9th September 2007: Who's made a mark this week?

Invitation to the 86th Annual Open Exhibition of the Society of Graphic Fine Art
Menier Gallery, 51, Southwark Street, London SE1 1RU
12th - 22nd September 2007

(click on the image to see a larger version)

Artists blogging on Life, Death, Art and what to do if you don't go to art school

I found a rather varied set of links while on my internet travels this week......hence the title of this section of my weekly round-up of what I've been up to and items I've found on the web.

• The Dumpster is about something I'd not come across before - information visualisation. It won the NetArt category in the 2007 Webby Awards. However it needs a fast computer with a good graphics card and a fast internet connection would be a help too. It also takes a bit of time to download the 460kb file. The link in this bullet point is to the Tate site and the one in the quotation below is to the site itself. I'm not sure I've got the hang of it yet.....
  

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.......
The Dumpster was created by Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg and is the first in a series of three Net-based artworks co-commissioned by the Whitney Artport and the Tate Online.
About The Dumpster

• Jeanette (Illustrated Life) blogged about the death of Pavarotti - and included a video of him singing with James Brown. (BTW I'm very excited as Jeanette has just started painting in oils!!!)
  
• Karen Jurick (A Painting Today) blogged at the end of August about how she got started and the pursuit of happyness. It's a very interesting read for all those who have not been to art school.

Often I am asked where to start. We live in the best of times - remember - the internet and computers are the fuel to get you going. Learn all you can and work hard at it every day. It'll happen.
Karen Jurick

• Do also take a look at Karen's website too - lots of interesting things to look at.
  

I’ve got no college degrees because I quit when they forced me to take academic classes instead of art.
Karen Jurick

• an interview with Jack Vettriano in Times Online highlights how he got started and his attitude to the art establishment.
  

One wonders how such a mentor would have changed his life at the same age. He dismisses it. “If someone had given me a helping hand, I’d be a chef by now,” he says bluntly. “If I had gone to art school I would have had all my figurative leanings knocked out of me by lecturers who didn’t like figurative art.” Without that academic status, though, his rejection by art circles persists. His income of £500,000 a year from reproductions alone also causes jealousy. “Other artists thought I had sold out when I first agreed to sell posters, and that was for about £2,000 a year. Ask them now whether they’d like to be in my position and I wonder what they’d say.

• Sue Smith at Ancient Artist is blogging about what's wrong with art schools after reading a discussion in the letters section of the September issue of Art in America magazine - do go and join the discussion on her blog

Two points I found particularly interesting were these: that art schools failed to teach students how to be creative enough to find their personal vision, and that they also failed to teach any realistic business skills............
My creative vision has grown out of my ability to think and conceptualize and explore outside of the academic box and to go where the paint takes me. Somebody else can give it a label.
Sue Smith

Artists and Cats

• Cats in Art and a monotype of a cat is a very good overview of the various ways cats have been portrayed in art in different cultures over the centuries. Lots of images for lovers of feline art! (For those familiar with Vivien's brand new Granny status, there is also a beautiful sketch of her very new grandson Sam here)
  
• I was very fed up last week as I missed the Private View on Tuesday for the opening of the annual exhibition of the Society of Feline Artists this week The combination of a tube strike and a health problem which has been plaguing me for the last few weeks made it impossible. I was especially to sorry to miss the opportunity to meet up again with Fine Line Artist Gayle Mason. She apparently had a good time and learned later that two people wanted to buy one of her works so she's going to produce another version!!! (For more details see my August post about the SOFA exhibition)
• I'm pleased to announce I've opened a new Imagekind gallery for feline art and you can find the first image in it here. I'll be adding more images in due course but for my first one, I've chosen to use Eyes Left (the two kitties) the original of which is currently making a guest appearance in the SOFA exhibition in the window facing the Old Vic Theatre. The original artwork is available framed via the Llewellyn Alexander Gallery.
  
• In the meantime, I'm hoping to auditioning four tiny kittens shortly. They're the next litter on from the Eyes Left pair and with any luck I might able to start collecting some photos to work from for next year's show.

Artists and Drawing

• Yesterday we delivered my drawing for the Annual exhibition of the United Kingdom Coloured Pencil Society which opens on 15th September.........
  
• ........and today we delivered my work to the 86th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Graphic Fine Art - a fine art drawing society. This opens on Wednesday (see images at top) following a Private View on Tuesday night. There's a great range of work in the exhibition all of which features some aspect of drawing. The exhibition will run until midday on Saturday 22nd September. I have framed work hanging and three pen and ink drawings in the portfolio stand. Do let me know if you'd like to visit and have any queries about how to get there - I've included the map at the top of the page.
  

