28th September 2008: Who's made a mark this week?

September Scenes from RHS Wisley
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This last week ushered in the autumnal equinox and, on a visit to RHS Wisley yesterday on a beautiful I could really smell Autumn in the air. The images above and throughout this post are various shots of Wisley yesterday. I can see me returning very soon to get some drawings of trees done for my new series on trees - the leaves have started to change.

How about a small competition for the best photograph of autumnal/fall trees? If you're interested let me know and I'll organise something and announce it next week. Advice on an end date would be helpful.

Art Blogs

• Thanks to Time Magazine's Art Blog Looking Around and Now "C" Here I now know that:
• The LA Times has started an art blog - called Culture Monster.
• C-Monster.net is not impressed! - see Help the L.A. Times comes up with a new name for their arts blog. Comments come up with a few alternatives! :) (Also check out their 'about C-Monster' page - I love it!).
  
• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) posted about Walking Poses and Action Poses and Photography
• Alyson B Stanfield (ArtBizBlog) recommended start to keep a loved file

September Scenes from RHS Wisley
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Art Business and Marketing

• Lisa Call (Contemporary Textile Art) writes about What Does Being a Successful Artist Mean?
• Sue Smith (Ancient Artist) talks about how to sell art in The Easy Cure for the Markaphobic
• Alyson B Stanfield (ArtBizBlog ) had a very nasty situation reported to her relating to a charity event - see Donation schmomation
• Art galleries: If one of your galleries is not selling work maybe now's the time to think about refocusing your efforts for gallery representation. Read Tracey Hegelson (Works by Tracy Helgeson) on what she's been doing with her galleries in Still Breathing (my congrats to Tracey!) and Ch-ch-changes. I also love it when an artist shows us what she used to paint!
• Art Economy: Jonathan Jones of the Guardian pondered on How could the economic crisis affect art? and he's talking about subject matter - but people commenting don't agree with him. One theme cropping up is about the need to teach emerging artists the facts of life when in business as an artist.
  

Etsy: The roll call of new esty shops continues

Tweedy Crab

• Paula Pertile (Drawing A Fine Line) has just opened hers for the yarn side of her creative self - plus her wonderful pencil drawings of yarn doing tangles. I love the name it's called tweedycrab and it's all looking very autumnal! (What's the 'fall' equivalent of 'autumnal'?)
  
• Sue Smith has a new one called Paintings from the Oregon Outback
  
• An Etsy Module has recently been developed for Squidoo Lenses - look for it under the A to Z list. You then need to enter your Etsy ID to fetch up to 5 specific items from your Etsy Shop. This is me - makingamark on Squidoo - if you get stuck.
  

Art Competitions - the AWS competition controversy

• The President of the American Watercolor Society (AWS) has recognised that the Gold Medal winning painting in the 2008 exhibition, “Impermanence” by Sheryl Luxenburg has generated a huge volume of controversy and indicated the issues which were being addressed - namely the ownership of the image, the originality of the piece and even the authenticity of the medium. See Statement on AWS Gold Medal controversy from President.
• Somebody from AWS even joined Wet Canvas as a member to reassure further the watercolour artists who've been discussing the situation now for a good month in a thread Copyright infringement at AWS? which has now topped 20,000 views! I can only imagine that this thread is being viewed by a very great number of artists around the country - and I can't reiterate enough that the issues this controversy highlights are ones which can face all art societies from time to time.
  
• Sue Favinger Smith (Ancient Artist) also had an extremely intelligent discussion on the AWS gold medal controversy last Sunday in Sunday Salon: The Dust-Up at AWS and the Continuing Relevance of Duchamp

Art exhibitions

• A retrospective exhibition about Mark Rothko opened at Tate Modern on Friday and runs until 1 February. The BBC has a brief slide show of some of the works. This is the Tate link to various resources. Opinions seem varied. Here are some
  
• Sunday Times: Mark Rothko in a whole new light
• Rothko's Gloom Is Compelling at London's Tate:Bloomberg Review by Martin Gayford
• Daily Telegraph -Tate Modern's Rothko exhibition asks us to ditch the mumbo jumbo

The show looks at the art Rothko produced in his final years, from 1958 to 1970. It is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on these late paintings, and the first to seek a fresh opinion of them.

Two's company by Dawn Benson
Bronze resin

• I came across the Surrey Sculpture Society exhibiting at the RHS's premier garden at Wisley Yesterday. The Society has 300 members from Surrey and neighbouring counties. The sculpture trail had 73 exhibits in total and I saw only a few of them - but some of them were selling very well. You can see more on members websites here. It's the last day of the exhibition today - so not a great day to be posting about it - except it's been on all month so there is next year! Also sculptors who might like to think about whether their sculpture society makes the most of gardens which get lots of visitors.
• Picture Gardens - an RHS Photographic Exhibition can also be seen at RHS Wisley. The exhibition is in the Glasshouse Gallery - which unfortunately doesn't seem to have any website URL - although it makes a great place for exhibitions of a botanical nature.
  

