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

Australian Artist Guy Maestri has won the prestigious $50,000 Archibald Prize with his large portrait of blind Aboriginal singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu. Do read the story about how Guy Maestri came to produce his portrait of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu - it's inspiring.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu
by Guy Maestri
oil on linen – 200cm x 168cm
Winner of the 2009 Archibald Prize

There were:

• 708 entries for Archibald (in its 88th year) for the Best portrait painting preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics. These are the finalists
  
• 712 entries for the $25,000 Wynne Prize for Best landscape painting of Australian scenery, or figure sculpture - won by Lionel Bawden The amorphous ones (the vast colony of our being)
• 561 entries for the $20,000 Sulman Prize for Best subject painting, genre painting or mural project by an Australian artist won by Ivan Durrant Anzac Match, MCG

You can see the exhibition for the The Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes
7 March - 24 May 2009 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. The exhibition usually draws huge crowds. I actually went to one when in Sidney in 1998.

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching

• Roz Stendahl of Roz Wound Up has got a series of posts about keeping journals
• Journaling Superstitions #1
• Journaling Superstitions #2: It Must Be Profound
• Journaling Superstitions #3: You Must Work Chronologically
• Gayle Mason (Fur in the Paint) has started her series of cat drawings for the SOFA exhibition in September - always worth watching. Keep an eye out for all the WIPs.
  

Sissinghurst - Elizabethan Barn and Fields
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• I'm often found sketching at Sissinghurst - farm fields as well as garden - and today's the day they open for the 2009 season - yippee! Sissinghurst and the BBC4 documentary highlights how I've now included links to all the episodes of Sunday evening documentary programmes about Sissinghurst in my site about Sissinghurst - for iplayer viewers only I'm afraid!
  

Painting

• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) did a very good summary about the new portrait of Shakespeare which has turned up in Shakespeare's portrait?
  
• I was amused by Carol Marine's comment - in eggplant demo and kids again - about her student 'kids' asking if her photograph of the workshop group was going on her blog. Looks like it's a new status symbol! I reckon you can always tell from a photo whether or not people have enjoyed their workshop.
• Lindsay Olson in Illinois summarised all the tips and links she got in response to her recent painting with mud in More Mud Works on Watermarks
• Marion Boddy Evans has a Knife Painting Tutorial on her blog About.com:Painting
  

Pastels

• There's a group of people on Wet Canvas Brainstorming About a European Pastel Society
  
• The Pastel Society of North Carolina has had a blog since February 2008 called The Pastel Society of North Carolina blog! It's good to see it has a steady stream of posts reporting on meetings, member news, member demonstrations, exhibitions and workshops, upcoming events, calls for artists to enter releavnt art contests , meetings and generally communicating information to their members. It's going on my list of art society blogs to review at the end of this year for Best Art Society Blog of 2009. (Let me know if you know of other ones).
  
• Gesa Helms (paint and pastel) is guesting on Casey Klahn's Pastel blog - here and here. She and Casey are both great fans of Wolf Kahn and she has a number of posts tagged 'Wolf Kahn'.
  

Print-making

• Chris Tyrell (only one 'r' not two in Chris Tyrell’s Blog) wrote a very interesting article last November about Acknowledging Your Process: Giclée Scandal #2
• Marion Boddy Evans reproduces Hogarth's comments on the printmaking scandals associated with his work in Have Technology, Will Copy
  
• As Michelle the Vermont Printmaker says "What really matters" is not really about art - and there again I think it probably is if your art comes out of the way you live your life.

Watercolour

• I asked What is watercolour? on Friday - and demonstrated the rather wide variety of answers you get if you try to find out! Comments indicate surprise at the range of water based media that are included in the definitions of acceptable waterbased media for the open exhibitions to some art societies - even if they are NOT to those compiling the dictionaries!
• I missed Belinda del Pesco's blog post about her workshop with Charles Reid. I am so envious - I have all his books!
• Check out Tim Wootton Wildlife Art - which is naturally enough the blog of artist Tim Wootton who lives in Stromness in Orkney. Not a lot of posts so far - but some beautiful paintings of birds. Do encourage Tim to post more often!
  

Art Business & Marketing

• Etsy have had a Tech Update: Freshening Up the Category Pages and are also doing a Etsy Seller Payment Survey - it takes about 2 minutes tops!
  
• Etsy also had a useful post at the beginning of the month on its blog Storque about Artistic Endeavors: Art Buyers’ Guide to Printmaking. Even better they now provide art categories that certainly didn't exist right back at the beginning (because I had a conversation with them back then about their lack of differentiation between giclees and fine art hand pulled prints!)
  