Group Art Blogs

• Art Central is the group blog run by Australian artists from the Australian Art Forum. One the things this one is doing is focusing one highlighting art supplies around Australia for different media - such as the one for coloured pencils which I highlighted on 26th August. If you want to become a member of Art Central then you must become an AAF member and contact the forum with your email address for an invitation to join.
• I'm always a bit surprised surprised that there aren't more group blogs by people who live in a specific vicinity. At present Group blogs seem to be very media oriented rather than localtiy oriented - perhaps because we don't notice the miles when on the internet? If you are part of one and it's open to people to join let me know.

Art Galleries Online

• The Old Masters Gallery at Dresden Art Gallery has been recreated online by Anshe Chung as a virtual reality in Second Life with masses of detail, right down to the trash cans. This is believed to be a first in terms of projects done in partnership with a Museum. (Thanks to Wired.com for this item). Second Life is a 3D World imagined, created and owned by its residents. This is the link (a SLURL) to the Second Life Dresden Art Gallery. (Thanks to My Second Life for the link)

Copyright theft - for visual artists

A certain party made a very big 'mark' on the coloured pencil world this week after a number of images produced by various coloured pencil artists (including me!) turned up on a site in another language and another country - without the knowledge or the permission of the artists concerned. Now I think I'm right in saying that all the artists involved have been or are being informed so I'm not going to give the name of the site that posted the artwork images and 'how to's' as that might only give further 'air-time' not to mention clicks to the site of the offending party. However I did think it would be useful to highlight just a few things which are useful should it ever happen to you.

• Read Lorelle Van Fossen's excellent thread "What to do when someone steals your content" (see below).

I will cover the following topics and issues on what to do when someone steals your content:

• Identify the Source
• Contact the Content Thief
• Cease and Desist Order
• Contact Advertisers
• Request a Ban from Search Engines
• Register Your Copyrights: Prevention is Protection
• More Information on Copyright Laws, Intellectual Property Laws, and Content Theft Prevention
• Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements
• The Growing Trends in Content Theft

Lorelle Van Fossen - Lorelle on Wordpress: what to do when someone steals your content

• Bear in mind it can be a very emotional experience for a lot of artists - especially if the work is neither credited to you nor linked back to you in any way. It's not always the best context for making decisions about what to do next. Before you do anything, I'd suggest talking it over with somebody with prior experience or knowledge of the sort of things you need to do
  
• If the copyright infringement has happened to more than one person consider the scope for banding together to get a resolution. Getting images taken down can be a very time-consuming process
• Read the blog post which I should have written after it happened to me back in April. By which I mean I need to apply myself to finishing the draft! It'll be better now in case as I now know how to find the registered details of the domain owner in another country!
  

Websites, Blogs and Widgets - for artists

• Charley Parker continues to post his excellent and very helpful posts about How to Display Your Art on the Web. I'm listing them all below for anybody who may have missed the first ones I posted. As charley says his posts are intended as a rough guide for illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present a professional representation of their work on the web.
• Part 1: Finding a web hosting provider
• Part 2: Registering a domain name
• Part 3: Building your web site
• Part 4: Planning your web site
• Part 5: Designing your web site
• I've been admiring the e-bay auction widget on Duane Keiser's blog and went in search of its origins - which is a betaish product called e-bay to go. Apparently anyone can create their own eBay To Go widget, even non-eBay users. You can create an eBay To Go for a single item, multiple items (up to 10) or for a favorite search.
• Take a look at the nominees and award winners for the 2007 Webby Awards. (keep scrolling - it goes on forever - or use the menu of categories choice near the top of the page). I found the netart category (after a lot of scrolling) very interesting - hence the blog winner getting a mention up top.
• It's been suggested to me that I introduce a label for this weekly blog post - "who's made a mark this week?" - but somehow or other it has fallen foul of Blogger's dreadful habit of running two labels together so I'm not sure if it's going to work. I guess we'll see after publication......
  

...and finally - what colour crayon are you?

One of those inane quizzes you can't help doing - especially if it involves pencils with a bit of colour! So What Color Crayon Are You?

And for the record I'm a blue crayon - and it will come as no surprise to those doing the quiz to find out that I have three cartons full of blue coloured pencils and a kitchen with duck egg blue cupboards......and very pale duck egg blue walls in my hallway.....then there's my large number of duck egg blue T shirts..............