Sunday, November 22, 2009

22nd November 2009 - Who's made a mark this week?

Yesterday was also the 5th anniversary of the very first Sketchcrawl - see Sketchcrawl is 5! (Plus 25th Worldwide Sketchcrawl tomorrow)

Mathew Brehm (Sketchblog) who teaches architecture at the University of Idaho and is a contributor to Urban Sketchers did a rather nice title page for his sketchcrawl in Moscow, Idaho.

25th Worldwide Sketchcrawl by Matthew Brehm

This is Urban Sketcher's interview with Enrico Casarosa (Enrico's blog) - the man who started it all- Five years later, Casarosa's sketchcrawls keep us drawing
The act of drawing has a meditative quality and that's what's great about it, it forces you to slow down and really take into account what you are seeing.
Here are some posts I found of people out sketching on Urban Sketchers. It is of course totally predictable that the east is posting faster than the west!
If you want to catch the next one try following Sketchcrawl on Twitter

Art Blogs

More blogging about trips to France

Early evening at the Auberge du Terroir
8" x 10", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in Moleskine
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Art Business & Marketing

I have no idea when this started or who the original perpetrators were, but I get more pointless, idiotic, ill-conceived and just plain lame single-sentence (and sometimes slightly longer) email communications like these (examples provided) from artists the world over trying to get exposure for their art-- way more than I would have ever imagined possible.

Art Collectors - and the art economy

In summary, evidence suggests that: (1) the wealth of the wealthy drives art prices; and, (2) art prices tend to evolve with, or somewhat behind, the equity market at a similar pace.

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

Art school
  • I think I know what I might be writing about on Tuesday! According to the BBC Saatchi says 'Don't be an artist'. This is by way of a prelude to the BBC 'X-factor' type programme School of Saatchi which starts on BBC2 on Monday 23 November (9.00-10.00pm BBC2), the synopsis being................
Powerful art world supremo Charles Saatchi sets six unknown artists up in their own East London studio for 10 weeks and commissions them to make a series of ambitious artworks, as he begins a search for the next generation of creatives............In today's opener, a shortlist of applicants bring their work to a London warehouse for scrutiny by the panel – artist Tracey Emin, critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings, art collector Frank Cohen and Barbican curator Kate Bush. They are confronted by an array of bizarre and wondrous work that constitutes contemporary art today
Demonstrations / guides
  • Jana Bouc (Jana's Journal & Sketchblog) has a great three part demonstration on her blog of a painting she is doing for a book. It's so nice to see a LONG explanation of what she is doing and lots of photos of how the painting progresses. I hope that's how it gets treated in the book too. I've highlighted books Jana has contributed to on this blog in the past and it looks like there's another one in the pipeline - it's called “Must Paint Watercolor Flowers” (Quarto Publishers, London)
detail of the painting of "Sunny Serenade" by Jana Bouc
watercolor, 15.5"x10.5"
copyright the artist
Step by Step - cats's eye demo by Gayle Mason
Classes

Art Exhibitions

Exhibitions involving artist bloggers
Don't forget to contact me if you want your blog post about your exhibition highlighted here.

Exhibitions elsewhere

Art Societies

Art Supplies

Book reviews

Rarest of all, there are art instruction books that are born out of the artist’s sheer enthusiasm for what they have learned and the desire to share it with any who are inclined to benefit from that knowledge. Imaginative Realism is one of those rare gems.............I also haven’t seen many art instruction books as information dense as this one. Not that the book feels visually cramped in any way, the book design is clear and elegant, but every one of its 200+ pages can be mined for nuggets of art technique gold.
  • Postcard from Provence - the book is being published in Spring 2010. Julian Merrow Smith and his wife Ruth have been very busy this week advertisng and responding to a very special pre-order opportunity for his mailing list of his new book. This has raised the capital sum required for the printing costs and indicates this is going to be a pretty popular book. As many of you will know I've been following Julian since I started blogging and am a huge fan. I passed on the subscription offer but will certainly be buying the book. The standard edition is going to be available to pre-order next week in time for Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving - which is when the serious shopping for Christmas really starts. One has to admire the timing! ;) Julian's plan is to offer a stocking filler card so that people can gift a copy and offer a discount or free shipping for all books pre-ordered before a certain date. The book will have a softcover holding 160 pages and 140 full colour plates (which I'm guessing are probably going to be mainly 'life-size'). Price likely to be very affordable.

Opinion Polls

  • Lots more people have responded to this month's opinion poll (in the right hand column). Have you answered the question yet - What makes a good art teacher?

Social Media, websites, blogging and webware

"When we look at where we can grow we look to the more than four billion active mobile phone accounts in the world, opposed to the 1.65 million active web accounts."

and finally............

I'm hoping that one of my favourite art suppliers hasn't been flooded in the "once in a millenium" rainstorms and floods in Cumbria (the Lake District) last week - 314.4mm (12.3in) of rain for a 24-hour period were recorded at Seathwaite Farm in Borrowdale.

Heaton Cooper is in Grasmere (in the next valley east of Borrowdale) and I viewed a BBC video of a car driving down the road to Grasmere into a flood caused by waterfalls coming over the top of the stone walls! The message on their website is that they hope to be back to normal after the weekend.

This is a link to photos of the floods in Cumbria

4 comments:

  1. oh, so many things to comment on this week! :)

    Firstly, happy anniversary to the sketchcrawlers! Great to hear the project has succeeded and grown.

    Re: emails. Even *I* get these from artists. It boggles my mind that artists don't even read websites for 5 minutes and somehow think I'm a gallery. Great article, and funny. :) My one disagreement - never send images unless explicitly requested. Most galleries I've talked to or heard from say they don't want attachments - the exception being if they've already spoken to you or it's requested in their application procedures.

    http://southlondonwomenartists.co.uk/

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  2. Phew! WMAMTW is wonderful (always, but especially)when life takes one away from the world of art and blogging for a while. I knew I could come here today and get up to speed on the worldwide week in art, and I have! I'm looking forward to following all of this week's leads. In fact, I've just gone to check out Roz's post on text in columns, your Squidoo lens on drawing books (it's always dangerous for me to check it out, because I end up ordering titles you've reviewed!), and have the Metropolitan Museum blog you mentioned and Jana's blog post on my agenda for today. Thanks for your great reportage.

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  3. I've only dipped into a small part of all your great links this week, Katherine but I'm so excited with that wonderful Google search box widget I've just put on my blog, I had to say thank you immediately. It is going to save me hours.

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  4. Thanks so much for the mention Katherine! Those darned prints are a pain, but at least I've done it, and now I know!

    Great blog, as always.

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