If you're looking for artistic inspiration--or just a way of avoiding the (sometimes very hard) work of painting--you might consider Found Photos, if you haven't already.

Intrigued by the photos he found in a fileshare network, the site's creator Rich Vogel, began sifting through them and compiling archives of his favorite shots. Scrolling through his selections can get  heady--it's a bit like watching the secret lives of others--but at the same time, it's a good lesson in how the ordinary can become extraordinary. Sometimes it's all a matter of context and sometimes it's the audience that makes the art.

Join the Found Photos mailing list and recieve found images by e-mail here. I pulled the selections shown here from several different archives. I'd love to include about 110 more.

In September of 2006, I began a conversation with artist Joseph Raffael that was to become what I can only describe as an experience, and certainly one of the best that I’ve had as an editor at the magazine.  It began simply enough—we talked about art and we talked about the artist's life and we talked about his big beautiful paintings and the big beautiful worlds happening inside them—but those early conversations were to become the root of one of the most meaningful features in the magazine, one that has reverberated in ways not even I could have expected.

Our June 2007 issue created a stir among our readers, many of whom wrote to us—and Raffael—of their admiration for his work.  They told us how inspired they felt and they sent us the paintings to prove it.  They said they wanted to see more, hear more, and be there when it happened.  And we promised to deliver:

With our first video exclusive, we take you inside the world of those big beautiful paintings. Join us on a guided tour of the most recent exhibition of Raffael’s work at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City: Curator/gallery owner Nancy Hoffman offers special insight into the show she describes as “a window to new artistic terrain” and the artist opens his journals to reveal the painting process that brought the work on display into fruition. Click here to enter.

We debuted our new Creativity Workshop column a few months ago with a challenge from Nita Leland and since then we've been watching our mailbox for news from our readers. We've already published four paintings inspired by the first installation of the column on our website. And now we're sifting through the submissions inspired by Cathy Johnson's Creativity Workshop Activity (appearing in the December issue of the magazine). If you haven't already sent us your work, there's still plenty of time to get cracking. The deadline is December 20, 2007. Johnson challenges us to simplify, simplify with her activity: