29th June 2008 - Who's made a mark this week

Out to Pasture

paper painting - collage
copyright Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson

People write to me from time to time and tell me about what they think about my blog, about their own art and what they are doing. If their blog looks interesting I tend to add it to the list of those that I keep an eye on in Bloglines. Then if they blog consistently and well then I start mentioning them in one of my weekly "Who's made a mark this week?" posts on a Sunday.

Now and again, I see a blog and artwork - and the artist leaps ahead of the queue and gets a feature mention.

Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson is a collage artist using paper. She creates "Paper Paintings" from torn bits of hand-made, hand-painted and found papers. Naturally enough, her blog is called Paper Paintings. It's brand new - so I guess many of you won't have found it yet. However she is not brand new as an artist!

• This is her website - you can see more of her paper paintings here
  
• Plus she has published a book on Lulu about her paper paintings.
  

What I like about Elizabeth's work is that it is unshamedly collage rather than an artist using a medium and trying to make their work look like something it is not. These are emphatically paintings in my eyes depsite the fact that the only brush involved will have been one with paste on! I also noted that much of work is also well designed. Her use of colour demonstrates to me a very strong and good appreciation of values which makes a lot of her work very eye catching.

Deja Brew
a paper painting by Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson

Extracting a post title with URL is becoming DIFFICULT!

Before I start with the body of this post I'd just like to highlight a difficulty I'm having. Copying a post title with an embedded and unique URL has suddenly become well nigh impossible on some blogs. I'm not talking about extracting content here - I'm talking ONLY about being able to copy a blog title with an embedded and unique URL which enables me to send people to visit a precise place in your blog

I like to keep and quote the exact title of a post and copying a title with a unique URL embedded makes life much speedier and more efficient for me. When post titles don't have a unique URL embedded it means that typing out and checking a precise blog title and then copying the URL can take 3 or 4 times longer. Frankly I don't have that sort of time which means that I may well move swiftly on to another blog........

Of late I'm coming across too many blogs which

• Either - Have NOT yet created settings for post pages so that each post has its own unique URL. (In Blogger you need to go to Archiving/enable post pages and set this to Yes. Post Pages then give each of your posts its own unique web page, in addition to appearing on your blog's front page. It also means that individual posts can appear in browsers as unique pages. All of which generates more traffic and visitors to your blog)
• OR - are Wordpress blogs which now seem to make it impossible to block and copy the post title to my blog. Any attempt to do so is either impossible or starts to catch other parts of the screen view (eg blogroll)
  

In this post, there are people whose blogs present me with these sort of difficulties. If I stop linking to you in the future or haven't linked as yet you might like to check out just how easy it is for anybody to reference your blog post on another blog so that they can send you visitors. Why don't you try copying a post title from your own blog - and see what happens......

Meanwhile the solution appears to be to copy the title from Bloglines - which doesn't cause a problem as yet - so long as you are in my Bloglines blogroll..............

Congratulations to.....

• Richard Childs who has just won the "Wildlife Artist of the Year" award from the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation at the Mall Galleries. You can see a large image of Richard's work Hope of Sepilok which featured in the last UKCPS annual exhibition on his website. Plus the UKCPS blogpost Some Winners - and a Competition shows a picture of him with David Shephard and Alan Titchmarsh who presented the prizes.
  
• Jeanne Grant (Jeanne Grant) in California whose blog is now two years old - Happy Blog Birthday Jeanne. Jeanne was a student in my online Sketching for Real class who's gone from drawing photos at home to being an avid sketcher from life who's also now a member of a plein air art club. You can see a recent example of her work on the right

Art Blogs and Newsletters

• Just in case any of you were wondering who I am, I wrote about publishing a new site this week - which focuses on Who is Making A Mark?
• My recent newsletter from American Artist Magazine provided an introduction to printmaking
  
• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) has created a very useful overview of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci - one of my all time favourite draughtsmen.
• He's also highlighted an artist whose cloud studies are definitely worth taking a look at - see Ambera Wellman (Ambera Wellmann) - who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia where they obviously have excellent clouds - see the gallery on her website!
• Robyn (Have Dogs with Travel) has posted her sketches and photos from her trip to London - and meeting with me. See London sketches.
  
