Kids, adults, neighbors, friends and family all enjoy my gallery almost as much as I do.. so... I see no reason to keep it secret. I don't quite understand the logic behind that, really.
Puttin' my stuff up on CAF by Friday of next week.. makin' it even more public. If I don't, I'll give Drew my one Silver Surfer page.
It's not that large a collection since I'm new to the hobby, but I've covered the artists/series that I wanted to.. so it's just icing on the cake from here on out.
The only way I see making your art publicly known on the internet possibly a "detriment" is if people know you already own quite a lot of a certain series, a certain character by a certain artist, or something similar.. just as much as people might want to continue to feed you pages/commissions because they know they're going to a good home, other dealers and such might be hesitant about "allowing you" to have more pages of a certain series/artist that you already have an abundance of.. so that the hobby is shared as equally between fans as possible.
There's a guy that owns every page from a sequence in Planet Hulk, except for two... and I own those two.
He wants them badly, and has even said a few words against me (and I'm not even on CAF yet) because I refuse to sell them to him because I love the series as well...(I emailed him saying I loved that sequence, and that I own the other two pages.. and that unfortunately opened the floodgates.. haha) and they're priceless to me, as far as I'm concerned. He could give me ten times the amount I bought them for per page and I still wouldn't sell them. There's no "entitlement" in this hobby, unfortunately some people seem to think there is.
On a side-note, I'm not saying there's something wrong with it, but I don't understand the mentality of people not framing their art and enjoying it, but rather keeping it in portfolios. Why bother owning pieces if people have to know you own it to enjoy it (ie to get you to take it out for them to see), and if you yourself can't just walk into a room and see the gorgeous piece expertly framed/matted on your wall? I do understand when overflow/money's an issue, and you don't have room/space/money etc. to have all your pieces framed and/or matted, though.
