There is a widespread myth about what it means to be a working artist. In it, the artist rises each morning, walks into a sun-filled studio, picks up a brush, and disappears into the creative act until evening. The truth, for most practicing artists, is considerably more complicated, and considerably more spreadsheet-adjacent.

Behind every finished painting, print, or sculpture is a small, invisible business. Artwork must be catalogued, priced, and tracked across exhibitions and collections. Sales have to be recorded. Invoices need to be sent. Collectors need to be remembered. Open calls and grant deadlines pile up. There’s a website to maintain, an email list to grow, expenses to log, and receipts to file. Then, after all of that, there’s the actual making.

“It’s a ton more admin work than people might think,” says Liv Cappello, a Somerville-based oil painter who knows this reality intimately. “It’s a lot about tracking your art, making sure your pricing adds up and it’s consistent, collecting email lists, managing contacts and relationships, tracking expenses, all of that.”

Cappello’s answer to this problem is Gesso (pronounced jess-oh, like the white primer painters apply to a canvas before they begin), a platform she built herself that consolidates every layer of an art practice into one coherent system. Launched in May 2026, it is the first tool of its kind: part portfolio website builder, part studio management suite, part CRM, fully designed around the actual texture of how artists work.

Liv Cappello was born in 1998 and is self-taught as an artist. She works in oil on canvas, making paintings rooted in everyday interiors and domestic spaces — kitchens, sinks, a pair of burners on a stove. Her work is drawn to ordinary light: the way it moves across familiar objects, transforms architecture, and accumulates meaning in the mundane. Her paintings have been featured in Studio Visit Magazine, Suboart Magazine, and Artscope Magazine, and her work is on permanent display in the JetBlue Lounge Collection at Logan Airport. In 2026, she received both a Visual Arts Fellowship and a Visual Arts Project Grant from the Somerville Arts Council.

She is also, by training and profession, a web developer. This dual fluency, in the studio and in the codebase, put her in a unique position to see the gap that Gesso was built to fill.

As her art practice grew more serious, Cappello found herself running it across a growing tangle of platforms. Her portfolio lived on Squarespace. Her sales and expenses lived in spreadsheets. Her invoicing ran through QuickBooks. Contacts were scattered. Opportunities were tracked in notes that went nowhere. Nothing talked to anything else.

So she started building. First, a better website for her own work. Then, piece by piece, she pulled the rest of her practice in: inventory, sales, contacts, commissions, events. When the system began to feel like something other artists could use, Gesso became a product.

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A studio that thinks with you

Gesso combines what artists typically stitch together from multiple subscriptions, website builders, inventory systems, CRM tools, accounting trackers, into one unified workspace.

Instead of juggling separate tools for:

• showing work
• selling work
• tracking collectors
• documenting exhibitions
• managing expenses and opportunities

Gesso threads them together so they stop behaving like separate lives.

A piece of work, for example, isn’t just an image on a portfolio page. It becomes a tracked object: it has a status, a history, a collector trail, and a place in your studio memory. When it sells, the system updates everywhere at once. When it’s exhibited, that too becomes part of its record. The artwork becomes less like a static post and more like a living file with biography.

There’s also a strong emphasis on reducing financial and cognitive load. The platform positions itself as a cheaper alternative to the “artist stack” — those combined subscriptions that often climb into a significant monthly cost — by replacing them with a single subscription system designed around real studio workflows.

Why it matters now

The dominant model for running an art practice online has long required artists to become involuntary software curators. A typical setup involves a separate website builder, an inventory management tool, a commerce platform, an accounting application, a CRM of some description, and whatever note-taking or project-management system the artist has cobbled together for the rest. Each tool has its own login, its own interface, its own monthly fee, and none of them share data with the others.

The cost accumulates quietly. A Squarespace Commerce plan, an Artwork Archive subscription, QuickBooks for invoicing, Milanote for inspiration boards, the total can easily reach $100 a month or more, for tools that still don’t add up to a coherent whole. Every time an artwork sells, someone has to manually update three different systems. Every time a collector reaches out, the relationship has to be reconstructed from scattered threads.

Gesso’s proposition is simple: one home for everything, at a fraction of the cost. Add a piece once, and it propagates to your public portfolio, your inventory, your sales history, and your collector records, automatically. The platform is not merely cheaper than the alternative; it is structurally less demanding. It asks less of the person using it, so that person has more left over for the thing that actually matters.