Somerville artist, creator of Gesso, Liv Cappello.

By Iris Martinez

Working as an artist is a unique mix of creativity, marketing and sales, and administrative work. From website hosting to tracking inventory, Somerville-based painter Liv Cappello noticed a lack of tools that could support artists’ needs in one place — so she decided to use her experience in web development to create Gesso, a platform for artists.

Courtney Alan, an artist and educator based in New York, has been a beta tester for Gesso and wrote in an email statement that it “is what every artist needs; one place for all of the admin to make tracking work easy and streamlined,” and would be particularly helpful when filing taxes.

Alan also noted the accessibility and affordability of the platform, which Cappello notes was a focus of her platform.

“One of the goals of this was to make something really affordable and work really well,” Capello said. “So, I’m only charging money for it, because I have to maintain the hosting fees and stuff, you know?”

Gesso offers two additional paid subscription plans alongside a free version. Depending on the tier, artists can have website hosting, inventory tracking, certificate of authenticity creation, and more. These services are based on Cappello’s personal experiences as an artist and on community feedback, much of which she received from fellow artists in Somerville.

Cappello’s “Bag o’ Sunflower Seeds” – 2026, oil on cradled panel.

“I put together a survey that I sent around just to, like, my studio building and people on Instagram and other artists I’ve met, and got a lot of good feedback on artists’ pain points and what they use for admin,” she said.

This survey highlighted some of the ways artists are losing opportunities due to the lack of a centralized service. Cappello found one of the more notable examples of this loss when an artist explained how they relied on Post-it notes to keep track of things and lost one with a highly interested potential buyer.

“It was a lot of stories of people losing track of work, and not being able to recover from kind of small things like that,” Cappello said.

The platform is still open for community feedback, which has led to ways for Somerville artists to connect through Gesso. For example, Cappello is publicly launching Gesso on May 1, which is one day before Somerville Open Studios, so she’s including a section for local artists to create checklists to prepare.

“Because I’m an artist here, I get to build directly toward what I think people in the community will use, and people can tell me what would be helpful for them,” Cappello said.