2nd December 2007: Who's made a mark this week?

Strictly Pedestrian
a finalist in "People and Figures" of the International Artist competition
16" x 16" oil painting on masonite
copyright Karin Jurick - A Painting Today and Portfolio website

Congratulations to.........

• Karin Jurick (A Painting Today) who is a finalist in the People and figures section of the International Artist Competition with Strictly Pedestrian. It's a really great example of the impact of rim lighting and how suggestion rather than detail within a composition can still provide a strong sense of place. Note the first comments!
  
• John Davies on the opening of his 'new' (ie relocated) gallery The John Davies Gallery at The Old Dairy at Moreton in Marsh in the Cotswolds. Vivien Blackburn and I attended yesterday and were extremely impressed by the space and overall exhibition facilities. The gallery has 2,000 square feet and another 1,000 square feet will come onstream in the Spring. The Gallery shows paintings from a range of periods and themes plus contemporary art - details here. We were there for the PV of the exhibition of the Opening Collection comprising mainly English and Scottish contemporary artists. I particularly enjoyed the work of David Prentice and Sandy Murphy plus Michael Bilton and Stephen J Carruthers. As usual, they look even better in real life - and even more so now that you can view paintings in the gallery with ease from a distance and a number of angles!
  

Art Blogs

• Robert Brindley (Robert Brindley Blog), a member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists, is using his blog for those interested in his painting demonstrations - it provides an alert as to when and where they are taking place and then he posts his paintings on the blog after the demonstration. Are other tutors and demonstrators doing this too?
• Vivien Blackburn (Painting Prints and Stuff) comments on Sketchbooks - a personal view. She tells and shows how she uses sketchbooks and also highlights some other artists whose sketchbooks she likes.
  
• I hadn't come across Terry Banderas's blog (Terry's Ink and Watercolor) before he commented on one of my posts this week. I always take a look to see who is commenting and was very taken with the quality of drawings on Terry's blog and the associated commentary. Go take a peek!
• For those interested in ecology and all things green as well as the arts, you may well be interested in the new Arts and Ecology Blog (originating from within the Royal Society of the Arts)
• Charley Parker ( Lines and Colors) has written a persuasive blog post about the progression of Pissaro's paintings - Camille Pissaro: Impressions of city and country

Art Communities and artists communing

• Art Society Blogs: I've included a new section in my right hand column for art society blogs. At present it only includes the blogs for UKCPS and SOFA. Does anybody else know of any other (national) art society blogs? They seem like such a sensible idea to me - as a way of communicating with society members (and prospective members and fans) without the need to wait for the next edition of a newsletter.
• Anybody interested in all the Flickr drawing groups you can belong to should take a look at the profile page for Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel. I certainly hadn't come across all of these before! Kathrin is a photographer and a designer and has her Moleskine diary on Flickr. It's brilliant at illustrating what your ordinary Moleskine diary could look like if you are as talented as as Kathrin.
  
• EDM Members Ronell Van Wyck (African Tapestry) and Nina Johansson (Nina Johansson.se) met up for some sketching while Ronell was visiting Stockholm in Sweden a couple of weeks ago. See examples of their sketches in Ronell's Sketching in Stockholm with Nina and Stockholm Sketches 2 and then Nina's Sketching with Ronell.
  
• Laura Frankstone (Laurelines) has been In Amboise with Casey. See also Casey Toussaint's (Rue Manuel Bis) post about Sketching in Amboise with Laura.
  
• Dan at Empty Easel has written about the new social network for artists at MyArtInfo.
• A sketchbook entry about my meeting with Vivien Blackburn yesterday will follow shortly. (I'll change the link and remove this sentence when it's posted.) This is Vivien's blog post re yesterday - Visiting galleries with a critical eye, sketching and David Prentice
  

Art Competition

• If you'd like to try and emulate Karin's achievement, the next International Artist competition focuses on Flowers and Gardens and has a closing date of 16th January 2008 and has an entry fee of $10 (Australian).
  
• See the American Artist Pastel 70th Anniversary Competition Winners

Art Journalism

• This is the the main on-line site for State of Art. I was amused to find the contact address is in Bethnal Green just off the Hackney Road! It contains (amongst numerous other pieces)
• Robert Heller being extremely scathing about some art blogging activities in Blogged Down...and Out
• ...and an interesting and provocative piece State of Ignorance (which dates back to Autumn 2005) by Laura Gasgoigne - art critic of The Spectator magazine and The Tablet newspaper - about the state of arts journalism and galleries' and dealers' awareness of painters in the UK.
  

Art Exhibitions

• The Annual Exhibition of the New English Art Club opened last week at the Mall Galleries and runs until 10th December. I'm going to be visiting it next Friday with Sarah Wimperis (of Red Shoes fame) who is in London for a few days.
• The Art History Today Blog author has been visiting Bilbao. You can read all it here in:
• Bilbao Diary 1: Poussin and Nature exhibition (8 october, 2007 - 13 january, 2008) at the Museo Bilbao.
• Bilbao Diary 2: Lost in the Funhouse at the Guggenheim Bilbao designed by North American architect Frank O. Gehry. The Guggenheim Collection has an interesting approach to how art should be displayed between the four museums - as a shared art collection.
  

The Permanent Collection comprises the works belonging to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Together, the four collections offer a complete overview of the plastic arts of the 20th century.
Guggenheim Collection

• The National Gallery of Art in Washington has a website exhibition of Robert Rauschenburg's printmaking during the course of his career.

Art Supplies

• Susan Borgas (Art and Stuff) has a very useful blog post about Saral Transfer Paper - which Susan uses for transferring a drawing to Art Spectrum Colourfix paper which she uses for her wonderful pastel paintings of South Australia.
  
• If you are ever in the Cotswolds and in need of art supplies, you may be interested to know that right at the very back of Grimes House Antiques and Fine Art in Moreton in Marsh is a very small art supplies area. It doesn't have everything but they cram in an amazing amount! Yesterday, it was great to be able to find some of things that I've been been trying to find for ages and which apeaar to have disappeared from the big art stores in London. Competition from online suppliers seems to have reduced many to a range catering to "the largest common denominator" only! It's so nice to be able to find small outlets who cater for those who forget or run out of supplies while in the area!
• Dan at Empty Easel is running a survey about the best place to buy art supplies - here's how artists have responded so far - The best places to buy art supplies. Note that it's very USA oriented.
  

Art Videos

Enrique Flores (acuarelista) has two new sketchbook videos on YouTube (making 38 in total!) for:

• Paris November 07
• Midori Clermant Ferrand November 07 (which includes lots of sketches of fellow travel sketchers)
  

The Big Drawing Book Review

• My review this week was: "How to Keep an Artist's Sketchbook" which covered:
• Albany Wiseman The Artist's Sketchbook
• Michael Wood How to Keep a Sketchbook
  
• Laurel Kaupelis (Learning to Draw) reviewed Robert Kaupelis Learning How to Draw (this is the volume which preceded 'Experimental Drawing'.
  

Websites and Blogging

• Valeria Maltoni writes about how to identify what your brand is in You are your own brand navigator on Blog Herald.
  
• Charley Parker over at Lines and Colors has an interesting post about some digital painting software Colors! and Inchworm: digital painting applications for Nintendo DS

Blogging Tip: After reporting sites to Google AdSense which steal my content in order to decorate their blogs with Google Adsense adverts around, I've now started to subscribe to thieving sites using Google Reader. I label all such sites 'all thieving blogs' in Google Reader and this enables enables me to check quickly and easily whether they are continuing to steal and/or have moved on to somebody else and/or whether the domain name is deactivated. So far this week we now have one deactivated domain!