18 Art Portfolio Website Examples for Painters (Plus Tips to Build Your Own in 2026)

Before I built my portfolio on Format, I didn’t fully appreciate how much having a great online presence could change things for a working artist. Then, when I finally got proper gallery representation, I learned just how much of a difference a professional website can make in being taken seriously. 

That’s when I stopped thinking of my portfolio as a nice-to-have and started treating it like what it actually is: a studio you can share with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Since then, my online portfolio has been the thread connecting my practice to opportunities I might never have found otherwise, most importantly: 

• Having more galleries who sell my work
• Landing gallery shows at public institutions that pay proper artist fees 

Curators, collectors, other artists, and gallerists all spend time online. When they go looking for painters like you, your portfolio is what they find…or don’t. That’s why it matters.

The good news? It has never been easier to keep your portfolio looking professional, even if you’re working on a budget. You don’t need to hire a photographer every time you finish a new piece. A good smartphone camera and some natural light can get you a lot further than you’d expect. What matters most isn’t technical perfection, it’s showing your work clearly, consistently, and in a way that reflects who you are as an artist.

Think of your portfolio website as your own private gallery. It’s a virtual white cube, and you get to decide what hangs on the walls. The temptation can be to include everything, every study, every experiment, every piece you were proud of at the time. Resist it. A carefully curated selection of your strongest work will do more for your career than an overly exhaustive archive ever will. 

To help you build (or refresh) your own online portfolio, I’ve gathered 18 contemporary painters whose portfolio websites do exactly what a great portfolio should: they get out of the way and let the work speak. They come from all over the world, work across a wide range of approaches and styles, and show that there’s no single right way to present paintings online; only the way that’s right for you and your practice.

Practical Tips for Showing Paintings Online

Painting presents a particular challenge for online portfolios. Unlike photography or digital work, paintings are physical objects with texture, scale, and presence that a screen can only approximate. This doesn’t mean you can’t present your work beautifully online, it just means a few things are worth keeping in mind.

Curate Like a Gallery: 12–20 Strong Works Are Enough

Fewer paintings which are well displayed will always outperform a packed gallery that overwhelms the viewer. Twenty thoughtfully selected works is usually plenty.

Photograph Consistently: Natural Light & a Neutral Wall

If your images vary wildly in light quality or background, it can distract from the work itself. It’s worth spending time getting a reliable setup for photographing finished pieces. Even a plain white or neutral wall and a consistent light source make a big difference.

Add New Work to Keep Your Portfolio Current 

One of the best things about Format is that you can update your portfolio anytime. Build the habit of photographing your work as you finish it. Your portfolio should grow with you, not sit as a snapshot from three years ago.

Write a Bio & Artist Statement that Sounds Like You

An artist statement and a bio aren’t just nice extras—they’re what help curators, gallerists, and collectors understand your practice and remember you. Keep it honest, keep it specific, and don’t be afraid to sound like yourself. If you already have gallery representation, be sure to add the contact information or link to direct anyone wanting to purchase your work. 

Make Contact & Inquiries Easy

After setting up your portfolio to capture the interest of people visiting your site, don’t forget one of the most important parts: easy to find contact information. Here are a few quick ways to include your contact info in your portfolio website: 

• Add your email to parts of your portfolio that show throughout, such as your site menu or footer.
• Include your contact info on your about page along with your bio and CV.
• Create a contact page that’s visible on your site menu, adding a contact form and/or a list of the ways to reach out, such as your email and the emails for any galleries representing you.   

Now on to some real-world inspiration!

Ready to set up your portfolio layout? Choose a clean, gallery-style theme and publish your latest painting series today—try it free for 14 days.

Art Portfolio Website Examples for Painters

Stella Schwake

Using Format Template: Spruce

Originally from Detmold, Germany, Stella Schwake studied art sciences in Berlin and Bologna, followed by experimental media in Potsdam and London. Now based in Berlin, her practice moves between expressionism and ultra-contemporary painting, guided as much by intuition as by concept. Her canvases are charged and visceral where structure and form are deliberately dissolved to create space for raw feeling. Themes of ecological collapse and feminism run through her work, rendered not as slogans but as sensory experience. Her Format portfolio, set against a clean, minimal framework, gives the force of her colour field paintings room to hit the way they’re meant to.

Natalie Petrosky

Using Format Template: Order

Painter Natalie Petrosky is based in Knoxville, where she teaches in the painting and drawing department at the University of Tennessee. Her work has a distinctive textile quality where she frequently incorporates cloth alongside paint, creating multimedia pieces that blur the boundary between painting and fiber art. The layered, material richness of her work translates beautifully online when given room to breathe, which her clean, minimal portfolio provides.

