Jason claims to have a stable of gum chewers to perform this basic prep work for the artist. (Netsurfer Digest)

Do you remember the sad, sad story of Orpheus and Eurydice? Who were the Gods, Mortals and Monsters of Greek mythology? Can you pronounce Aphrodite, Hecate and Persephone? All this and much more can be found at  Winged Sandals, a prize-winning Australian site that makes the subject accessible both to children and adults. You'll need Flash and a fast computer to enjoy this mixture of animated graphics, text and sound. (Neat Net Tricks)

A spectacular marriage of fine art and up-to-the-minute technology has resulted in our being able to view in detail some of the world's most beautiful books. At Turning the Pages, from the British Library, you can turn over the pages of Leonardo's notebooks with a click and drag of the mouse pointer; read or listen to notes on each page; magnify page parts; even reverse his writing. For sheer gorgeous illustration, view the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Sherborne Missal. Best with broadband. (Yahoo)

Take a look at these striking black-and-white photos by Joseph Stashkevetch. Then take a closer look and realize they aren't photos at all--they are marvelously detailed drawings, typically in the 40x40 inch size. So why does an artist choose to imitate photography? I don't know, but the results appear to be highly successful, judging by the wide range of exhibitions and references to them in art books listed on the site. (Netsurfer Digest)

If you love painting, but not walking the museum galleries, here are some stunning images selected from the Virtual galleries of the Met. There appears to be a friendly competition among the great museums of the world to come up with the best website. The Met's is surely among the contenders, in my humble opinion. Just take the seemingly endless capabilities of the zoom feature that lets you see the finest detail. The quality of the exhibits on view is second to none, of course. (Recycled)

Can you believe the photos of models you see in those ads? And what about all the product images that look so alluring? For a sneak view behind the scenes, take a look at Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio. By rolling the mouse over the image of say, a perfect face, you see instead the original image, complete with blemishes, crooked smile and less-than-perfect proportions. All this magic is done with Photoshop -- and a lot of artistic skill. (Netsurfer Digest)

Don't ask how they obtained all the wonderful artworks on virtual display at the Vatican Museums. Just take one of several virtual tours instead and wonder at how you can zoom in to inspect the finest detail with no apparent loss of resolution. If a tour of these museums is a highlight of your real visit, this site represents a highly satisfying alternative, without the expense and exhaustion of the real thing. By the way, did you know the Vatican has its own Internet country code, .va? (Netsurfer Digest)

Have you heard of Harold Cohen, or of AARON, the result of his thirty years of research and development into cyber art?  It seems his collaboration with Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence pioneer, has come to fruition at  Kurzweil Cyber Art, where you can view many quite reasonable-looking paintings produced by AARON. You can even download AARON and try it out for yourself, and maybe become famous... Question: is AARON an artist?  It's your call. (Netsurfer Digest)

I wish I had thought of this idea as a young man: buy art from thrift stores. By this time I would have a formidable collection, some of it quite tolerable, and perhaps some worth quite a bit. You can take a look at the results for someone who did just that, at The PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art. Not bad, I say, and what would my descendents think fifty years from now? They might get a pleasant surprise at some future Antique Road Show. (Netsurfer Digest)

Its hard to describe NOTNOT except to say it's a highly experimental site, with among other things a tickle machine. My favorite however, is Frankendael 2001, where you see what at first looks like a still photo of a winter landscape. Slowly it transforms itself as the snow melts, the light begins to brighten and the first green shoots show themselves. It takes a few minutes to progress through the four  seasons, and it's riveting to watch. (Netsurfer Digest)

By Saturday, May 10, 2003 over 700 people around the world had signed up for The Mayday Project. Each of them agreed to take a photo every hour on that day describing their lifestyle, and the results are posted on this site for all to see. "What makes this site special is the very ordinary and similar character of the recorded activities across so many different places. It's a reassuring sign of our common humanity."  (Netsurfer Digest)

Ben Rubin's Ear Studio is the 2003 Webby award winner in the Net Art category. The content is a broad collection of descriptions of sound design projects, with links to the websites where they reside and can be heard. Much of this is highly experimental, and if these sounds are not your idea of entertainment, they may well appeal to your intellectual curiosity. You can at least enjoy some highly creative and ingenious web site  designs while listening. (Webby)

