This is our 1000th post – believe it or not, that’s 1000 articles and interviews since I started up Invurt. That number may seem small, but when I think about it, that’s a couple of hundred words written for each article – so I went and did an “entire website” word count. Minus an average of about 20% for press release content … that’s, at the time of writing this, 482,733 words posted here over the past two years. Oh yeah, by the way, this week also marks our 2nd birthday – how’s that for a coincidence? Only two years? It feels much, much longer … but its been great, and thankyou for all of your support!

Anyways, I guess this 1000th article lets me introduce you to a new mini-(read, epic) project I’ve been working on. See, there’s a bit of back story here, and if you can’t be assed, just skip the next few paragraphs.

Towards the end of last year I compiled a very large list of over 500 artists who I thought were worthy of doing some kind of article about here on the site, a kind of whose who of established, emerging and just plain cool New Zealand and Australian underground, street, graffiti and illustrative artists.

I got about two thirds of the way through, when I realised – who the fuck is going to read such a big, fuck off article? Hell, even my attention span was wandering writing it – I was, for all intents and purposes, writing a fucking book. In fact, for the past month all my friends have really heard about is me muttering some bullshit about “gotta do this fkn article … fkn article killing me … fkn article… argh article hell …” etc etc. So, I got to about artist #68 and two things dawned on me – firstly, as I mentioned before, who the hell would read such a huge article on the web. Secondly … I didn’t like the initial cull. I didn’t like culling that first list of 500, whatsoever. But then again, who the fuck would read a list of over 500 (oh, and I’ve been adding more every day since that first count) artists – on the web.

So, I’ve decided to kick off this #1000th post milestone and our second birthday by starting a new regular column – there are several columns that I really want to get back to, the Press Mill and the Friday Wrap are the two main ones, but keeping up to date with everything that’s going on and maintaining a good level of content, interviews, the snapshots … well, they’ll return in time, when I have more time. This one, however, wont take much effort at all as a bulk of it has already been written.

So, every day or two, we’ll give you a small profile of an Australian or NZ artist that we think you should check out, in no particular order – we’re calling it “Artists Of 2012” but, as I’m sure these things go, it will probably go beyond, there is, after all, no limit to the amazing creativity that both our countries have to offer.

Lastly, the initial article, and subsequently the new column, has had a lot of input from a lot of great people, with the majority of the artists listed being corroborations between our initial list and the selections of the people we asked for input. We’d like to give some special thanks to the team at Acclaim Magazine, Blomtrog (Knock Knock Magazine), Mark Holsworth (Melbourne Art & Culture Critic), ArtyGraffarti, Just Another Agency, Jacqui Vidal (Signed & Numbered),  George Shaw (Oi You!),  Jeremy Gaske (Curator, RTIST Gallery) 19Karen, the Street Advent team and a whole bunch of our readers – all of whom contributed names and feedback as we put it all together.  We’re also sure that as time goes on, that there will be even more people contributing to it – its not just our list – so if you want to see someone featured or have someone you think others should know about, have a great comment or news of an artist, just let us know.

So, sometime in the next day or so, we’ll kick it off with our first artist – we hope you enjoy your daily snapshots of all the artists we love, and don’t worry, we’ll still be interviewing someone different every week, because that’s the shit we love most!!