Wired Island


	Rick Cranston spent more than 40 hours creating this great western red cedar "Shaman Mask," one of the pieces offered through Art Vision International's virtual gallery. (Photograph by Bill Keay)

ig-city defectors Susan Eshelman and Van Charnell like nothing better than watching the whales from their oceanfront home on tiny Gabriola Island, British Columbia. At the same time, as business demands, the couple schmooze with visitors to their virtual gallery, deal with associates in Singapore, and negotiate the sale of a painting with a museum director in Australia.

They run Art Vision International, an online fine art brokerage and artist management company. The enterprise crossed the cyberfrontier following the successful stringing of the world's longest suspended fiber-optic cable, bringing the world within reach of this 35-square-mile island and its 2,400 inhabitants.

"Suddenly we're rubbing elbows with curators from the Smithsonian and talking about creating an online gallery for 2,000 Native tribal elders," says Susan.

The couple still drive the backroads of British Columbia looking for artists and running late-night appointments with sculptors "who tell us to find them by reading the numbers on the hydro poles. Now they're getting wired, too."

According to Susan, "Business is more intense than ever before -- 850 emails a day, 30 different deals in the works, and a market bigger than we'd ever dreamed we'd have access to. But I'm at home and I can kayak out to the lighthouse whenever I feel like it.

"Has getting wired changed my life? Who'd have believed we could run an international art brokerage firm, sitting here by the beach? As we old Deadheads say, 'The higher we go, the weirder it gets.' "


	Kirsten Lutken sits in a huge Arbutus tree overlooking the rocky beach of Gabriola Island, British Columbia, sketching the scene for a later oil painting. She has lived here 12 years and is now one of the artists represented by Art Vision International, an Internet business that sells local artists' works around the world. (Photograph by Bill Keay)

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