Sunday, July 19, 2009

19th July 2009 - Who's made a mark this week? #105

Hidden
16 x 12 on Arches

copyright Gayle Mason

I'm topping and tailing this blog post this week with two aspects of technology which help to market art to online viewers.

First, the Annual National Exhibition of Wildlife Art opened on Friday. Its excellent online gallery opened at the same time and is permits buyers to reserve works for purchase online. So sensible!

Intensity
16" x 12" on colourfix
copyright Gayle Mason

My good friend Gayle Mason has had two works accepted this year - which you can see above and on the right. You can follow how Intensity was developed on Gayle's blog Fur in the Paint
For anybody who's ever wanted to take a good close look at wildlife art this is your chance.

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching
The challenge is to produce sketches of trees done from life.
Drawing people, portraiture & Figurative
Images of sketching people in interiors in London
- see Interior Landscapes - Drawings by Katherine Tyrrell
copyright Katherine Tyrrell
I frequently draw people in public places while eating in public places as restaurants, cafes and gallery tea rooms. In fact I've drawn in cafes and restaurants all over the world - in the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
Painters
Photography
  • Take a look at the work of Erik Johansson who is the most highly rated artist on Artist a Day. Absolutely stunning work in terms of both concept and execution. This is an interview with an artist who is operating at the edge of reality.
  • This is the the Prix Pictet - the world’s first prize dedicated to photography and sustainability - and the 2009 shortlist. It's sponsored by the Financial times and this is the FT article commenting on The 2009 Prix Pictet shortlisted photographs
Printmakers Art Group Blogs

On Sketchercise most of us are losing weight and some of us are even getting into trousers a size smaller! (Preen!) :)
  • Jana Bouc did us proud this week with her first bike ride in two years - read Amazing Grace: “Sketchercizing” on the S.F. Bay Trail on Jana's Journal. Just a quick note to those inclined to apply to join us. If you've not been sketchercising already then you'll be asked to join Sketchercise on Flickr first and show us your results. Experience to date is that people ask to join a group because it exists and not because they want to participate in the activity of a group.

Art Business and Marketing


I'm starting with two books which are getting good reviews. the first is aimed more at artists and the second more at galleries but also of interest to artists.
With over 1,000 participating artists and over 500,000 visitors, the art fairs are together one of the largest art fairs in the United States.

Art Exhibitions

The 100 or so works will span the period 1400-1510 and artists including Jacopo and Gentile Bellini, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Michelangelo and Raphae

Artists Communities and Art Forums

  • Wet Canvas has a new logo. The globe and the coloured paint splashes have gone and, if I'm honest, what's left is an extremely boring logo!

Art History

Colour

Copyright

On Friday my post about the National Portrait Gallery versus Wikipedia - Round Two! summarised a number of links in this fracas. I hope everybody works towards a constructive solution of this one.

Tips and techniques

My creative partner (in books, teaching, blog, Etsy, blah, blah, blah) Carlynne Hershberger had to learn to photograph our artwork for our first book(Creative Colored Pencil Workshop). I say "she had to" because if we had depended on me to do it, our publisher would still be waiting and I would be under my bed in the fetal position sobbing and mumbling to myself.

Websites, webware and blogging

  • Alyson B Stanfield (Art Biz Blog) has wrritten about What to tweet and How to reply to tweets on Twitter. For what it's worth, I'm no longer following people for one of two reasons - low content quality (ie what I'm interested in) to frequency of tweet ratio and staccato tweeting (you know the one - 6-8 tweets in quick succession).

and finally........

The very frequent mantra for artists when a recession bites is to focus on how you're marketing your art. The same holds true for the larger art organisations.

Sales at the auction houses are some 70% down on last summer. However, following the success of bidding via its live website, Christies (the Auction House founded 1766) has come up with a new wheeze. It's created an iPhones app for its auctions. You can browse sales and catalogues and check auction results. A couple of articles about it follow:

1 comment:

  1. I thought the same thing about the new WetCanvas logo. Too plain. What were they thinking?

    ReplyDelete

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