Chase Parker
Artist Portfolio
A gallery-style site for a Tampa artist who sells one of a kind pieces by commission. Big artwork, quiet design, and a simple way to ask for a private viewing.
The Client
Chase Parker is a dimensional surrealist in Tampa, Florida. He builds the human form out of thousands of small pieces placed by hand. Butterflies, brass, and found objects.
His work hangs in hotels across eight states and in private collections. He does not sell prints off a shelf. Every piece is built once, for one room.
The Problem
Art like this does not sell from a small thumbnail. The whole point is the scale and the texture. You have to see that one figure is made of a thousand separate wings. Shrink it into a grid of little squares and it just looks like a photo of a statue.
A normal shop layout worked against him too. Most of his pieces are already sold, so a page full of sold out buttons tells the wrong story. And a buy button is the wrong ask. Chase builds each piece with the buyer, for their space, which starts with a conversation and not a checkout.
He should not have to shrink his work down to fit a website. Now he does not.
The Solution
We treated the site like a gallery instead of a store. Plain white rooms, a lot of empty space, and one piece at a time. The design gets out of the way so the artwork is the loudest thing on the screen.
Every page is plain HTML and CSS with no framework, hosted on Vercel. That keeps the site fast, which matters when the artwork photos are the whole product.
Signature Moment
The Vitrine
The home page holds five selected pieces in what Chase calls the vitrine. As you scroll, the page holds still and the artwork steps toward you, one piece at a time, with the title and materials underneath.
It slows people down. Instead of scrolling past a grid in four seconds, a visitor spends real time with five pieces. That is the closest thing to standing in front of the work.
Browsing the Work
Past the home page, the work is split into sculptures, paintings, and installations, so a hotel buyer looking for a large wall piece is not scrolling through small work.
Each listing says what it is made of and whether it sold. Sold pieces stay up on purpose. They are proof, and any of them can be built again in the colors and size that fit a new room.
Asking for a Viewing
There is no cart anywhere on the site. The button in the corner of every page says request a private viewing, because that is how the work actually sells.
Collectors can also join a list to hear about new pieces first. That gives Chase a direct line to the people most likely to commission something, and he owns that list instead of renting an audience from a social platform.
How It Is Built
An artist portfolio does not need a database or a login. It needs to load fast and show pictures well, so we kept it simple on purpose.
- Static HTML and CSS
- No framework, so pages load fast
- Design tokens
- Every color and font set in one file
- Vanilla JavaScript
- Scroll effects without heavy libraries
- Vercel
- Hosting with instant deploys
What He Owns
Everything on the site belongs to Chase. There is no platform in the middle taking a cut of a commission or holding his collector list.
- His artwork photography
- His collector inquiries
- His mailing list
- His domain and hosting
- His site files (plain HTML, so any developer can pick them up)
Have Work That Deserves a Better Website?
If your product has to be seen to be understood, a template will fight you. Let's talk about what your site should do instead.