• Edward Winkelman - and readers - have been considering By What Measures Is a Picture Considered "Good"? Open Thread

Art Practice

• Serena Fenton (Layers of Meaning) has been pondering on practice - see Ponderables
• as has Sue Smith - in recent posts on Ancient Artist.
  
• Michael Chesley Johnson (A Plein Air Painter's Blog) commented on knifework painting last week. Michael also recently posted some results from a survey he did recently about workshops. It makes interesting reading Workshop Survey Results.

Art Book Reviews

• I've recently taken out membership of Good Reads and now have their widget in my side column. People can list books they own and also do short reviews. I was very much persuaded by the fact that people I like are already members. I luuuuuuurve looking at people's bookcases and this is a way to do so online. The only thing is I now look like a total nerd as I've almost totally given up reading fiction. I have a stack of books about colour next to my bed at the moment!

Art Business and Marketing

With the impact of the credit crunch, here are some alternative perspectives on how to deal with the marketplace

• Damien Hirst is going straight to auction - do not pass a dealer, do not play the gallery game, keep control and sell direct - see Hirst hopes to revolutionise the art market with golden calf
• Tina Mammoser (The Cycling Artist ) in Greenwich has written about "The Alternatives, or "less is more""
• There's a fascinating story apparently emerging online about eBay Live in Chicago. Following my earlier post What happens when you annoy eBay sellers,I've gone into bloodhound mode and am sniffing around and tracking down posts for material which either supports or disproves my new theory - of which more later - maybe! I started my new persona as a bloodhound after seeing a reference to this post on Silicon Alley Insider - it has a link to a video about eBay Seller Goes Berzerk at eBay Live: Outraged Sellers Game New System To Survive. The really interesting thing is how few references there are to eBay Live online compared to two or three years ago.
• Meanwhile, the international and high-end art market definitely appears to be operating in a different economic universe. There was a World record bid for Le Bassin aux Nymphéa by Monet (of £40.1million) at the Christies' auction (that's sterling folks not dollars - so roughly $80 million). The successful bidder did ask for a little more time before actually making the winning bid! The middle market is now described as works costing less than £1 million!!!

Art Materials

• The Pastel Journal Blog has got a link to a Free Download: Guide to Pastel Supports. The guide has been written by Maggie Price and deals with a variety of papers and more abrasive surfaces.

Art Exhibitions

• Reviews of the Cy Twombly exhibition at the Tate Modern (until 14th September) - from the Independent and the Guardian - in the latter Jonathan Jones describes him as the thinking person's Banksy. The Guardian also provides a podcast - Art podcast: Jonathan Jones and Nicholas Serota take a walk through Tate Modern's Cy Twombly retrospective and a Gallery of Highlights.
• A new exhibition has opened at The National Gallery in London - Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 (on until 7 September). You can see some of the images from it in this slideshow on the NG website this slideshow prepared by the Daily Telegraph.

Dissatisfaction with modern civilization led Divisionist painters to explore Symbolism. Their aim was to represent political concerns and make their art into an instrument for social change. The movement also sprang from research into optics and the physics of light. Inspired by French developments with pointillism, and fuelled by a desire to increase the luminosity and brilliance of their paintings, artists developed new techniques applying paint in a variety of dots and strokes.

• On Tuesday, July 1st, J. M. W. Turner - a Special Exhibition opens in The Tisch Galleries at theMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York (July 1, 2008 - –September 21, 2008). This is the first retrospective of the work of J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) presented in the United States in more than forty years so it rather looks like a MUST SEE for those who can get to New York. It has approximately 140 paintings and watercolors—more than half of them from Tate Britain's Turner Bequest—along with works from other collections in Europe and North America. Turner's range from seascapes and topographical views to historical subjects and scenes from his imagination, is represented. Accompanied by a catalogue.
• The decision as to what is going on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square has been made. It's going to be shared by Antony Gormley and Yinka Shonibare MBE. Antony Gormley proposes that the fourth plinth is occupied 24 hours a day by members of the public who have volunteered to stand on it for an hour at a time. Over a period of 12 months, 8,760 people will take part. You can see the winning designs and the rest of the shortlisted works here plus the Guardian commentary on the choice here Fourth plinth: He wanted to scrap it. Now Boris Johnson could be on it. Plus this is the 4th plinth quiz.

