Sunday, March 01, 2009

1st March 2009 - Who's made a mark this week?

Cave painting of a horse at Lascaux
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Global warming is now threatening prehistoric art. The caves at Lascaux in SW. France are a world heritage site because they contain very famous prehistoric paintings on the walls of the caves. However they're experiencing a problem....
Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.
AP: Scientists meet to save Lascaux cave from fungus
Adam Cope (Dordogne Painting Days) alerted me last week to the fact that UNESCO is threatening to put the caves on its "List of World Heritage in Danger" and has written a couple of blog posts about it.
Art Blogs

My Blogs

This week I reorganised my blogroll (as announced in I'm freshening up my blog roll). The 'regular reads' section has gone; blogs are now listed in categories which means blogs which are similar are all together. There are more blogs in the blogroll than show up at one time because I'm (mostly) limiting blogs shown to the the last 5 or 10 blogs posts in each group. This means that all blogs in the blogroll gets an airing whenever they post but those who post more often will be seen more often.

For some blogs I had to work out which way they 'leaned'. However I had a real problem placing three blogs - until I realised that the three bloggers concerned (Robyn, Rose and Cindy) shared an insatiable curiosity to learn more about art and different techniques! If anybody is unhappy with their blog's category please contact me.

What this change should mean is that people will now always see recent posts and a blogroll which changes as the posts change. I'm probably also going to switch the order of the categories depending on whatever is the theme of my blogging at the time.

Drawings and Sketches

Coloured Pencil and Pastels

  • This week Casey Klahn (Pastel) has a post Plein Air On Purpose- Loriann Signori which reviewed Loriann Signori (loriann signori's painting-a-day) an artist and blogger in Silver Spring, Maryland, who is new to me. I like her work, her colours (see her plein air box here) and her subject matter. I also note she's working on marble dust panels - I need to find out more!.
  • Cindy Hasse (Littleton Studio) has combined her fiber art blog "In Stitches!" and fine art blog "Color On!' into one blog with a new name.
Printmakers
I had some very positive responses to my posts about printmaking this week - and I'll be doing another post about printmakers blogs and websites next week. In the meantime, they have now acquired a category in my blogroll.
Painters
  • Tracey Helgeson (Works by Tracy Helgeson ) responded to a rather negative and anonymous comment about her people paintings - and then 23 comments followed as people debate the interchange and the nature of anonymous comments. Thanks Tracy for the post - I'm sure quite a few people have learned from it - not least the anonymous person!
Art Group Blogs

Art Business and Marketing

“Professional insults are less hurtful than amateur ones. Amateur insults are mean. Professional ones are artful.”

Or… professionals get plenty of insults but deal with it with relatively little injury. Whereas the hobbyists are just rather whiny about minor infractions. The relation between insults received and offenses taken could be considered a true hallmark.

Some man Says

Art and the economy

The downturn
The economy is spiraling down at an accelerating pace
New York Times
The successes
  • Meanwhile, as banks look like increasingly risky places to put your money, art collectors continue to plump for 'safe' art by dead artists. In Paris the sale by Christies of the Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre BergĂ© Collection was last week characterised as the sale of the century. By the end the sale it achieved a total of €373.9 million with fees ($483.8 million) making it a record high for any auction in Europe, and a world record for the most valuable private collection sold at auction. It also set new high records for set new high prices for works by Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian and Duchamp. Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose an oil painting by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) painted in 1911 achieved €35,905,000 ($45,264,579). Proceeds are going to charity. If you'd like to see the various lots you can see them all 689 lots of the collection Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre BergĂ© on the Christies site. Alternatively you can have a taster by viewing the slideshow of the art on display courtesy of the Guardian. The FT concludes that it's likely to perk up the market.
A staggering 33,000 people queued to see the collection last weekend. Access to the auction room has been strictly controlled, with potential buyers having to prove they had access to at least €500,000 in ready cash.
Independent - Sale of the century: The YSL auction

Art Competitions

Art Education

Art Exhibitions

  • On Tuesday I reviewed Originals 09: The Contemporary Printmaking Show and had lots of people commenting that they wish they could have seen it too!
  • I also went to see the 21st Century Watercolour exhibition at the Bankside Gallery on Friday - and met some people from the Ulverston Art Society in Cumbria who had made the trip down an art weekend. A review will be posted either tomorrow or Tuesday.
  • You can get an online preview of works in Karen Jurick's solo show “We The People” at the Morris & Whiteside Galleries (opening Friday, March 13th)

Art Museums and Galleries

  • an interesting article about the Brandeis affair/dabacle in artnet magazine - Paradise Lost (Again) by Robert Moeller has a great quote at the end!

