​The Visionary Art Network Artists of the Month, from when this feature was first introduced when the public website opened in August 2009 to presently December 2016.
The private network was started on the Ning platform in January 2009 by Otto Rapp with a handful of friends. As the network grew, we eventually mirrored the best content from our network in the public Visionary Art Gallery (VAG): VISIONARY ART GALLERY 
Represented are Surrealist, Visionary and Fantastic Realist artists from around the globe. Associated with the VAG is the spin-off Visionary Art Exhibition (VAE) site: VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION - there you find guest blogs and special selections of artworks from our network. The section of Featured Artwork is regularly updated: FEATURED ARTWORK 
​Visit the VAG page for Artist of the Month ► Slide Show here: ARTISTS OF THE MONTH SLIDE SHOW - the images link to the respective artists pages.

Soundtracks by JASON SHAW www.audionautix.com under a creative commons attribution license

all images are © by the artists

video produced by  OTTO RAPP

A promo for a small scale C31 TV series featuring Visionary Artists who currently live in, or were originally from Australia. This is the second season of this show.
Featuring artists:  Adam Scott Miller, Bonny Hut, Bryan Itch, Chandrika Steinhardt, Kuba Ambrose, Melissa Shemanna, Orryelle, Paulie Mann, Tobius Miller. 

Produced and edited by Bonny Hut
Brought to you by Metro Television
In association with 
Visionary Art Network Australia

First of all, I would like to wish everyone in our community a Merry Christmas!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Visionary Art 
Date: Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 9:48 PM
Subject: XXXXXXXX  has reported an issue on Visionary Art
To: Otto Rapp 


XXXXXXXXX  reported the following issue on Visionary Art

URL Reported: http://visionarytribe.ning.com/photo/the-exodus?commentId=2675382%3AComment%3A139302&xg_source=msg_com_photo

Issue:Fraud

Additional Information:Hi,
I am XXXXXXXX  and I've published some of my imagery in Visionary art.
I was outraged to see that when I googled my name I did see among my imagery some that somebody's else images advertised trough Visionary art....using my name and the name and description of my imagery.
Example: http://www.vagallery.com/visionary-paintings-xii.html

Please fix it ASAP or I will take my art of the website.
It is wrong to use my name to promote somebody's images.
Thanks
XXXXXXXXXXX

Network:    visionarytribe
User:      XXXXXXXXXXX
Email:    XXXXXXXXXXXXX
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9

For additional questions or to contact Ning, please click here:
http://help.ning.com

Since that exchange (and subsequently there were more e-mails) XXXXX  left the network.
After this, I 'hid' the public page from search engines and made it invisible in the index and site map.
What remains when a external link directs to the public page is this disclaimer:

should you be directed to this page by an outdated link, please note:
Quoting XXXXXX  from an e-mail dated 22.12.2015:

I don't want my name and my image 'XXXXXXX' to be on the cover of this 100 artist album....and I absolutely don't want the images of this 100 artists being associated with my name and my art.

I  subsequently removed images from all references - and XXXXX  later removed all  uploaded images from the network site and left the network(a short step ahead from banning, so it saved me the trouble).

​Page updated 23.12.15

Deterioration of Mind over Matter

Unbelievable - to be listed among some of the worlds famous artists - and for the List25 author Petr Habarta to pick my work as the title image! This work is one of my earliest, dating back to 1973 and it is from a phase that I jokingly refer to as my "Scare thy Neighbors" period.

here it is on DeviantArt - with the background story: 
http://fav.me/dser0i
acrylic on canvas, 20"x28", 1973

One painting, entitled “The Deterioration Of Mind Over Matter” is a frightening picture of a decomposing human scull firmly ensconed on some devilish birdcage in which the raw gore of mans physical being lies lifeless at the base. The parting flesh of the scull is secured by a tromp-loeil safety pin. This is truly an image that could have been utilized in the former issues of “Tales From The Crypt”, in fact it brings to mind in its own scary way the imaginations of Edgar Allan Poe. The poem, “The Conqueror Worm” comes to mind immediately:
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! - it writhes! - with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Excerpt from the critique by J. Brooks Joyner, Editor Visual Arts, The Albertan, Saturday, May 29th, 1976

Report by Otto Rapp

Though Ning Status claims that after yesterdays glitches about Error 500 'All systems go', I found that this is not so with our network. Some pages work, some don't - it changes frequently - flickering off and on. After several tries to even get into the network, and several more tries to submit a ticket, I finally succeeded to get through (even submitting the ticket I got Error 500 several times before I got through).
This of course affects some (and sometimes all) of our slide show feeds on the public Visionary Art Gallery.
I hope Ning will resolve this soon. Our public site is very successful and gets well over 2000 hits a day, with a respectable alexa ranking and very good bounce rate (meaning visitors stay and browse).

At the moment I write this, it seems to work again, but I had problems with 'off-and-on' feeds all morning long, so I am a little worried it may go off again. Hope not!