Art Societies

• Thanks to the BAGSC News Blog for alerting me to the fact that registration has opened for the 14th Annual Meeting and Conference of the American Society of Botanical Artists in Pasadena and Sanata Monica from 30th October - 1st November. BAGSC are hosting this exhibition and are planning Pre- and Post-Conference Classes. I really like the idea that every registered attendee can enter a small work for showing in an exhibition of small works which is not juried. Plius they have a slot for portfolio sharing. It seems to me that this is an art society which is embracing its community of members rather than being resolutely elitist about only having juried entries on display. That gets them a goldstar from me!
• If you're a fan of marine art, you'll be interested to see works from the 13th national exhibition of the American Society of Marine Artists - on their website plus you can also see it as these gallery venues during 2008 and 2009.

Colour

• Color Lovers Color and Design Blog has a couple of posts which caught my eye:
• All 120 crayon names, color codes and fun facts speaks for itself
• The Colors Of Global Brand Identities which illustrates very neatly how much of the power of a brand icon lies in the choice of colour and how much in the design of the graphic and use of colour. I had one of those "duh" moments when I realised that Kodak, Shell and McDonalds are virtually identical in colour use - and I'd never spotted it before.
• Plus they also highlighted this fascinating tool Name that Color created by chir.ag - which is when I found out that:
• a colour I use all the time as a background colour on my website is called "Tusk"!
• The header for this blog has "Patina" as its central colour and "Laser" in the corners and used as the background colour for all the titles in the right hand column! As a result I tried out the colour names in the Chambers online dictionary and found that the colours are symbolic of this blog being associated with......

Patina: "...any fine finish acquired with age..."
and
Laser: "a device that produces a very powerful narrow beam of coherent light of a single wavelength..."
Chambers Dictionary

• The Society of Dyers and Colourists now has an official blog - A world of colour in blog form is underway and has a few posts so far. Looks like it could be interesting though. Plus they also have Colour Click - their new website dedicated to news and information about colour. It includes the virtual colour museum which has LOTS of interesting content.
• Richard McKinley (The Pastel Pointers Blog ) has an interesting post about Dealing With Green
• I had three posts this week dealing with:

• Colour - a materials perspective #1 - pigments and dyes
• Colour - pigments and related colours the development of my new guide to pigments and their index names, chemical names and usage continues - it may even be published later today! I had to take a break as so much reading - from books and screen - was causing my eyes to go loopy!

Photos of Arcobaleno Pigmenti de Nube Massimo - the pigment shop in Venice
(see Venice - a resource for artists for a map of where it is)
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• Colour - naming dyes, pigments and paints

Websites and blogging and "being a geek"

• My Upgrade to Firefox 3.0 means more speed! That was Monday. Since then I've lost the ability indent bullet point lists using the tab key - and I'm now writing all my blog posts outside Blogger!!! Which does mean I get to see what I'm writing! Just when are the men with the purse strings at Google going to realise that it is actually possible to invest in creating a better user experience by creating a bigger text window for Blogger. Screen size has increased, screen quality has got better but the Blogger text window resolutely sticks to being the same size as it was when they started - many tens of millions of blogs ago! Sooooooooo silly.
• For those who missed it, Bill Gates retired from his role at Microsoft on Friday (although he's staying on as Chairman of the Board). I found the comparison of the Microsoft Family - then and now - to be riveting
• Did you know there's been a domain name shake-up?
• I came across a site which looks like it could be very helpful to artists trying to track down whether or not their images are being copied - TinEye Image Comparison Search
• The Guardian has an interesting article on Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution
• Wordle will generate text in word clouds for any text that you supply to it....in principle - it crashed my browser!
• a set of suggestions of 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site
• plus Sue Smith (Ancient Artist) has recently has an item about websites Of Course You Know This.... You might also want to read her most recent posts about the experiences of older emerging artists.

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

For everybody's new laptop.....

Thanks to Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life ) for highlighting the latest in laptop sleeve design. Well naturally, if you live in Canada you take it literally and knit your laptop an arran sleeve. Well - just like you, laptops don't like getting cold!