Dallas PUA

I'm trying to decorate my place and need some good paintings/artwork. I don't want to spend more than $100, but I will if I like it enough. I just don't like anything that's mass produced. I live in Fort Worth, but I might try travelling to Dallas and checking out the Arts district, but I get the feeling that the shit there is out of my price range. in a nutshell this is what I'm looking for:

1: $100-ish
2: I'd like it to be locally made (want to support the starving artists in DFW)
3: not mass produced (don't want to have people say "hey, I have one just like it!")

Where do you guys go to find art?

There's an art gallery on Frankford and Preston. There are art galleries in the Willow Bend mall and the Galleria. There's a great art gallery in the Bishop Arts District.

I've been meaning to get some actual art for my house. Hit me up and maybe we can hit them together.

It won't be local but I would check out ebay.

Artists on there sell their stuff for very cheap so they can survive. You can pick up unique(at least nobody you know will have it) for a very nice price. Downside is you can only view the pics online.

I have seen some very nice stuff on there for cheap.

You can find some unusual stuff on deviantart.com too. If you like an artist, you can order prints, which come framed. They're not mass produced art, but they are digitally created prints.

Also check out college students studying in art. If you have an eye for it you can get art from up and coming artists for super cheap.

I prefer a more modern type of art, and I think you might like it too, Muk. I typically order prints from deviantart.com and frame them...very modern digital renderings...but they are top notch and not what you'd normally find on anyone's wall.

Zine: Yea, that's exactly what I was wanting to do, but I have no idea where to look. I went to one of those "starving Artist" sales a few months back, and everything looked like the same landscaping/Oceans/Paris paintings. I was looking for more modern art like what smirks is talking about

Smirks: yea, I just spent a few hours looking through deviantart last night and damn, that's a lot of stuff. I'm actually pretty overwhelmed with that site, I'll check it out again later with a more specialized search.

[URL]http://www.dfwart.com/dfwgalleries.html[/URL]

A pretty good directory for contemporary art galleries in the area that I think might exhibtit the kind of stuff that fits the specifications of what you're looking for. I don't know how affordable this stuff might be (the value of art is a strange animal with so many different factors influencing it at a time). Make a fun day of it and go hopping from gallery to gallery, checking out if there's anything you might want to buy. Might make a good Day 2, also.

What do you guys think of taking some album covers and blowing them up and framing them? I have a friend who works at a print shop who could probably hook it up. It might make a good conversation topic.

If you want to support starving artist and you want cheap, then hands down the place to go is [url]www.Etsy.com[/url]. It's all handmade, it's mostly all original, and it goes directly to the artist.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I know some artist in North Texas that use Etsy exclusively to sell their art.