Well, if you do decide you'd like to pay, you 
might want to look into your-site.com.  That's 
where I host my site, and I've been very happy 
with them (it's been...hmm, a year and a half 
now?).  I hosted on free websites for years, but 
got tired of constantly switching around when 
they'd drop things that I liked and put in things 
that I hated (ah, I remember the days of no ads! 
^^;;).  

Anyway, it's $5 a month for the hosting package if 
you pay yearly, $20 a year for domain name 
registration.  You get 50mb, no ads, cgi-bin, and 
25 pop3 email accounts.  The data transfer is 6 
gigs...I'm not sure if that's as much as you were 
looking for, but I have a fairly art-centric site 
too, and I haven't hit the limit in all the time 
I've been with them.  Uploading is by ftp only, 
but you can create as many subfolders as you'd 
like.  The only fault I have with them is that 
it's very hard to see how much disk space you're 
using...they really need a user interface.  But 
customer support is very good, imho.

Anyway, just something to keep in mind ^_^.

Talia
http://chanth.com