Bronwyn Sale

Using Format Template: Offset

In her series Looking, Painting and Liminality, Maine-based artist Bronwyn Sale uses painting to question how we perceive perspective and place. Ephemeral arches and doors recur as central motifs. They are thresholds that invite passage but offer no promise of arrival. Her decision to display works one at a time, in a click-through gallery format, is a considered choice that mirrors her subject matter: each painting holds your full attention before stepping aside for the next.

Sarah Letovsky

Using Format Template: Horizon Left

I am a long-time fan of Toronto painter Sarah Letovsky. She works in oil on large canvases, returning again and again to the female face. Her subjects carry a quiet unease with features that drift just slightly from the expected, and emotions that don’t resolve into something comfortable or familiar. The subject plays beautifully against the enviable confidence her brushwork shows. It’s the kind of work that stays with you after you’ve moved on. On her Format site, a horizontal scroll organizes her paintings chronologically, letting you trace the development of her practice across time.

Katrina Pallon

Using Format Template: Peak

Manila-based painter and muralist Katrina Pallon graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of the Philippines-Diliman with a BFA in Visual Communication, and has since carved out a distinctive place in the Philippine art scene and beyond. Her practice is maximalist in the best possible sense. Her paintings are dense with imagery drawn from Pan-Asian mythology, folklore, and textile tradition, filtered through the influence of Klimt’s ornamentation and Kahlo’s unflinching gaze. 

Women are her primary subject, and their stories, she has said, are universal regardless of race or time. Her paintings vibrate with pattern, colour, and symbolic weight, each piece a layered world that rewards sustained attention. She also creates large-scale murals, several of which weave together indigenous mythology, environmental advocacy, and sheer visual beauty. Her Format portfolio captures the richness of her work with a curation that invites you to slow down and look properly.

Julie Beugin

Using Format Template: Offset

Berlin-based painter Julie Beugin draws on the particular texture of city life. Her paintings evoke the density of architecture, the surprise of green tucked between buildings, the feeling of turning a corner into a neighbourhood you didn’t know existed. Her abstract works often incorporate collage alongside paint, building up surfaces that carry the accumulated layers of urban experience. Her portfolio lets those layered works take centre stage against a clean backdrop.

Hayley Chiu

Using Format Template: Obsidian

Hayley Chi Hay Chiu is a second-generation Chinese Canadian painter based in Toronto. Her practice is an ongoing exploration of home as a feeling more than a place. It’s a search told through a blending of reality with fantasy, often using imagery from a heritage she was close to but never fully inside. Her work combines realism with overtly layered images, breaking any easy illusion of direct representation. It is painting that acknowledges its own mythology-making, and that’s what makes it so compelling. 

Chiu won the Untapped People’s Choice Award at Artist Project Toronto in 2024 and has exhibited at Art Toronto, San Francisco Art Fair, and Moosey in Norwich, and beyond. Her Format portfolio is elegantly organized across bodies of work that reward a patient viewer.

Bence Marafkó

Using Format Template: Horizon Left

Hungarian artist Bence Marafkó maintains a practice that moves fluidly between painting and design and in his paintings, the canvas itself becomes part of the conversation. His works push toward the sculptural: the shape and form of the support matters as much as what’s on it. With a large and diverse body of work to navigate, Marafkó organizes his portfolio using a sidebar menu sorted by date and medium, making it genuinely easy for visitors to find their footing.

Grace Blair

Using Format Template: Kiln

Toronto-based painter Grace Blair works primarily in oil and acrylic, exploring femininity, gender, and sexuality through a visual language that balances the whimsical with the deeply considered. Objects, interior landscapes, and the nude figure appear across her canvases rendered in soft pastel hues that give her work an aesthetic warmth without softening its ideas. Her Format portfolio is as carefully designed as the work it contains.

Marie-Claude Lacroix

Using Format Template: Offset

Montreal painter Marie-Claude Lacroix keeps her online portfolio deliberately small with fewer than 20 pieces, and it’s a lesson in the power of restraint. Working in oil on canvas, Lacroix develops coordinated palettes of muted tones that give her bodies of work a quiet cohesion. Her domestic scenes feel simultaneously familiar and deeply strange: figures, furniture, and perspective all distorted in ways that linger in the memory. Her portfolio leaves you wanting more, which is exactly the point.

Tom Palin

Using Format Template: Offset

British painter Tom Palin teaches in Leeds and has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally. His practice is rooted in the English and northern European landscape tradition, though his more recent work on aluminum pulls him toward abstraction with bolder colour, looser brushwork, the landscape as emotional territory rather than documentation. His portfolio captures both registers of his practice without forcing them into a false unity.

Julia Maiuri

Using Format Template: Horizon Left

Minneapolis-based painter Julia Maiuri works in oil on canvas, drawn repeatedly to faces and figures rendered in a palette of grey, blue, and quiet pink. There’s a stillness to her work that rewards careful attention. She creates the kind of paintings that you want to spend time with, not scroll past. By keeping her portfolio deliberately small, Maiuri ensures that each piece gets exactly that kind of attention.

