Stock images are legion-but stock artwork? That’s the tack Toronto-based Archive has taken with its new visual arts venue. Both a digital library and a gallery, Archive has over 4,000 works from hundreds of Canadian artists available for rental or sale to designers, photographers, TV, film and advertising productions, corporations and the general public.

Co-owner Patricia Christie, production designer and art director for film and TV productions, devised the concept three years ago in response to her mounting frustration at the difficulty of finding and acquiring the ‘right’ artwork for set decoration within shrinking time constraints. "Getting releases to use the art, finding the art- it was becoming a more complex process, so I wanted to create a service to simplify it. A service where anyone looking for original artwork, to decorate film sets or a photo shoot, could quickly locate and rent what they wanted."

Together with her partner Johnson Chou, Christie contacted hundreds of Canadian artists and catalogued their work on a computerized database. Each entry has a picture of the work along with such criteria as subject, media, artists name, size and price; a searchable index lets users find artwork using any combination of these criteria, and color printouts are available for reference purposes. Not only that, each work has all the delicate issues of copyright and insurance prearranged.

Composed of a diverse collection of artwork including painting, sculpture, photography, illustration, print-making, digital work, clay, glass, enamel and textile art, the digital library features the work of such names as photographer Barbara Astman, illustrator Linda Montgomery, painter Natalka Husar and sculptor Eldon Garnet. "Finding quality artists was difficult at first," says Christie, "But as the word of mouth gets out there, artists are now approaching us." So much so, she adds, that they have decided for the time being to cap Archive’s roster of artists at 1,000.

The company’s Toronto studio, reminiscent of the "archival institutions of the 1930s," serves double duty: as an office open to the public with workstations clients can use to search the database, and as a gallery. New works are featured daily, and a thematic show is held once a month.

The concept has been so well received that Archive is considering expanding to Vancouver and Montreal, and putting its digital catalogue on CD-ROM. "The goal is to revive both public and corporate interest in using and owning original works of art," says Christie," and I think we’re doing that."