Its really well designed. I am not a fan of hover affects, but thats a personal choice
I think its might be too dark and bleak (not a fan of mainly black), but it does seem to go along with some of your art and does provide a contrast, so its a tough choice.
I like how you have kept it simple, a lot of modern web designers will just put too much on their websites and make them very inefficient.
Also, if you want to protect your work, I would (at minimum) add water marks to your pictures or, use a php or flash based gallery for your pictures. The php image gallery called "Gallery" in Softaculous (in cPanel) is supposed to be quite good and has a feature to automagically serve images with watermarks even if you feed it your original photos. A flash based gallery should be able to do the same thing, and it also forces users to have to first copy their screen to copy a photo instead of simply right clicking and copying.
Finally, the last part is that pictures are encased in a large black surrounding frame with a little bit of text. Serving that whole thing is inefficient. You should use a simple picture with just your art and then use CSS to place it where you want it to be. If you want to still use an image for your wording, use CSS to place that as well.
