19th October 2008 - Who's made a mark this week?

This is the 1,000th Postcard from Provence.

Oyster Shell, Knife, Lemon Quarter and Goblet
19cm x 13cm (8"x5"), oil on gessoed card at auction
copyright and courtesy of Julian Merrow Smith

Congratulations!

Back in February, Postcard from Provence, had its 3rd birthday and Julian Merrow Smith agreed to an interview with me to celebrate the 1,000th Postcard from Provence. On Friday I published that interview in The 1,000th Postcard from Provence. You can now see that 1,000th Postcard from Provence above and also read

• a Guardian article last Monday The 1,000th Postcard from Provence could be yours,
  
• his wife Ruth's (meanwhile, here in france...) blog post One man, one thousand paintings
  

Thanks to Julian for all his help with the interview. I had a lovely time going through the archives to select paintings from the last three and half years for Friday's post.

Another person I celebrated this week was Tracy Hall. On Monday, Tracy accepted the most prestigious prize in the world of miniature art for her painting Red Admiral & Rook - which fans of Tracy and her blog Watercolour Artist Diary will remember from Rook painting in miniature - complete with the requisite one penny coin to demonstrate just how small 2.25" X 1.75" really is!

You can read all about it in my Tuesday post The Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers - Annual Exhibition 2008. Tracy has now achieved a 'hat trick' with prizes in all three of the miniature art exhibitions she's entered here in the UK and in the USA.

Moving from miniature art to small paintings but staying with the 1,000 paintings theme Duane Keiser's new blog Oddments - a 1000 small paintings is letting people buy paintings the 'crackerjack' way. I've not seen this online before - is this another Keiser first? Plus he announced on Friday that he's been working on a big project which has been taking up quite a lot of his time. Could this be the next 'big thing'? Who knows - I certainly don't but I do know that Duane keeps coming up with new ideas which others follow. Duane and Julian between them popularised the daily painting blog format which has since between taken up by many artists for selling their work online. I think most people have by now realised that a painting a day is a major challenge and have settled for painting a little less often.

Daily Paintworks - changes to the line-up

The Daily Paintworks people make a commitment to paint and post a set number of new paintings each month. That's easier said than done when the profile you can get as a result means that demands for your painting take off!

Within the group members and names have changed recently as other demands (such as major commissions, galleries, exhibitions and 'life' changes) have had to take precedent. So the Daily Paintworks people have said

• Goodbye (from their website) to Neil Hollingsworth, Karin Jurick, J Matt Miller, Sarah Wimperis and Peter Yesis and
  
• Hello to Jelaine Faunce (Jelaine Faunce Studio) in Las Vegas Nevada, Edward B Gordon (Edward B Gordon) in Berlin, Germany, Jacqueline Gnott (Realism in Watercolours) in South Bend, Indiana and Jonathan Koch (A Small Painting) in Santa Cruz, California. Edward by the way has just reached painting #700 ! and Jonathan acknowledges both Julian (and Duane) as inspiration to start painting small. You can also read more about them on their bio pages accessed easily via the contact page on their new website.
• They join the other members of Daily Paintworks who are: Tom Brown, Justin Clayton, Belinda Del Pesco, Qiang Huang, Aaron Lifferth, Carol Marine, Darren Maurer, and Michael Naples.

The Daily Paintworks email certainly continues to be one of the emails I look forward to getting each day! You can read more about daily painting in my post from December last year Daily painters, paintings and paintworks - and where you can see them.

Art Blogs

• a momentous post by Jana Bouc (Jana's Journal and Sketch Blog) Finding my way as an artist.
• Andrea Joseph (Andrea Joseph's Sketchblog ) has been showing us the inside covers of her Moleskines in push it along
• Lauren Nassef is a freelance illustrator living in Chicago. She has been producing a drawing a day for nearly a year - you can see them on A Drawing A Day. I really like her drawings - technically excellent and thought provoking at the same time.
• Mattias Adolffson (Mattias Inks ) is now selling his original drawings via an Etsy Shop - his drawings always make me think of words like whimsical. Check out his shop and stock in Mattias Adolfsson Originals - there's lots of pink piggies
• Sometimes you spot a blog and respond to it because it's of an area you know - such is the case with Sheila Vaughan's Stalybridge Paintings
• Dan has got his redesign up at EmptyEasel.com and a brand new strapline
• Armand Frasco has got a Web Find: Urban Sketchers

Urban Sketchers is a community of artists around the world who draw the people and places of the cities where they live and travel to. This blog is an extension to the Flickr Urban Sketches group started in November of 2007 by Seattle journalist and illustrator Gabi Campanario.

