15th February 2009 - Who's made a mark this week?

Walk with me - Kennack by Sarah Wimperis

Watercolour and Pen in Sketchbook

Congratulations to:

• Andrea Joseph (Andrea Joseph's Sketchblog ) who has been selected to exhibit at the Bologna Children's Book Fair - see this post for more details
• Sarah Wimperis (The Red Shoes) who announced in Moleskinnery that she has won a moleskine from Simply Moleskine. Check out her post as it has a very nice slideshow of recent sketches - her sketches of the Cornish coastline (like the one above) are excellent. Here's the feature 'Me and my Moleskine entry which won Sarah her moleskine. Note that you can send Simply Moleskine your pictures from your travels that feature your Moleskine and the most interesting picture of each month will get a mention in the monthly newsletter and win a free Moleskine of your choice!
  

Art Blogs

• Rama (The Portrait Party) has declared the month of February as self-love month - self-portraits
  

in honor of valentine's day, the portrait party will celebrate the greatest love of all with an entire month of self-portrait parties. draw yourself. share the results. self-portraits will be posted until midnight on february 28th.

• Rama identified how to host a real-life portrait party some time ago - which is worth reading if you ever fancy having a go
  
• here's Julie Oakley's self-portrait for the February project
  
• abd I enjoyed Cathy Gatland's contribution in Portrait Party on her blog A sketch in time
• while Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life ) is participating in a selfportrait challenge in coloured pencils on Wet Canvas
• In the meantime Anita Davies (Anita Davies) has a thing-a-day challenge going on for February and completed a self-portrait from life , Me Again, andother self-portrait and yet another self-portrait as part of that. I did a spate of self-portraits from life during Wally's portrait challenge and found I learned a lot from the exercise so here's wishing Anita well with her exercise
• and Roz Stendhal is attending a Portrait Party on Monday and has some book recommendations about drawing people in Drawing Faces: Some Book Recommendations
• Nicole Caulfield (Nicole Caulfield Art Journal) is trying to decide what her entry for CPSA should be and would like some feedback about her current thinking - which is to enter Shannon and Becca - or should she maybe choose one of her other portraits?
  
• I came across a great new blog Brush Paper Water which is featuring watercolour artists - including Belinda del Pesco last week
• Duane Keiser has announced that he's changing the title of his main blog and the way it works. It's now Recent Paintings by Duane Keiser

Art business and marketing

Marine Inversion at Carmel
14" x 18", pastel
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• I had a couple of posts about marketing in relation to art and artists this week
• Marketing 101 for Artists - an introduction
• Marketing Art: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" cautioned against having only one way of selling your art

• At last! Imagekind has FINALLY managed to introduce a decent search engine for its website - see Browse Art: Easier - Imagekind Search Filtering on the Imagekind Blog . People have only been commenting on how dire the search engine is since I started with the site. Maybe it was the way RedBubble overtook them in terms of number of visitors which finally provided the impetus (see my site Print Art on Demand - Resources for Artists for the comparative traffic chart)!
• Linda Blondheim (Linda Blondheim Art Notes) has been rethinking Facebook and highlighting the value of a business mentor in The Facebook Experiment, Notes From the Studio, Meeting with my business mentor. I keep reading a lot of posts about Facebook by ladies of more mature years (rather than teenagers/twenty somethings) and I think they might be about to take over Facebook! Linda also writes about how she manages Twitter in My Twitter Plan, Idea People VS Execution People, Notes From the Studio in which she also has some very interesting comments about people who have ideas versus those who pay attention to the fine print and the details.

At Economy

"Why do people think artists are special?" Andy Warhol once asked, "it's just another job". And, during a recession, it is harder to plead the case for painters, authors, musicians and photographers.
Arts and the economy - uncomfortable bedfellows?

• In the USA, the arts got some funding for the arts as part of the package which has just been agreed. Here's Razia Iqbal, the BBC's arts correspondent's blog post about art in a recession Arts and the economy - uncomfortable bedfellows?
• Charlotte Higgins questions whether now is the right time to be building giant sculptures in the countryside - like Mark Wallinger's White Horse at Ebbsfleet
  

Art Education

• On Thursday I commented on how the current MAM Poll: What's the most effective way of improving your art education? appears to be showing a distinct preference for instruction from a tutor in a variety of settings and how I'd decided to respond by creating a new site about Art Schools in the UK - Resources for Artists. You have until 28th February to vote in the poll if you haven't done so already.
  