Felix Treadwell

Using Format Template: Post

Born in Maidstone, England, Felix Treadwell trained at Camberwell College of Arts before completing his MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2018. His work is anchored by a semi-autobiographical character called Feelo, a figure who exists somewhere between self-portrait and stand-in for the viewer, exploring worlds that feel at once cartoonishly familiar and gently vertiginous. 

Rendered in soft, pastel-hued gradients using airbrushing alongside hand-painted acrylic elements, Treadwell’s paintings draw on manga, anime, and traditional Japanese printmaking to evoke a kind of knowing, nostalgic strangeness. He has exhibited internationally across London, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Milan, and Taipei, and his work has gained significant recognition in both Western and Asian art markets. His portfolio captures the dreamy, cartoon-inflected quality of his practice with room for it to expand across the screen.

Wei Xiaoguang

Using Format Template: Slate

New York-based Wei Xiaoguang has developed one of the more genuinely strange and funny practices in contemporary painting, which is something I deeply admire. His subjects include prominent figures from the art world, depicted with a wry, unsettling humour that manages to critique institutional power while remaining formally inventive. More recent works push even further into the surreal, with what appears to be CGI fire engulfing his canvases. His portfolio, clean and precise, plays perfectly off the chaos of the work itself.

The Clique Artworks

Using Format Template: Amazon

Curated by New York-based artist Efe Kurt, The Clique Artworks is an interdisciplinary artist team that brings together work from across art, design, and architecture. Their collaborative practice is interested in what painting can reveal about tactility, space, and the physical experience of looking. These are questions that a digital portfolio can only partially answer, but that their clean, engaging site poses compellingly.

Georgina Walker

Using Format Template: Ora

Toronto-based painter Georgina Walker creates work that sits in the charged space between dream and waking, between a room you remember and one you’ve only imagined. Her series Summer Solitude Fantasies, also the subject of a visual essay on Format Magazine, depicts domestic interiors in which human presence is felt but not seen: a lit cigarette, an open doorway, clothing arranged as though just discarded. 

Working as a scenic artist in film and television, Walker brings a professional understanding of how spaces carry stories, and that craft runs through every painting. Her interiors are rendered in vibrant oil paint without traditional shading, with depth achieved instead through overlapping geometry and bold, flat pattern that gives her work a beautifully graphic, almost stage-set quality. Graduating from OCADU in 2013, she has participated in a number of group shows and residency programs. Her Format portfolio is one of the finest examples of how to present a cohesive body of work as an immersive world.

Alejandro Javaloyas

Using Format Template: Ora

Alejandro Javaloyas is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toulouse, France, whose practice spans expanded painting, figurative drawing, oil painting, and experimental photography. His classical training runs deep. He received academic instruction in drawing and painting from the age of six to eighteen under Majorcan painters, before going on to earn both a BA and MA (Summa Cum Laude) in filmmaking from ESCAC Barcelona. That double education in observation and narrative runs through everything he makes. 

In his expanded paintings, Javaloyas transforms veneered plywood into curved supports that push against the flatness the medium usually assumes. In his figurative work, spare compositions explore fragility, ritual, and transcendence with a restrained atmospheric quality that is distinctly his own. His Format portfolio reflects the discipline and intelligence of a truly research-driven practice.

Caroline Denervaud

Using Format Template: Grace

Based in Paris, Caroline Denervaud works across painting and performance, and you can feel both sensibilities in her canvases. Her works hover in a productive ambiguity: a suggested vase, a figure in motion, forms that feel on the verge of becoming something recognizable. The boldness of her palette demands an equally restrained frame, and her website is likewise minimal, distraction-free, and entirely in service of the work.

What These Painter Websites Have in Common

Each portfolio is a unique experience, from their art to how they share it. Even though they have differences, many of the websites share some similar traits: 

• Simple navigation
• Strong curation
• Large images
• Series-based organization
• Minimal design that supports the work

Which painter portfolio websites inspired you?

If you’ve spent time with any of these sites, you’ll have noticed there’s no universal formula. Some artists choose a grid that offers an immediate overview; others lead you through work one painting at a time. Some write generous, specific statements about their practice; others let the images speak almost entirely on their own. These are all valid choices. What matters is that they are choices, made deliberately in service of the work.

The artists here range from emerging painters fresh out of their MFA programs to mid-career artists with decades of exhibition history. What they share is a commitment to showing up professionally online and to giving their work the context and clarity it deserves.

You can do that too. If you’re ready to start, try Format today… and if you already have a portfolio but haven’t updated it lately, maybe today’s the day.

Your next gallery is out there looking for painters like you.

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Cover image by Georgina Walker.