Art Business and Marketing

Art Review's Power 100 was published this week - it consists of an awful lot of names which I don't recognise at all and am not getting excited about enough to look them up, mainly because I have an inbuilt resistance to thinking of Damien Hirst as the most important living person in art!

ART'S MOST POWERFUL

1 Damien Hirst - artist

2 Larry Gasogian - gallerist

3 Kathy Halbreich - gallery director

4 Sir Nicholas Serota - museum director

5 Iwan Wirth - gallerist

Source: ArtReview

In the meantime Laura Allsop posed the question Will women artists ever get the respect they deserve? given that there are only 30 women on the list.

Once again, men outnumber women on the Art Review's Power 100 list - further proof, if you need it, of the lack of equality in the art world...............only three out of the 30 artists featured in the Power 100 are female, and these three all appear in the second half of the list

Art market sliding: On the city front the news continues to be woeful......however this week, I've also started to spot articles suggesting the market turmoil is now having an impact on contemporary art at the high end and the tide is turning. Included below are an assortment of articles from Friday and Saturday commenting on the state of the contemporary art market - it won't make for easy reading for some....... however the quote below might bring smile to a few faces (it's a very good article too)

The great thing about the imminent possible crash in the art market is that there are no victims. By which I mean, there are no victims other than enormously rich people. Even better, some of the enormously rich people who may lose their shirts are bankers.
The Observer Carole Cadwalladr Before the bubbly stops flowing ...

• Bloomberg's take on last night's auction of contemporary art is Crisis Bites Art Market as Sale Raises Less Than Third Estimate
• Richard Brooks at The Sunday Times concludes Art imitates life as boom shows signs of bust
• ARTINFO: The consensus seems to be that the party's over. The Era of the Five-Minute Decision Is Over and Lowered Reserves Power Unremarkable Sotheby’s Result

If Sotheby’s contemporary art evening auction in London tonight did somewhat better than expected, it was only due to the pre-sale across-the-board lowering of reserves.
Art Info - Lowered Reserves Power Unremarkable Sotheby’s Result

• One of the blogs to keep an eye on is Sellout which burned very bright earlier this year before closing down. It's now back up and posting about

• Your Debt (has a video embedded and takes ages to load)
• Easy Credit Days Are Over For Emerging Artists
• After Art?

• On Thursday I asked What happens to artists in a recession? (note what I said about contemporary art prices at the high end) I tried to avoid total gloom and doom by striking a middle line between the bad news and some more positive thoughts (and some suggested prompts for action).
• Darren Rowse (Problogger) has a blog post about 13 Tips to Recession Proof Your Blog. Darren is a professional blogger - but some of his tips are very applicable to artists facing a recession. The tip about website hosts not being immune from bankruptcy and failure seems particularly pertinent. Nobody is too big..........
  

Frieze Art Fair and a few art auctions triggered the negative press highlighted above. Frieze closed yesterday with sales in the thousands rather the millions it generated last year..........

• The New York Times had the best title -Frieze Art Fair Feels a Big Chill !
• 'If the work is free, is it art?' - which considers whether or not the art world has become too commercialised. (Don't you just love it when people behave as if art has never had a commercial past and/or artists live on thin air?)
• By way of contrast, The Daily Telegraph had this article and a video Frieze Art Fair 2008: mentally splashing cash which I have to confess to finding it complete unmitigated twaddle!
  
• Personally I much prefer the Guardian's slideshow of photos of visitors to Frieze - don't miss the captions and another slideshow Frieze 2008: British-based artists talk about art and money

As we know ;) Damien Hirst has been keen to follow the success of art bloggers selling their work direct to customers via ebay and other online auctions and has taken to selling work direct to collectors via the auction houses - missing out the galleries. Auction houses are now buying galleries...........

