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.

• Unesco Threatens to Put Lascaux Caves on Endangered List
• International Symposium 'Lascaux & Preservation in Underground Settings'

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

• Pete Scully (Pete Scully) in David, California is now in print - read maybe it’s because i’m a londoner
• I posted earlier today about my A 'trip' to Borough Market, Southwark. It contains links to nice foodie market stalls for those who like such things.

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.

• On Thursday I asked Is printmaking becoming the new 'painting a day'? and got some very interesting replies. (Note my daily painting category also disappeared in the blogroll makeover!) Plus a number of links to other sites
• One of these was the ning community of printmakers. Inkteraction is an international printmakers group on Ning with 2,463 printmakers as members the last time I looked!
• Baren, the blog for BarenForum members has a link to Hiroshige's 53 Stations on the Tokaido - video documentary
• Sarah Wimperis demonstrated people printing on her 'art process' blog Muddy Foot Prints - Nyntaku- Person Prints

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

• Watermarks continues to amaze in terms of the creativity it has generated! This week we've had painting with mud from rivers (Waterways Project Hits Pay Dirt) and printing with fish (Fish printing - gyotaku)! Lots and lots of comments and advice too........
  
• The Week 23-24 Challenge - Wigs is over at Different Strokes from Different Folks
  

Art Business and Marketing

• Etsy - Survey Says: International Seller Survey Results Are In makes for very interesting reading. A commentary on this can be found at Read Write Web.
  
• Cindy Haase (Littleton Studio) has highlighted how much she likes the 1000 Markets website and comments on how it compares to Etsy
  
• Robert McCrum in the Guardian reminds us about Book covers: the pictures that sell thousands of words (An aside: So what's the first thing people see when they reach your website?)
• Alyson Stanfield (ArtBiz Blog) has a round-up of posts about donating your art
• check out the chart on Indexed (blog posts on index cards) in this blog post Your whimpering gives you away in Indexed. I thought the best explanation was the one which suggested that
  

“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

• In the USA it has been announced that the economy contracted by 6.2% in the last quarter of 2008 and people are beginning to talk of a depression in the sense of a period of broad and extreme economic distress that remains stubbornly in place for much longer than a typical downturn. Here's the answer to how long the recession will last.
  
• The next wave of the recession is beginning to affect publicly funded institutions and creative neighbourhoods and of course individual artists.
  

• Arts Council England will slash jobs by a quarter in a restructuring of regional operations which should save the organisation £6.5m per year. It has to save 15% on its administration costs so that this money can be diverted to funding arts organisations. Part of the restructuring involves a a centralised Grants for the arts team based in Manchester. More details here.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art is apparently in financial trouble
  
• Plus there are more layoffs at museums in the USA (the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art) - see the New York Times and Budget Cuts Bring Layoffs to Museums
• the Boston Globe Online's Exhibitionist Blog highlights the tactics being employed for Art, on the cheap
• Changes in creative neighbourhoods are now being noted by the New York Times - see When the next wave wipes out
• I'm now reading articles which name artists with incomes from selling paintings of nearly $100,000 p.a. who are getting very worried by the slowing of art sales.
  
• Sotheby's has posted a loss as their revenue plunges
  

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 Bergé 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 Bergé 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

• Is Maggie Stiefvater the next JK Rowling? which contains a link to a new site which in turn highlights the Stiefvater way to be successful as both artist and author - even in a recession.
  

Art Competitions

• A reminder that the receving days for the Society of Women Artists is the 6th and 7th of March.
  

Art Education

• Yesterday I posted the results of the MAM Poll for February in MAM Poll results: Improving your art education. This answers the question posed What's the most effective way of improving your 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

• 4 Ways to Add Variation to Your Paintings by Dianne Mize on Empty Easel includes an example of a pen and ink drawing by me - as well as paintings by a number of artist bloggers such as Carol Marine and Linda Blondheim
  

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 13^th! 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!