If unsold art is clogging up your studio ? perhaps a lecture on the global market place might be an answer for you.

You need not be an Internet wiz, learn HTML, or twist up your mind with FLASH, and javascript. You simply need to either visit nonstarvingartists.com or attend the lecture at The Bermuda Society of Arts tomorrow at 10.30 a.m.

The lecture aims to show how to organise and present portfolios, how to choose web-based tools for promotion, using good publicity methods to promote shows, and when and how to use advertising. Co-founder Jeffrey Cawley, who is great friends with artist Michael Cacy, has come to Bermuda for a vacation, but decided to give the free lecture to encourage local artists and others to sell their work internationally.

The idea of the Non Starving Artist (NSA) was coined by Richard Cawley, the artistic son, of the site?s inventor.

So, the elder Mr. Cawley, who works in marketing and with computer systems, decided to liaise with Daniel (Sparky) Avila and they created an arts portal, which feeds art-based news information around the world.

?Part of the interest in this is that I have been in marketing and promotion mainly in the high-tech fields and this Northwest Analytical is a company I started 27 years ago ? a very different kind of field, but I certainly learned a lot about marketing and promoting,? said Mr. Cawley.

?My particular trigger for getting involved in this was my son was an artist and sculptor, and in fact he worked with Michael for a while on airbrush techniques.

?It was the typical situation were he and his college buddies and art school friends were like, ?we are going to build this site and it is going to be the world leader? and month after month, year after year it never happened. So, I thought let?s get something up, it need not be extravaganza, it just needs to work.

?So, this friend of mine Daniel Avila, who also goes by Sparky, is a programmer and systems guy, who was building a community for a Northwest chain of coffee houses/galleries and one thing led to another and that company went out of business, but he had did a lot of work and I had this interest, so we stormed over the idea with a few beers and helped these guys out.?

But often when artists venture into the Internet world, he said: ?The classic problem is their girlfriend/boyfriend or depending upon their relationships knows a little bit of HTML, puts the site up and it may stay current for a couple of months and then die. They may have the problem that their mother, girlfriend and boyfriend visit it and that?s about it. But we both knew a fair amount about traffic building etc. so that was the idea of this ? it was to build a high-traffic site, have on it places for artists and gallery portfolios and the like.?

Mr. Cawley said they have used art news as a way of getting traffic. ?For example people can put a news release on our site and we have gotten to the point were we are the standard art news feed for Google.com,? he said.

?There are a many billions of sites, but Google has about 4,500 that they use for a news source and we are one of those. Also newsnow.co.uk with professional journalists in the European market and so it is everything from an exhibition, to works awards.?

Artist Michael Cacy who is friends with Mr. Cawley now has a portfolio on the site and found it very simple to navigate.

?It is very simple because these guys are dealing with a lot of artists like myself ? electronic dinosaurs,? said Mr. Cacy.

?Yes, I have a computer and I use it mostly for e-mail. Could I put my own website up? No. And people have been after me for ages, in fact my son has been after me ? where and why don?t you have a website?

?But with these guys I just got the images and it was up there in an hour and within two hours I was getting feedback from across the world. It happened that fast and I would not have known how to do that myself.?

Mr. Cawley has spent many years ?pontificating ways to promote and so forth?.

?Most artists have some idea how to promote themselves, but often it is in very conventional terms like planning a show, getting a little bit of publicity in the local paper,? he said. ?But they don?t often think beyond that scale. It is just the way people have done it and times have changed. In fact it is often easier to get a world-wide audience than a local audience.?

?The idea of this is that people who are functional, can use a word processor and a graphics machine can do this ? it?s trivial.

?So, from their computer they can upload their artist?s statement, CV, their bio, put up individual pieces of art or craft, certainly submit press releases, and because we are talking electrons and not atoms, unlike a newspaper we have unlimited space and we are always encouraging people to contribute articles. It is like a trade paper or magazine online.?

Mr. Cacy said artists can use this site as an electronic gallery. ?Normally when you show a piece of work you have the size, the medium and the substrate,? he said. ?And you can put a price up there and sell it off that site. And NSA doesn?t take a cut out of that unlike a physical gallery that will take anywhere from 25 to 60 percent of that sale and you can put 100 pieces up there.?

When asked how does the Non Starving Artists Site make its money? Mr. Cawley said: ?There are subscription fees and an artist?s portfolio is $20 a month, a gallery is $50, a vendor adverts is $100 a month for the whole page, we also have just instituted click through ads, which are 200 by 250 image so you can make a sophisticated ad to click through. We also provide services for setting up web portals, so it?s evolving like all things we recognise that we have to be a bit experimental with this and the formula is a little bit different than average ? there are online art portals or galleries that like Michael said will charge you commissions.

?That really didn?t seem to be the right model because we wanted to get a lot of people active on it and increase the activity on the site.

For instance right now a slow day on the site is 1,000 visitors, so we are getting quite a bit of reach it keeps building and increases the desirability of the site with the more people on it.

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The free lecture takes place at the Bermuda Society of Arts, City Hall tomorrow morning at 10.30 a.m.