About Us
Our Mission: A Fresh Approach to Design Arts!
To offer clothing and household objects with original artistic prints directly from the artist/designer to the public at affordable prices.
Our Story
Some years ago, our original online presence showcased sculptural art. There was no way to make purchases on the website. If a customer did make contact and inquire about pricing, we had to give them the "gallery price", as we were trying to follow traditional paths to art sales, like galleries and shows. A typical gallery would not look at anything with a price tag under $1000. We could not undercut the gallery prices either on our website or at shows. Making art, and running on the show and gallery treadmill required time equivalent to more than a full time job. We were living a middle class life with jobs, kids, and debt. Something had to give, so we abandoned the traditional art sales path.
Flash forward to the present. Steven has been making pattern art for many years, just because he loved it. Selling his creative photo and graphic art transformations never entered his mind until he stumbled on a website that focused on the pattern design market and Print-on-demand. The light flashed on. He could do something he loved and get his art into the hands of regular people completely outside of the stifling constraints of the traditional art markets, and Triboca Arts was born to run!
Our Team
We are a small visual arts Print-on-demand business.
Jeanette manages most of the business maintenance tasks like banking, taxes, pricing, policies, etc., and helps with customer service.
Collin's area of expertise is business development. He is a young entrepreneur with multiple start-ups under his belt. He steered us toward the store platform we currently use, and helps guide our Print-on-demand business development.
Billie is an artist we work with part time who also has a business degree. She helps with HR concerns, customer service, and data analysis, particularly social media marketing data.
Steven is the artist and photographer. He has a degree in Information Technology, and has many years of experience in visual and digital arts. He creates the digital art and designs all our original prints, patterns, and graphics. He also manages the website and helps with customer service.
Our Process
Painters will often start by filling the entire canvas with color and generalized shapes, working into the image with ever greater detail later. The initial image is often totally obscured by the layers of paint applied as the artist develops their often evolving vision. In a similar way, Steven uses photographs to lay down the bones of his vision, to initially fill the digital canvas. Additionally, he transforms photographic and graphic elements into the building blocks of his creative process. As with a painting, the finished pattern or print might not display many hints of the original photograph. In this case, photography is more often a tool, not an end. Steven does also offer traditional photographic prints, and fine art photo and graphic images.
Most of our product families are named after places where their core photo captures occurred. The Gaviota Collection, for example, comprises several product families, like the Monterey Azul Family, based on photographs captured at Gaviota State Park, Beach, and Campground on the central California coast. Others are named after tactical approaches. For example, all core photos in the Aloft Collection product families, like Gold Canyon, were captured through the windows of commercial aircraft using telephoto lenses, usually at much higher altitudes than most drone photography. (One of Steven's jobs required him to fly around the country a couple times a week for a few years.) While a few of these photos are offered as traditional photo prints with minimal post processing, most are not in themselves the endpoint. They are the raw resources for patterns and textures, part of the visual artist's toolbox and palette.
Our Future
We are an art focused small business now. Our goal, focusing first in the USA, is the global stage. We aim to eventually create and host other selected artists where styles are complementary without much overlap.