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Sunday, June 29, 2008

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

Out to Pasture
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!
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
Art Practice
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 Art Materials
Art Exhibitions
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
Colour
  • Color Lovers Color and Design Blog has a couple of posts which caught my eye:
  • 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
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
Websites and blogging and "being a geek" 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!

10 comments:

  1. I am so excited to see Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson's work featured here. I have a wonderful work of art by her in my home!

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  2. As regards the direct url link. i find that if you use the green thingy and transfer the globe to the address panel you have to make sure that there is only one https. you can check this and carefully delate one , then it should be ok .
    I still have firfox 1.5.02. tried to change to three but so much hasel. i have my icons back anyway.
    Hope all that makes sense!

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  3. I have fallen in love with your site, your writing and most defnitely your art!
    Thanks for mentioning me, I appreciate it!
    Looking forward to my next visit!
    Cheers,
    Ambera

    ReplyDelete
  4. Katherine thank you for the mention. Like Ambera I too enjoy your blog very much.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't know how much longer I can go on reliving our day together, Katherine. But it still resonates very warmly. Thank you!

    Thank you for the Cy Twomley links - I can't believe I missed that exhibition by a day!

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  6. I just love the paper paintings! How clever!!

    And Katherine, come on, you know you really want to knit an aran sweater for your laptop.... ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Jeanette, I want to knit an Aran sweater for MY laptop - even though it's 33 degrees here at present! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Love the paper paintings; thanks for bring her up!

    As to the difficulties with linking to Wordpress posts... I never thought of copying the post title to link it. (I've always just copied the URL directly from the top of my ISP window.) I tried it on my Wordpress blog as you mentioned and you're right I couldn't get a link when I was on the specific post. However when I was on the main page showing the posts in backwards chronological order, I could copy the links from the post titles. (This sounds confusing, but I think I said what I mean.) Anyway, thanks for letting us know the difficulties!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Katherine,
    Barry and I just came back from the Met exhibit - it is now pouring on the 4th of July with the fireworks 2 hours off! I thought of you and our lovely visit to Hockney on Turner. There are two rooms of his watercolors - many more very early ones and I was surprised at the detail. They were small and yet had many realisticly painted people in them. The Burning of Parliment series and those from the 1840s were more like the ones selected by Hockney. A lovely exhibit.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Thank you Shirley - it's always good to hear what the exhibit is really like.

    Plus I note you can now see some of the paintings which are included on the Met website which you couldn't last Sunday!

    ReplyDelete

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