About Tokarta

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Tokarta was conceived, built and run by Girts Gailans, Jan Bickerton and Aleksis Gailans.

Girts is a professional photographer with over 30 years experience of working with international clients in advertising, publishing and architecture. Jan is also a photographer whose work is directed to the field of publishing. Aleksis is an imaginative web developer, known for his elegant, intuitive solutions for web based projects.

A few years ago, Girts and Jan started selling their photographs on the internet as Fine Art prints. What they wanted was an international site that specialises in all kinds of art for walls. A site where the artist charges the right money for their work, not bargain basement rates. A site that is not forbidding and 'exclusive' but accessible and welcoming, with a wide range of artworks, well executed by talented artists. A site that is fair to the artists.

They sold their work on various sites, and investigated many more, but couldn't find a site that satisfied their criteria. This helped to confirm their determination that the site needed to be professional and elegant to the eye, easy for a non-computer-literate person to navigate and operate (both from a selling and buying standpoint), and it needed to give the artist a fair deal. All costs needed to be evident up-front, with no hidden surprises, no listing fees and most important, no commission charges. The artist must be free to hang what he likes, when he likes, for as long as he likes. And he must receive all the fruits of his work - not just a percentage.

Another element they came to feel was important was that there should be a facility for artists to talk to each other, support each other, help each other with hints and advice. Discuss problems that they might have encountered and how to overcome them.

In short, they wanted to create a community of talented artists who would create a vast portfolio of artwork for visitors to browse and buy from.

The only option, of course, was to build their own site. This is where Aleksis' special talents came to the fore.

The result is Tokarta.