• Laura Cumming in The Observer last Sunday queried What price the rise of private art? - in a fascinating article which comments on the number of curators who have switched from museums to the "dark side" and various other aspects where boundaries are blurring and changing.

The map of the art world has been transformed over the last 10 years as people and money have moved from public to commercial galleries, while collectors and dealers wield ever more influence. But as commerce dominates, where will the radical and challenging approach to art take place, free from the pressures of the market?.............The entire industry is forming and reforming by the day like some monstrously engorged digestive tract, in which public and commercial are mulched.

Art competitions

• On Monday I posed the question Juried art competitions - does size matter? Thanks for all the really thoughtful comments.
  

Art Education

At the end of September the Times newspaper had a series of Art School articles on its Times-Online site:

• The Times guide to the best British art schools
• Top ten art history courses in the UK
• Essential art history texts for budding art historians
• How to be an artist: expert tips - has attracted the comment "Is talent required or optional?". Why not see whether or not you agree?
  

Art Exhibitions

• Art Calendar has an article about Vanity Galleries: Pay to Play at Your Own Risk by Renee Phillips
• Last Wednesday saw a new exhibition open at the National Gallery. Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian runs until 18 January. You can see some of the paintings online. Plus the Guardian also has a slideshow
  
• The Tate Modern now has a very big spider. This is a Video of the Gonzalez-Foerster installation at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. You can vote for which turbine hall installation you've liked best
  
• I saw Kate Moss at the British Museum in Statuephilia this week. For all those bored of the 'full frontal' perspective this is what she looks like from behind. Plus this is an interview with Mark Quinn who's the chap who created the sculpture. The Antony Gormley piece is splendid - it really looked as if it belonged.
  
• The Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of Marine Artists opened on Tuesday in the west and east galleries at the Mall Galleries. We saw it while there for the RMS show and there are an awful lot of very impressive paintings. The show is open until 26th October.

Art Forums

• Yesterday I decided it had been quite a while since I last reviewed art forums and yesterday in Forums and Groups - Resources for Artists I highlighted my new information site called Art Forums - Resources for Artists. I've had suggestions for three new groups since publishing the post - all of which have been added in.
  

Art Practice

• Nearly 60 people have responded to Making A Mark's October Poll which asks what is your main reason for working in a series. Two options about exploration are out in front. Click the image to see a larger version of the chart. There's 12 days left to vote.
  

Poll - What's your MAIN reason for working in a series?
Chart of responses as at 18th October 2008
(see poll in right hand column)

Art Videos

• I remember watching Picasso painting on television when I was a child - and there are now videos on YouTube of some of those programmes - see Picasso painting and more Picasso painting

Book Reviews

• For all those needing an overview of how painters connect to the bigger picture in terms of the development of art - and each other - you might want to talke a look at my book review this week MUST READ: The world's most influential painters.

Tips and techniques

• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) looked at the different ways you can create texture in paint in Paint Texture

Websites, blogging and software

• Most of you probably use some sort of office suite for your routine communication and keeping records. If you balk at Microsoft Office prices then take a look at a FREE productvity suite Open Office 3 and this review from cnet news (the people behind download.com). The demand from people downloading was so great it crashed the website on the first day out of beta!
• (For USA readers only) Quicken Online, the Web-based financial software, is also now FREE - again checkout this review from cnet news. If you do use web-based software for doing anything with money online then I highly recommend you read how it works, make sure you have an up to date browser, a good security suite and don't do anything risky eg wireless communication on a public non-secure network. Basically all the same sort of stuff you'd do if you were communicating with your bank online.
• Free links to your site - Matt Cutts highlighted the fact that the Google webmaster blog has announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site.

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


Banksy has an exhibition in New York. Here's the links to the exhibition - and the comments

• The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill is Banksy's first official exhibition in New York
• The New York Times review - Where Fish Sticks Swim Free and Chicken Nuggets Self-Dip
• and Jonathan Jones is becoming frustrated on his blog and reckons Banksy's new show outshines the Turner prize shortlist. He's also got a video of the exhibition.

.......it is the leopard in one of the storefront windows that stops passers-by first. “Is that — real?” a woman asked on Wednesday, peering at a large furry object perched on a tree branch, its tail swinging. It’s not: it is an ingeniously arranged fake fur coat.
New York Times review