16th December 2007: Who's made a mark this week?

The Frost Fair at Bankside
(L) outside the Globe Theatre and (R) outside Tate Modern
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

You know the way newspapers and magazines start having different content just before Christmas / the end of the year? Well I am too!

Yesterday we went to The Frost Fair at Bankside, outside the Tate Modern and the reconstructed version of Skakespear's Globe Theatre. The latter was open for free as part of the Fair. Being long time residents of London we have, of course, never ever visited the Globe Theatre before - but we'll definitely be going back! (There will be sketches on my Travels with a Sketchbook blog later today.)

We also nipped into Tate Modern to go and see Dora Salcedo's crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall - Shibboleth!

Photographs above are of (left) the crowds at Frost Fair between the Globe Theatre and the River Thames and (right) outside Tate Modern. Click the images to see larger versions.

The End of the Year Review
At the end of December 2006, I did an "end of year review" about blogging art which came in four parts (which now all have a label - 'who's made a mark this year')

• Blogging Art in 2006 - a Review:
• Part 1: practices relating to individual artists/art bloggers
• Part 2: how artists and art bloggers have influenced the content of the internet
• the Making A Mark Awards - for excellence in blogging art and about art - which also came in two posts (Part 1 and Part 2)
• and my own personal review of what I got up to in 2006

I'm trying (with difficulty) to find some time to draft posts for the end of year review 2007 and I'll be saying something more about these tomorrow.

There may be even be an interactive component this year!!! ;)

Art Blogs

• Visit The Great Tate Mod Blog - and send in your photos to help shape a new building. You can read more about the blog here. Seems like a great use of a blog for me - I think it's a way of using blogging which has really not been explored yet.
  
• A couple of tales of art bloggers and their mishaps:
• Last week I missed Wally (Crackskull Bob) telling the real story behind Crackskull Bob in Memories - and who would ever have guessed it involved Brian Wilson and deep sea diving?
• Read Seascape 911 to see what Ed Terpening (Life Plein Air ) did to create an emergency while painting plein air - and what happened next!
• I discovered a page on the The Artists' Information Company website last week. Earlier this year three prizes were awarded for reviews and blogs posted on this year’s Degrees unedited site (described as an interactive platform and information hub for current art and design students and recent graduates). The site featured listings for sixty institutions and hosted blogs by over thirty final year students.
• This review of the Royal College of Art Photography Degree Show won a first prize of £100 for Andrew Bryant. It has an interesting start! It's also one of the best reviews I've read in some time insofar as it asks some really interesting questions and makes me feel as if I can see the show even though I didn't!
  
• The second prize was awarded to Rachel Murray for her review of Nottingham Trent Fine Art Degree Show. It reminds me that a lot of graduating art students are now working in video.
  
• The £100 prize for the best student blog was awarded to Squid Ink whose blog details the development of ‘Touch This Press’, and the making of books for four fictional emerging artists. This is the MySpace version of Touch This Press
  
• You can read the 2007 blogs of Graduating students discussing their practice and experiences during the lead up to their final year exhibitions. Some are more expansive than others! You can also read the rest of the Reviews of the 2007 shows.
• This link contains links to articles and information for After Art School.
  
• The Guardian's Arts Review of the Year By Adrian Searle is included here only to indicate what it isn't highlighting.......... ('visual art' comes after 'Theatre' in the Guardian! ;)
  

Art Materials

• First off – check out the polls on my two new squidoo lens for art supplies – in the UK and the USA The lenses are getting lots of visitors and people are beginnning to vote on the polls about types of art suppliers and the pattern which is emerging already makes interesting reading.online suppliers have captured a lot of the market in the USA - which I guess is very much about distances because I know the art shops while I was there last year I visited were very, very good.
• Gayle Mason (Fur in the Paint) has started a series about the art materials she uses. Her first post Art Materials - Part 1 is about Polydraw drafting film which she uses for coloured pencil work. I've added it into two of the Resources for Artists sites - Paper and Supports and Coloured Pencils.

Squidoo lens

I think may be going to bore people with the publication of too many squidoo lens - so this weekly post seemed a good place to provide a bit of an explanation.

Some of you may be wondering why there have been so many posts about Squidoo lenses this last week. Well the main reason is that I'm getting ready early on all the ones I have planned to support my art projects in 2008. So there's also a bit of an imperative to 'clean house' and tidy up and post lenses associated with activities and research in 2007 before we get to the end of the year. Plus I need to get ready for Christmas!

• Published this week in the Making A Mark - Resources for Artists Group:
  
• Art Supplies in the UK
• Art Supplies in the USA
• Miniature Art
• The Big Drawing Book Review
  
• New squidoo lenses to be formally announced this week
• Blogging for artists
  
• Venice - maybe/maybe not............
  
• to be published in the very near future in the Artists in History - Resources for Art Lovers
• David Hockney
• James McNeill Whistler
• Georgia O'Keeffe
• maybe Degas
• maybe Stanley Spencer
  
• 2008 projects: New lens to support these are developing as works in progress by steadily collecting links 'on the fly' and have already been published in embryonic form. You are very welcome to suggest links! Their formal announcement will come along as each new project starts as they are very much a work in progress at the moment.
  
• Design and Composition - for January. I'm having a few problems finding really good links for this one. For some reason there seem to be few authoritative sites commenting on design and composition.
  
• Colour - the problem here is too many links at present and a need for some better organisation!
  
• Japanese Art and Artists focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries and those artists who influenced western art towards the end of the 19th century.
  
• Hokusai - one of the great Japanese artists who influenced Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Whistler etc etc.
  
• Seth Godin (Internet marketing guru and founder of Squidoo) also has an update about squidoo - two years on. In it he highlights that Squidoo now has over 300,000 lenses and over 6 million visitors a month to those lenses - which helps squidoo lenses to rank well in Google.
• most of mine are in the top 10,000 - with 2 in the top 1,000 and 3 - 4 in the top 100 for the Art & Literature category - but you have to check out the other things in that category to see why I don't get my undergarments in a twist about that one!

Blogging, the Internet and Websites

• Have you noticed that Blogger has some new iniatives? I've not tried any of them yet - but they are:
• Open ID commenting
• Blogging from YouTube
• plus last month they explained how to display photos using the new slideshow
  

And finally......

Thanks to Big Dermie's friend Mrs Snowy (who is really Robyn - Have Dogs will Travel) who sent me a link to this hysterically funny YouTube video about waking up with a cat. I absolutely hooted all the way through this one!

• Wake Up Cat' is by an English animator called Simon Tofield and it is actually called 'Cat Man Do'. He works for an animation company called Tandem Films.

I think this one needs to go on my squidoo lens for Somali cats – because Cosmo, my Somali does virtually all the actions in the film. I just don’t have a baseball bat. He resorts to knocking glasses off my bedside table and turning the radio on (I kid you not!)

This picture is what he looks like when I open my eyes and he’s sat right next to me………..