Art galleries and museums

• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors ) has a very helpful post about taking photographs in musems
• The New York Times has a review of the new Edvard Munch exhibition “Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth ,” at the Art Insititute of Chicago - it's got a very arresting title So Typecast You Could Scream. The exhibition on the website includes an explanation of different printmarking techniques
• The Louvre has an exhibition titled The Louvre invites the comics which is on until the 13th April - which just seems a bit weird to me!
  
• On Tuesday I wrote about how The National Portrait Gallery has a new website

Civilisation - a breathtakingy ambitious project that featured a thousand years of art, architecture and ideas, written and presented by former Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark.

• Next an important alert! This month, the National Gallery celebrates the 40th anniversary of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 BBC2 series Civilisation - orginally commissioned in part to showcase colour television - and has lunchtime screenings over 13 consecutive weeks on Wednesdays at 1pm starting on 25 February. There is also a (free) Lunchtime Talk Kenneth Clark's Civilisation on 18 February 1pm and a Study Day (£25) with Sir David Attenborough, Simon Schama and AA Gill on 21 February, 10.30am. The wikipedia article provides an outline of the contents of each episode. The Daily Telegraph obituary of Michael Gill , responsible for creating Civilisation provides a fascinating account of how the programmes got made.

The series had difficulty at first in finding a home on American television, but success was assured after the National Gallery of Art in Washington put it on at lunchtime in the gallery theatre. This seated 300 people, but on the first day 24,000 turned up.
Wikipedia - Civilisation (TV programme)

Art History

• The Observer has an article about The many faces of Pablo Picasso in advance of the opening of the new exhibition Picasso: Challenging the Past which opens at the National Gallery on the 25th February.
  

Book reviews

• On Thursday I did a Book review: The Art Atlas which is an excellent and unique reference book for anyone interested in art history
  
• Plus I also published your recommendations of your favourite art books - made back in January as your recommendations as Favourite Art Books - Resources for Artists.
  

Copyright

The interpretation of copyright law has been getting very interesting of late!

• Shepherd Fairey is now suing AP in a countersuit - and maintains a "Fair use" defence - see Obama 'Hope' Artist Sues AP In Copyright Flap following the earlier Copyfight Erupts Over Fairey's 'Hope' Poster of Obama
• I was somewhat amused to see that there has been an organised response to Damien Hirst's crackdown and legal threats to sue a 16-year-old designer who used an image of Hirst's diamond skull in a collage to sell on the internet. See The Independent's God save the Damien Hirst rip-off industry! and the Daily Telegraphs's Artists flout copyright law to attack Damien Hirst. You can see the response on the website www.redragtoabull.com and which explains the Street Urchin Art Appeal
  

Tips and techniques

• There's an excellent article by Dianne Mize on Empty Easel about Repoussoir: A Classical AND Contemporary Art Technique For Better Compositions.
• Roz Stendhal (Roz Wound Up) has posted Part 4 of her series about eraser carving - How to Make an Eraser Carving—Part 4: Carving an Image.
• Roz also highlights that she's identified some lifgtfastness problems - Fading in the Fast Lane: Art Kure Brush Pens
• Jacqueline Gnott (Contemporary Realism) has been discussing the palettes she uses for her watercolour painting in Rose & Palette
• This is a very good article about Digitizing Original Paintings for Giclee-type Prints

websites and blogging

• Top 10 tips on how to improve your broadband speeds from Think Broadband
• A rather superior SEO blog - SEO Theory has identified and explained something which I'd noticed - which is that Google blogsearch is no longer effective. See Google Throttles Blog Search Indexing

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

This week the Daily Telegraph came up with a list of The national art treasures Britain cannot afford to lose. I wonder how many have seen all these works? Do you agree with the choice?

The article also quotes David Barrie, the director of The Art Fund as saying

government funding of museum acquisitions has almost entirely evaporated and as we enter the deepest recession that anyone can remember, it will be increasingly difficult to secure public and private donations in the event that a masterpiece comes up for sale.