A Guest Essay By Ken Januski

It was about two years ago that I decided to join and pay a subscription for the online magazine, Wildlife Art Journal. As the magazine itself says, why pay when everything online is free? Well, publishers such as them are making a bet that people will pay for quality content.

It is the same bet that all publishers have had to consider over the last 10 years or so. Will customers pay for content in the face of all that's now free on the web? For awhile many thought that online advertising would pay for the free content. Except that then came the recession and advertising declined, in almost no instances paying for the cost of providing content.



I won't go on about this, though 25 years in the newspaper industry did get me to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it. With Wildlife Art Journal I decided that I wanted to place my bet on people being willing to pay for quality content. Personally I believe that there is no other business model that will work. Quality content takes time and money to produce. Somebody has to pay for it. Or, we'll just have low quality free content. Worse, we might forget what quality content even was.

All well and good you might say but why write about this now? Well, the main reason is to note that the linocut at top is in the Gallery of the Commons in the new issue. It's the third time I've had something shown there. Many of the articles are free, including Gallery of the Commons. There you'll find a collection of 57 images of 'wildlife art'.

I realize that there are probably few readers of this blog who are interested in wildlife art. The thing is I myself didn't even know if I was interested in wildlife art when I subscribed. My educational background is 'Fine Art.' I have Bachelors of Fine Art and a Masters of Fine Art. Once I decided to start working with natural subjects, birds in particular, I realized that I was abandoning, and would soon be abandoned by, Fine Art. The two just don't overlap, neither in the 20th nor the 21st century.

When I started using birds as subjects a few years ago I didn't even like wildlife art. Almost everything I saw seemed cliched, kitchsy, formulaic, anything but vital even though it had 'life' in its very name. But over the last five years I found that there were some wildlife artists who I really liked and respected. And what convinced me to subscribe to Wildlife Art Journal was that it seemed to be raising the same questions about wildlife art that I had.

And that's really why I'm writing this long, somewhat rambling post. The newest issue seems particularly vibrant, raising all the right questions about art, nature, wildlife, the environment and their connection. And it's far more than that. I really find it to be somewhat like a Christmas present, and an unexpected one at that. If you have any interest in nature, art, wildlife or conservation I'd encourage you to pay a visit.


Ken Januski is a painter, naturalist and writer from Greater Philadelphia, USA.  You can visit his website here .

EDITOR'S NOTE:  For a short time, Wildlife Art Journal is running an annual subscription special of just $12 for unlimited access to all the stories in the current issue and over 150 in the archives. To subscribe, click here .