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Sunday, September 28, 2008

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
September Scenes from RHS Wisley
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Art Business and Marketing
Etsy: The roll call of new esty shops continues

  • 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
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
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
Botanical art and illustration

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

3 comments:

  1. I hadn't heard about that AWS controversy before and was curious to see the work. I found an image on Painters Keys with a comment by someone who provides a link to the photos from the stock photo company on which her work was based. Wow! The link is in the middle of this page:
    clicks.robertgenn.com/paper.php
    I can't wait to read the article you linked to about how to put off doing what is really important (title?)...after I get off the computer and go paint! Just the title got me going! Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm hoping the Ways of Seeing will be on BBCi soon, as I forgot to watch it tonight. (For good reasons at least, I was being social and having a barbeque with friends.)

    As for the Twitter tool, it does look clunky on Wordpress, but I think Wordpress bloggers sometimes don't get the best gadgets really. I have my Twitter feed at the top of my blog and know several people find it useful because they can see that throughout the day but can't access Twitter (usually because of internet limitations at workplaces).

    And thanks for the Sharpie art link! That is really fun and impressive. The curving staircase is my favourite part. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tina - the next "Ways of Seeing" episode is tomorrow night - same time - and focuses on oil paintings.

    ReplyDelete

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