Art Projects

• On Tuesday I announced that I'm starting a new art project on this blog in A Making A Mark Project - Working in a series. I've still to decide but I think it's quite likely that at least one of the series I'll be trying to develop in the longer term is going to be one about trees. I've already got a trees and leaves gallery on my website - but I need to do more work in this area.
• The nice aspect is that just announcing the start of this project seems to have had a positive impact with a number of you commenting that the project has triggered you to think more about series - and get back to one/start one/get on and do one!
  

Art Supplies

• On Thursday I wrote about The new Icarus Drawing Board™ and judging by the traffic that post has been getting I'd say that announcement has raised a lot of interest in the CP World - and maybe beyond?
• On Wednesday I wrote about What is Cartridge Paper?
• Plus over on my sketchbook blog you can find my Product review: The Derwent Safari Journal and some sketches!

The Regents Canal looking towards the Approach Road Bridge entrance to Victoria Park
pen and sepia ink, 6.7" x 9.25"
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Arts Television

• On Monday I posted The art of marketing is the art which highlights Robert Hughes's film The Curse of the Mona Lisa
• Then yesterday I posted yesterday about art on television in the UK during the next week - so you can wrest control of the remote control.... see Ways of seeing art on television
• .........but forgot to look at Saturday night TV - which included a repeat of Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New (I only caught the second half). It's very odd - there's no page on Wikipedia for The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change

Botanical art and illustration

Tropical Sussex - a work in progress
8" x 10", coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• I wrote about Gardens and Botanical Art on Friday and in doing so highlighted
  
• this post on the UKCPS blog about Botanical Illustration by Valerie Oxley
• my new information sites about great gardens of the world. The one for Wisley is in draft and likely to be the next one published.
  

Websites, Blogging and the Internet

• On the 7th September, I featured the fact that Google was having its 10th birthday. It incorporated on 4th September and registered its domain name on 15th September 1998. However it took until yesterday morning for the birthday celebrations to start on my Google.co.uk page (and it's gone again today)! Check out their 10th birthday site and their Google 10th birthday timeline. It's fascinating how much has changed in 10 years and how much has stayed the same. For example - it includes a link to the New York Times article Google Deal Ties Company To Weblogs (Feb. 03) about its aquisition of Pyra Labs, the people who created Blogger - and it's an interesting comment on where blogs were just 5 years ago. Or should I say weblogs! ;)
  

Our indexing system for processing links indicates that we now count 1 trillion unique URLs (and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day).
Official Google Blog

• For those using advertising on their blog or website here's a site I've only just discovered. Quantcast quantifies estimated traffic of different sites for advertising purposes which should be rather interesting for advertisers trying to validate traffic claims. It's very interesting if you try checking a few popular websites and then check out the difference between claimed traffic and estimated traffic. Has anybody tried using it yet?
  
• Fancy entering the Webby Awards - then check out the entry FEES!!!! I personally don't trust any awards which involve payment - it's too easy for results to 'diverge' (or do I mean 'converge'?).
  
• The Statcounter Blog has:
• Google's Chrome Latest Stats - Global/US/UK in September
  
• how to install StatCounter on Blogger/Blogspot for anybody who has been having problems
• an introduction to SEO for people who have got Statcounter newly installed and are now wondering where all the visitors are! There's a very helpful guide to search engine optimisation in SEO: Intro
• Twittering: Lorelle (Lorelle on Wordpress) explains How to Remove WordPress.com Ads From Your WordPress.com Blog. She's also experimenting with importing Twitter Tweets into her blog via Loud Twitter - personally I think it looks really awful! Keep blogs for blogging and Twitter for twittering! Clint Watson (FineArtViews Blog) wrote about A Spectacular Way to Avoid Doing What Really Matters but has given to comments and is giving it a whirl! See A Spectacular Way to Avoid Doing What Really Matters
• Wired Magazine's blog ran an item Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy. (caution - language). Then in How Sarah Palin's Yahoo mailbox was so easily hacked the Guardian provided some simple reminders about secrurity. And the moral of the story?
• Never ever use any standard question for a security question.
  
• Create your own question and make sure it has an answer that isn't publicly available. Apparently you're 90% of way there in terms of improving security for non-relative hacking purposes as soon as you use a non-standard question.
  
• Most of all (say I) just think about how many bank employees know your mother's maiden name and how many accounts you have savings in............

and finally......

Maggie came up with this one up. Ever fancied drawing on your walls with a Sharpie? See what Charlie Kratzer, the Associate General Counsel at Lexmark got up to in his basement in Man decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie. Remarkable - plus I love the trompe l'oeil effects!

Plus sitting here in the UK I find it difficult to keep up with all the new female political candidates on the American political scene. But I was gobsmacked by the latest one Can Meg Whitman Turn Around California? So what's it to be folks? How about a nice auction?