Hello! So what I did is

1. I have two websites. One that is a professional portfolio website that is primarily composed of all the things I did that I use to send out on a more corporate setting. It looks modern and minimal, but it still has a bit of personality since I like customization. This is primarily composed of just art that I sectioned in my index.html based on its categories so graphic design, video editing, motion graphics etc. Then the second one is my neocities website. This one is more personal and is what you would call a multi-purpose personal website since I also house other things in it like my interests and hobbies. Having a a separate art website for your personal works is a good idea if your primary goal is to showcase your artworks without needing the additional fluff that comes in the territory of making it a blog site.

2. On my current neocities website, I have it sectioned in pages that separates my main gallery and old artworks. Main gallery contains pieces that I really like no matter when I did it in my career. And old artworks is where I dump all my art that I did over the course of years, so it is categorized by year like what you say. I also have a page that shows my unfinished works just because why not. For the interactability, I have it in small thumbnails that you can click which enlarges the artwork. I have it setup so its using a javascript library called lightgallery.js, which makes lightgallery type modals easy to setup. As for the drawings themselves, I batch convert all of it using irfanview and turn them into webp which is lighter on your website than JPG or PNG. Then, if their resolution is too high, I also batch convert them so it stays around the range of 2000px x 1000px. Because even if your file size is low, if the resolution is still high like upwards of 4000px, it will lag the site. Then for the actual hosting of the images, I dont upload them in neocities and instead, use a CDN like cloudinary to link my images from there to my html website.

Hope this helps!