Slow motion video enables us to see detail in events that are too quick for the unaided eye. Conversely, events that take hours, days, years or more can be com pressed into a video clip a few seconds long, thus allowing us to understand changes too slow for the unaided eye to detect. There are several brilliant clips here, such as Cape Cod, Mural and Potter, while others only serve to prove that Playing With Time is a pretty new art form, and some of its practitioners are quite amateurish. (Netsurfer Digest)

Andy Foulds is a weird, wacky, wonderful artist whose chosen medium is Macromedia's Flash. His website is very strange, with neat things that happen when you point at practically anything. You are expected to click and see, just like a child, and there may or may not be peculiar effects to enjoy as a result.  There's some wonderful still photography, too. Take my word for it, it's worth some of your valuable time. (Neat Net Tricks)

Having watched and enjoyed Cirque du Soleil on TV several times, I wondered what their website would be like. I wasn't disappointed, because Cirque du Soleil is a tour de force of the website designer's art. Using the Flash format, you see a stunning series of living tableaux with exquisite images, beautiful words and music. Without attempting to replicate the circus experience, it offers an independent but related work of art that can be appreciated in its own right. (David Henry)

Trevor Van Meter is one of those artists who thinks "outside the box" and challenges you to do the same at his unusual site. Its riches are accessible only to the persistent. First click "flyboy" for a game with no rules that you will nevertheless enjoy if you play around a bit with the arrow keys.  Then go back and click "tvm" for an artist's world, accessible only through a small "M" in the top left corner. Then click "Pixel Art", then WWD2007, then "here" to access websites of 200 artists around the world. (St. Petersburg Times)

There's a remarkably versatile artist at work at Scorpiocraft. Whether you are reading the monologues, viewing the portrait photography at Priceless Ladies, or puzzling out those striking graphic designs at Mayan Sun Banners and for Altered State Radio, there is clearly a powerful artistic creativity here. Work in progress (4/03) includes listening to the artist's original music on mp3, and viewing Underground Videos. (David Henry)

Winner of the 2002 Webby Award for Arts, the Guggenheim site is a tour de force of recent trends in website design, with innovative navigation techniques, thumbnails that smoothly zoom in as you point to them and  crystal clear audio. In addition to its parent museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Las Vegas, it is partnered with other great art museums, including the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. For something quite different, visit the Art of the Motorcycle at the Las Vegas Guggenheim. (David Henry)

The story of Ninjai, The Little Ninja, is an animated cartoon so beautifully rendered in Flash, I found it compulsive viewing, despite the occasional violence and vulgar language. Artistically it is a cooperative project with chapters contributed by various artists -- The Ninja Gang-- yet it appears amazingly consistent in style. I like its measured pace, atmospheric scenery, sepia tones, brooding music and great voices especially for Ninjai. It describes Ninjai's search to answer the big questions, "Who am I? Where did I come from? Who are these demons...?"  Best with broadband. (Netsurfer Digest)

If you've ever dabbled with wildlife painting or photography, and would like to improve your skills, there's a neat place to do so at A Brush with Wildlife.  An offshoot of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, this is an appealing, interactive classroom dedicated to explaining the principles of creating a composition, and is based on the works of Carl Rungius.  Create your own masterpiece in the Composition Studio, and check out the parent pages for some marvelous examples of his art.  (Netsurfer Digest)

If the thought of reading Huckleberry Finn or any other major work is pretty intimidating, why not take it in small bytes?  Subscribe to a novel of your choice from thee rather limited selection at  Classic Novels and they will send you a five minute installment of it every day via e-mail.  "Subscribe" means register for -- it's a freebee. I signed up for a Shakespeare Sonnet every day and found them wonderful but heavy going.  That is until I visited the Amazing Website of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with text and commentary that makes everything come clear. (Netsurfer Digest)

Something about the images at Quod Erat Demonstrandum reminds me of Dali.  There are elements of mysticism and of surrealism in the world of Polish artist Bjurkowski.  If these designs resonate in your heart or mind, also check out the Links on the site, which point to art sites that he likes and how-to-do-it sites, including tutorials on Photoshop and 3-D graphics. If the controls are in Polish, go back and click the Union Jack on the home page. (Netsurfer Digest)

Have you ever visited the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican?  That is just one of the fourteen tours of European art you can take at the Web Gallery of Art, with expert commentary.  The tours are just one easy way of enjoying the riches of the Gallery, which has over 10,000 magnificent digital reproductions of paintings and sculpture.  The Dual Window mode allows you to compare related images side by side.  You can even choose appropriate  background music to accompany your viewing. (Bits of Blue)