Call for Entries: Royal Society of Marine Artists Annual Exhibition 2023

This is about the Call for Entries for the Annual Exhibition 2023 of the Royal Society of Marine Artists. It covers:

• Exhibition Dates and Prizes
• Who can enter
• What you can enter
• How to enter

The deadline for digital entries only is 12 noon on Friday 28 July.

One of the walls in the RSMA Annual Exhibition in 2022

The RSMA seeks submissions of art inspired by the sea and marine environment, including harbours and shorelines, traditional craft and contemporary shipping, creeks, beaches, wildlife - in short anything that involves tidal water.

The Exhibition and Prizes on Offer

The RSMA Annual Exhibition 2023 - at the Mall Galleries

The Society's annual exhibition is widely recognised as a showcase for the best in contemporary marine art, with selected work from the open entry hung alongside the work of RSMA members.

The exhibition will be 

• open to the public between 21st - 30th September 2023 
• at the Mall Galleries in London.

There is an invitation only Private View on 20th September. 

If you want to know what it will look like, take a look at some of my reviews of previous exhibitions listed at the bottom of this blog post.

Prizes and Awards

This is an exhibition which generates a decent level of sponsorship of various awards. Notably, unlike most of the art societies exhibiting at the Mall Galleries, the prizes and awards in this annual exhibition are predominantly monetary in nature - with over £9,000 in cash awards and over £350 value in art materials - plus two publication awards

I've categorised them below. You can see what won last year in my post  Royal Society of Marine Artists - Prizes and Awards 2022

Is it OK to create a painting by copying a photograph?

Here's my response to a painter who asked whether it's OK to copy a photograph taken by somebody else. 

• First his letter 
• Then my draft response - and 
• Then the long post I started to draft after I realised this would be a helpful topic for others and could be a blog post (which is what I invariably do now - and the person who asked the question gets sent the link!)

However I didn't quite finish it!! I probably went off to continue writing information about copyright rights and abuse on my Art Business Info website! 

That's why I've only just found it some time later - but it's now finished and addresses one specific question......

Can I copy a photo to make a painting?

This is the letter I received

Dear Katherine,

I was interested to read your recent article on copyright.

I have worked on the understanding that photographs which are published in the media, may be copied and turned into paintings. In which case the photographic image clearly belongs to the photographer, but the image of the painted version belongs to the artist.

On this premise, I have no qualms about scanning a photo in a newspaper or downloading an image from a site such as Pinterest or Instagram and basing a painting, either closely or loosely, on them.

Am I right in my assumption, do you know?

As my work is improving, I am considering entering art competitions, but I notice that some organisers’ rules state that if a painting is based on photographic reference, the permission of the photo copyright holder should be included. This seems to infer that my copyright to my painted image is subject to the photographer who put his image into the public domain, and who could well be difficult to trace.

Can you enlighten me?

[name of painter]

Review: 124th Annual Exhibition of the Pastel Society

I visited the 124th Annual Exhibition of The Pastel Society on Wednesday. The theme of this year’s Pastel Society Exhibition is ‘Pastel Without Boundaries’.

This post covers:

• general observations about the exhibition - compared to the previous 17 previous annual exhibitions - all of which I have seen and commented on (except for last year when I was immobile post surgery)
• artwork I liked
• things which IMO need to change and/or improve

Some exhibition metrics will follow after the end of the exhibition.

This post is later than I intended as I ran into major problems yesterday with Blogger absolutely refusing to upload images. So I waited 24 hours and it's now back to normal. However this left me more time to mull over over my thoughts on the show. 

Pastel Society Annual Exhibition 2023: Catalogue Cover

The Annual Exhibition is on at the Mall Galleries until 3rd June 2023. 

• Admission is £5 but is Free for Friends of Mall Galleries, Friends of the Pastel Society, and under 25s.
• You can read the catalogue online via Issuu
• The Pastel Society Annual Exhibition 2023 | Award Winners - has been posted on the Mall Galleries website, so I'll not cover those in this blog post unless they happen to be one I was impressed by.

You can see my photos of the exhibition on my Facebook Page

• West Gallery [UPDATE] where I comment further on some of the points made in this review
• East Gallery
• North Galleries

Observations about the Exhibition

All that follows needs to be viewed from the perspective that I am a very big fan of dry media and pastels - so some of the comments made below are hard to make - but I think need making. 

Blogger problem - unable to upload pictures

I'm afraid I cannot write any blog posts involving images at the moment. 

Google has made a change to its software which is preventing me from uploading images to blog posts.

It's an appalling situation in Google's Chrome. This is the message I get while signed in

It's slightly better in Apple's Safari browser - which is where I found out that they want me to accept all Google Cookies so they can track all my activity.

The latter is illegal in the UK - Google should really mug up on GDPR - it's been around for quite a time (see General Data Protection Regulation ​for Artists and Art Organisations)

I suspect the change has been due to the enormous fine Meta has just received - see Meta: Facebook owner fined €1.2bn for mishandling data | BBC

Facebook's owner, Meta, has been fined €1.2bn (£1bn) for mishandling people's data when transferring it between Europe and the United States.

Issued by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), it is the largest fine imposed under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation privacy law.

I suspect Google has changed things so they can say "we all agreed to all the cookies" - EXCEPT they obviously don't understand that in the UK we have a legal entitlement to refuse all but essential cookies i.e. they cannot make us accept all cookies!

Looks like Google is setting itself up to get a big fine too!

Peter Doig at the Courtauld Gallery

I visited the Courtauld Gallery to see the Peter Doig exhibition (which closes on 29th May) about two weeks ago. One of the reasons I've not written about seeing the exhibition before now is because I actually found it rather disappointing.

I've seen his artwork before and liked it - which is why I visited.

But in this exhibition there was little that I liked and much that felt like reworkings of stuff he'd done before - but less successfully

There is one really good painting in the show - and that's the one of the skier. However that was about it for me. 

Alpinist (2019-2022) by Peter Doig
pigment on linen

It's a painting based on an old postcard, which was then changed (eg introduction of the harlequin suit) to make it a more monumental work.

I read the reviews of the exhibition beforehand which were almost universally were complimentary - so maybe I was disappointed because they'd built it up to be better than it is.

Gallery view of other paintings by Peter Doig

Simply put - I just didn't get it. 

• Making large paintings is what people do these days. Making large paintings does not make you better than everybody else. 
• Making paintings look brutal or about alienation is what some artists do - so what makes Doig better?
• Making paintings out of photographs? Yes, happens a lot!

The reviewer who in my opinion got nearest to my response to the exhibition. was The Arts Desk review titled Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review - the good, the bad and the unfinished - with a strapline of 

Paintings that run the gamut from the sublime to the banal

It turned out that the person who wrote it had taught him at the Chelsea College of Art 

I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one.

I also visited the Peter Doig Etchings for Derek Walcott - and similarly came away underwhelmed.

I think the conclusion I've come to is that 

• Peter Doig is a painter who is perfectly capable of producing genuinely new and inspired - and does - now and again.
• He is also a painter who can complete quite a lot of dross inbetween. 

I'm not surprised. This is the way for many painters. It's just that many painters have more sense than to show everything they've ever painted - even if it takes them years to finish it.

However, having come to the exhibition late, I could also judge the success of the exhibition (once I had left it) by the amount of goods for sale still left in the shop. 

Let's just say there's going to be an awful lot of cutprice catalogues very soon......

The public have spoken.....

PS I think I have at last worked out why so much contemporary art disappoints me. Those that are trying to be like Doig - given he fails to impress - cannot hope to make me happy.