Find more monoprints and monotypes in the Etsy Art Category.
Find more linocuts and woodblock prints on Etsy.
Find collographs in the Etsy Art Category.
Find more intaglio prints on Etsy.
Search for screenprints, gocco, silkscreen, and serigraph on Etsy
Artistic Endeavors: Art Buyers’ Guide to Printmaking

• On a more optimistic note Art Galleries With Less of a Profit Motive Flourish in Brooklyn
• The saga continues - AP countersues artist over Obama posters
• Linda Blondheim (Linda Blondheim Art Notes ) has written a a great 'can do/stop making excuses' post - An art career is all about making it work

Art and the Economy in recession

• Update (for those who don't read the financial pages): More Americans are claiming unemployment benefit than ever before. Warren Buffet (the second richest man in the USA who famously described 'financial derivatives' as financial weapons of mass destruction) says The economy has ‘fallen off a cliff’. His view is that we are all engaged in the equivalent of an economic war.
  

“It’s fallen off a cliff,” Buffett said Monday during a live appearance on cable network CNBC. “Not only has the economy slowed down a lot, but people have really changed their habits like I haven’t seen.".....He predicted that unemployment will climb a lot higher before the recession is done, but he also reiterated his optimistic long-term view: “Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created.”

The situation is set to become even bleaker in the arts.

• Yesterday, the Guardian highlighted the fact that the Arts world braced for 'hurricane' as recession hits. From art galleries to opera houses, UK cultural organisations face cutbacks or even collapse as private sponsors pull out and government money dries up. Regular readers will recall I predicted this back in October in a post about the impact of the banking crisis and the looming recession in relation to the sponsorship of art competitions and prizes.
• On Friday Reuters highlighted the continuing trend for U.S. museums cutting back due to recession. New York's Metroplitan Museum of Art has already announced plans to cut 250 jobs .
• The New York Times reports that The National Academy is revising its policies after many years of doing nothing about restructuring governance practices, financial oversight and strategic planning. The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts was modeled after the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It comprises a museum focused on American works and a school. Members both past and present include many of the country's leading painters, sculptors, architects, and printmakers. You can read NYT articles about it here
• Bloomberg indicates that Sotheby's Cuts CEO Ruprecht's Pay From $10.3 Million as Profit Plummets
• Many thanks to Alyson Stanfield (ArtBiz Blog) for highlighting the piece in Psychology Today about the reason why arts should be continue to be funded - and how they have contribited in very significant ways to innovation and economic progress - I was amazed! Read A Missing Piece in the Economic Stimulus: Hobbling Arts Hobbles Innovation
  
• Following on from this, the dumbing down of culture was highlighted by the New York Times - better and brighter

Art competitions and art exhibitions

• The Guardian brings us a slideshow of The week in art
  
• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) had a fascinating post last week about Paris Salon Statistics
• Upcoming competitions and exhibition: News of an art competition for British and International printmakers and the annual exhibition of the pastel society were posted on my blog this week
• northern print biennale 2009 - call for entries - deadline is 24th April 2009
  
• Change of dates for Pastel Society Annual Exhibition 2009 - deadline this year is 3rd/4th April 2009
  
• I also did an exhibition review of Constable Portraits: The Painter and his Circle at the National Portrait Gallery
• My sister was telling me about this exhibition about Degas: Master of French Art in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. They always do such nice microsites for their exhibitions! One of the best bits is the zoomable map of Paris with photos which invites you explore the Paris that Degas knew. I think National Galleries have just seen another 'must have' for their online exhibitions in future.
  
• I had Two works juried into SBA Annual Exhibition
• Vivien Blackburn and Sarah Wimperis have both been "Going Large at the Gallery" with MuseumR. Scale enhancement suddenly seems the way to go!
  

Paintings in Museums
by Vivien Blackburn (left) and Sarah Wimperis (right)

Art History

• I did a major update this week of Art History & the History of Art - Resources for Art Lovers to include approaches to studying art history and how to write about art history. If anybody has any useful sites they'd like to suggest I'm all ears! Here's a couple of the items I included
  

• a discussion of art history assignments and strategies and approaches for writing about art history by The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Dartmouth College has provided a paper about Writing the Art History paper
• Somebody has created a site to try and identify their Japanese pillar print
  

Websites, webware and blogging

• I keep a control on the cookies which get allowed by my computer I was going to create a link to a blog this week - until I found I neededd to authorise 42 cookies! Do you know how many cookies your blog places on other people's computers?
  
• Etsy had a Web Analytics Recap: Seller Chat in the Virtual Labs last week on Storque
  
• According to the Guardian British search engine 'could rival Google'
• There has been slow access to the feedburner site on Google this week - The FeedBurner Status Blog is the official source for technical updates about FeedBurner within Google.
• I changed my Blogger template to the stretch version and provided a few tips in Stretch! (and scream ever so quietly!)

and finally......

I'm taking a break from blogging next week to work on a number of linked items on a 'to do' list which have been hanging around for far too long! I've come to the conclusion that I'll get them all sorted if I sit down and work on them all at the same time - so that's what I'm doing next week. You might find things popping up on this blog - and there again you might not - it all depends how it does!

I think you'll find it interesting when I've finished!

I'm now off to the Museums in South Kensington for the monthly sketch outing with the RWS Friends......