Book reviews

  • I wasn't too complementary in my Book review: The Coloured Pencil Artist's drawing bible but I got quite a few people saying how refreshing it was to read a review spelt out the less good aspects. This marks a new policy for me with the coming of the recession. Quality counts - just like pennies!
  • Stormy Waters - book reviews on Watermarks is a review by Tina Mammoser of seascape books she finds helpful in relation to painting water

Tips and Techniques

Websites and Blogging

  • Starting with a short reminder - yesterday was the deadline for the Feedburner feeds transfer to Google - you did all remember didn't you? If not take a look at More details on moving to a Google Account
  • Google gmail / googlemail is down or at least it was onTuesday. It does however succeed in having a better track record for consitency of turning up for work than some other webware!
  • I took at a look at the various widgets available from Neoworx for counting visitors and showing where they are from this week. Very impressive but a tad too busy and dynamic for me.
  • Thanks to Tina (The Cycling Artist) and her shared bookmarks for this one - 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design by Dmitry Fadeyev (Smashing Magazine) on 2/20/09
  • Blog as an edge zone by Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic) is an interesting comment on the nature of blogging.
  • I'm still having an extremely frustrating time with Flickr - now excerbated by the fact that quite a few recent pics are now sitting on a laptop which doesn't work because of the difficulties in uploading. I've been taking a look round at laternatives and came across this comparison of Flickr vs SmugMug
  • However I did download the new Flickr Uploadr last night and had a go - and this time it worked! It is however the slowest Uploadr in the history of uploadrs!
  • I guess tomorrow morning I'm going to start finding out what happened to my laptop - in the meantime check out the Lesson learned - don't forget to do your updates
  • Having to go back to using a big keyboard again is a pain (for my tenosinovitis). Whjat's an even bigger pain is the fact that somehow or other two symbols on my keyboard have reversed. As they happen to be the " and @ symbols (which I use a lot), that's actually a big problem. Does anybody have a clue about how to remedy this?

and finally.........

Congratulations to......Jenna White who got engaged on Friday 13th! I'm Engaged!!! This is also my first blog engagement - as in it's the first time I've read about a proposal via the artist's blog!

6 comments:

  1. Katherine, my old laptop often changes those keys too. On this pc (with Vista) in order to change I go to Control Panel, then Clock Language & Region, then Regional & Language Options and change the language back to English UK.(It's probably reverted to US) On my DH's pc it's slightly different - go to Windows bottom bar, right click, select Toolbars. 'EN' will appear in bar, right click 'settings' then 'keyboard' and select alternative settings. Hope that helps.

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  2. Katherine, It is quite an honor for me to be mentioned on your blog! Thank you for noticing my site.

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  3. Thank you so much. You were right - it was set up for US English!

    I had to go back into the Classic Menu for XP to find the language regional settings. There's nothing on the keyboard menu about languages in XP. Very silly!!!

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  4. This post is filled with so much information. Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to provide all this detail and all these links!

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  5. Thank you Katherine! Wow, what a surprise to see my engagement mentioned in your blog. You just made my Monday morning. :)

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  6. Hi Katherine!

    I am ever grateful to show up regularly in your blog posts!

    Congratulations to Jenna! Friday the 13th is an awesome day. My last granddaughter was born on Oct 13th, a Friday. And the one that is due in March could be born on Friday the 13th. She's due on the 12th.

    And isn't it just a hoot to watch Maggie's success? I remember her from the early Wet Canvas days..thinking she was such a talented artist...and here she is becoming a famous writer.

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