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Sunday, November 30, 2008

30th November 2008 - Who's made a mark this week

The first set of Kelpies by Andy Scott
Copyright - Any Scott (sculptures); Nisbet & Wylie (photography)
Phots courtesy of Andy Scott

Meet the Kelpies, Scotland's giant addition to the UK sculptural skyline is a Guardian article about sculptor Andy Scott.

Kelpies are mythical water horses in Scottish lochs and rivers but are now set to become a public art project involving two vast equine heads which will stand 35 metres high - that's a third higher than Antony Gormley's Angel of the North. The heads will become the centrepiece of a £49m eco-park near Edinburgh and will guard the entrance to a canal link connecting the Firth of Forth with the Clyde in Glasgow.

Andy Scott has very kindly provided me with photograps of the first set of relatively small maquettes for the project which helped to win both support and funding for the project. You can read more about the project and the public art of Andy Scott on his website Andy Scott Public Art.

Art blogs
Lots of people have been creating items associated with their art:
  • Cathy Johnson has created a gallery site for her art on Blogger - Cathy Johnson Art. As she says it's been a long time coming!
  • Lindsay Olson (Non-Linear Arts) has been making a paint map of the locations of all her paintings for her Waterways Project. Vivien Blackburn also has a paint map
  • Nicole Caulfield (Nicole Caulfield Art Journal ) has been making a blurb book about her portraits - see BLURB and preview the book here. It's got a nice balance between close-ups and full size portraits - ideal for her potential clients!
Plus more tributes to Cindy Woods (see last week's who's made a mark this week':
Art & Illustration - team blogs and projects
One more day to go! Tomorrow comes the announcement of a brand new team blog devoted to....but that would be telling! You may just pick up a clue from some of the teasers we've all been leaving lying around.....all over the place......even in this blog post!

Artist
Art business & marketing
Art Collectors
  • Edward Winkelman (edward_winkelaman ) offers his thoughts on:
    • How to Buy Art in a Recession, Part 1 which "discussed discounts, payment plans, and advanced payments as means of buying work when money's tight or taking advantage of the situation to secure a better position in a waiting list or pecking order." and notes that even Damien Hirst is now prepared to take a price cut
    • How to Buy Art in a Recession, Part 2 is about positioning yourself for the next upswing
For artists whose prices are in that difficult zone (too high for impulse purchases and low enough to indicate you haven't yet had a retrospective at MoMA), a recession is perhaps a good time to consider making less expensive works...just to keep your market active
Art Competitions
Art Economy
The art market's crash - for that is what it is - threatens to remake the art world. In the past few weeks, auctioneers, dealers, artists and collectors have changed strategies and policies, and it's likely that future changes will be even more sweeping.
Art Exhibitions
Piran
Oil on gesso board,10 x 18 cm 0r 4 x 7in

copyright Sarah Wimperis
available from the Beside the Wave Gallery
Art History
  • The Guardian highlights that in Auvers-sur-Oise Impressionist villagers protest at industry plan. Interestingly, while reading The Private Lives of the Impressionists I learned to my surprise that some of the places where Monet lived and painted were far from rural idylls and in fact there was a fair bit of noisy, smelly industry around and about
  • On Thursday, everybody in the USA ate Turkey and I wrote about Turkeys and Monet's Montgeron series
Art Supplies
  • Is it my imagination or are Dick Blick's percentage discounts in its sale getting bigger and bigger? Are we all being more circumspect before ordering and/or do they have a lot of stock to shift? Anybody noticed any other good deals?
  • James Gurney (Gurney Journey) highlighted a Fountain Pen and Marker on Gurney Journey this week. He also got 'marked' himself! ;)
Book reviews
  • I'm starting a series of blog posts highlighting books shops which are good for art books. I know the Internet can be cheaper but I actually like looking at art books before I buy. The first post was about The Bankside Gallery Bookshop which has probably got the best selection of books about the different methods of fine art printmaking anywhere in the UK.
Websites and Blogging
  • On Saturday, I posted about Search engines - some alternatives to Google - which has had a very good response from people who weren't aware of some of the searche engines I wrote about.
  • This is the Paintmap site and this is the Paintmap Blog - and How-to: Embedded Paintmap Maps tells you how to embed a paintmap Google Map on your website
  • If you're being green and saving power when you're not using your computer (but don't want to switch off) do you know the difference between Standby/Sleep and Hibernate? If not, read Hibernation revisited -- saving energy with a PC
  • Did you know the mouse is 40 next week?
  • Caution! Watch out for a new form of spam. I had a comment this week which left the link back to their product very low in the comment so it was easy to miss (ie there was no link in the text and the link comes just above the 'publish' link in Blogger). When I checked it this is what it said (below) - yuk! The person commenting came from a blog which was all about drugs. The stupid thing is it's completely pointless as all the links in Blogger are automatically marked up by Blogger as 'no follow' and hence never ever count as links! So watch out for all those human "seeds" (see quote) - I just call it seedy and stupid!
Our large fleet of human based publishers seeds / delivers the content about your product or service, including a link to your website on a variety of highly related and visited news, forum, blog, social bookmarking and other types of websites.
and finally..................

This is an item for both fans of Thomas Kinkade and those who are less fond of his painting style and business practices.

I was interested to read the Vanity Fair Article about Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck. It reprints in its entirety Thomas Kinkade's memo containing sixteen guidelines for creating the "The Thomas Kinkade Look". I gathered from reading them that this is what he does when creating his paintings. So now you know..........

Incidentally Frank Pasquale (Concurring Opinions ) highlights this article in his comment on Copyright in Movie and Painting Styles?

4 comments:

  1. Katherine,
    Thanks so much for the nod to my collector's blog.
    Love,
    Linda

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have already posted some reactions to some of your links on art & the economy. I'm indebted to you - very timely stuff, here.

    Poor old Kinkade. The one article tries to set an even tone, but slips the word "suck" into the headline. That is journalistic cowardice, IMHO.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Katherine for the nice mention. THese posts are my favorite ones I look forward to every week.

    ReplyDelete
  4. And thanks from me too, Katherine - Who's made a mark keeps me busy for days following links - so great to be one of them!

    ReplyDelete

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