29th March - who's made a mark this week?

It's not often I feature a book at the beginning of this post each week. However I was very taken with Seven Things Every Artist Should Know from the Huffington Post and highly recommend that you have a quick read.

It's based on a new book published last week - ART/WORK: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art Career by Heather Darcy Bhandari (Director of the Mixed Greens Gallery, New York) and Jonathan Melber (an art attorney). If you'd like to know a bit more:

• read the first chapter on the Amazon website (click the link in the title) and check out the two 5 star customer reviews
• read a very thorough review on artblog.net.

For the record the seven things are listed below but you'll need to read the article (or the book) to understand the reasons behind the list.

1. Every artist has a day job
2. Residencies are good for your health
3. NO BLIND SUBMISSIONS!
4. Write stuff down
5. The Internet is all the rage
6. Rejection: It's not you, it's them
7. There's more to life than commercial galleries
   

Jonathan Melber is the lawyer (degree in Ethics / doctorate in law) who has been opining in his new blog on the Huffington Post that The AP Has No Case Against Shepard Fairey - check it out for his take on the use of "fair use". Plus I like Ed Winkelman's take on it - that by using the photo Fairey actually increased the value of the original photo rather than harming it!

Congratulations to....

Laurel Daniel who has won 2nd place in the International Artist competition for April/May and has also joined the Daily Paintworks group.

Laurel's blog Laurel Daniel Oil Paintings features her plein air paintings and studio work while Laurel Daniel Small Works features her small paintings. Laurel now paints full-time and teaches at the Austin Museum of Art .

Congrats also to Richard Klekociuk who is an international member of UKCPS living, as he does, in the state of Tasmania in Australia. This year, Richard was one of 43 finalists in the Glover Prize - an art competition which has the biggest prize for landscape art in Australia.

You can read more about this in Richard Klekociuk - Glover Prize finalist on the UKCPS News blog.

Wholemeal Landscape, Northern Tasmania
90 x 75cm framed (35" x 29.5"), Prismacolour pencils on Canson Pastel Board
copyright Richard Klekociuk

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching

• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) has written an update about Urban Sketchers
• Richard Klekociuk (Artkleko’s Weblog) had a post recently asking Tracing: what’s your view? - which garnered some interesting responses including one from Ann Kullberg
• Roz (Roz Wound Up) has continued her occasional series of posts about journaling superstitions with the latest being Journaling Superstitions #4: Each Page Must Be Perfect. It's a great post - and recommended reading!
  
• thanks to a comment from Quirkyartist I discovered the Sydney Sketch Club

Dry Media - pastels and coloured pencils

• Diane Wesman is the name of a new blog by pastel artist and tutor Diane Wesman

Botanical art

• I've been researching botanical artists (and gardens) recently, hence a short mini-series of posts from me about botanical artists from the past
• Botanical Artists: Elizabeth Blackwell and 'A Curious Herbal' - a Scottish artist in the eighteenth century who became the first femakle artist to both paint and engrave plants for a herbal produced to get her husband out of debtors prison!.
  
• Botanical artists - Franz and Ferdinand Bauer who have earned the reputation of being among the best ever botanical artists
  
• Botanical artist - Pierre-Joseph Redouté renowned painter of roses and lilies who had the unique distinction of being artist to both Marie-Antoinette and the Empress Josephine. Which led to Malmaison - a great garden - the garden developed by the Empress Josephine which had the most fabulous rose garden.
  

Environmental Art

• Diane Wesman is also a member of Project Art for Nature. This is a a collaboration of artists and illustrators from Minnesota and Wisconsin, working independently and collaboratively to create artwork which promotes stewardship of threatened natural areas in the region. Great idea - I wonder if others are doing likewise!

Painting

• I find Barbara Benedetti Newton's travels from coloured pencils to pastels to oils and now acrylics really interesting - especially since she is generous about sharing (on Barbara Benedetti Newton Artist's Journal) what happens along the way - even when she's not too happy about how things are working out - see posts this last week. Nice to see an Aha moment in there !
  
• Quirkyartist has written in Another Urban Landscape (or two) about using a new medium which I've not heard of before called Matisse Dry Mediums with acrylic paint.
• Different Strokes from Different Folks is gathering some interesting crops and variations on the reference photo in Week 27-28 Challenge-Beach Family. Also check out Karin's great pep talk about motivation!
  

Being a painter is my job and just like most jobs, I need to clock in and work whether I'm interested or not. That's where finding the key to motivation comes in.

Printmaking

• There's a startling new plagiarism claim - this time from Dermott.
  
• While Robyn Sinclair (Have Dogs, Will Travel) has now got into White Line Printing and drypoint etching. Meanwhile I've just cut my very first lino print. I use the word with caution - the print has still to emerge!
• A post for all all those interested in Bookbinding, Letterpress and Engraving from new Canadian art blog Neurartic by Aurelie K. Collings, a gallerist and art consultant specializing in contemporary Canadian art
• I'm most grateful to Robyn for highlighting the work of Australian artist and printmaker Cressida Campbell - I spent forever looking at her fantastic print here plus you can see more relating to her current exhibition in Brisbane here

Exquisite woodblock paintings drawing on the tradition of Japanese art. An uncompromising and accomplished artist, Cressida Campbell has established a reputation as Australia's pre-eminent exponent of the painted and printed woodblock.

Art business and marketing

• My blog post about Guidance on pricing art has generated a lot of comments - which I'll summarise on Tuesday when commenting on the results of March Making A Mark Poll about approaches to pricing art. Two days left to vote!
• Ed Winkelman (ed_winkleman ) has had a couple of posts worth reading:
• He points out that And the Winners Are....The Lawyers! in the current economic climate. As always, he makes a number of really good points as do the comments on the post - recommended reading!
• He addresses Baseline Issues for the "How to Get a Gallery" Question in robust fashion

Galleries are not the magic ticket to stardom and riches...they are but one option in the spectrum of venues by which artists can exhibit their work and hopefully advance their careers.......My point is there are other options out there, many of which are totally in the hands of artists themselves.
Edward Winkelman

• Sharon L Butler (Two coast of Paint) has written about The Art World on Facebook: A Primer on the Brooklyn Rail. which is chock-full of insight into the advantages of Facebook. However it doesn't get to grips with the intellectual ownership/copyright issues and underlying thrust for finding ways to make Facebook generate income (witness more than one volte-face by its creator and owner).
• You can lose out in more ways than one of losing out when investing in high-end contemporary art. Not only have values dropped but now it seems at least one gallery owner has been "economical with the provenance". Lawrence Salander, the gallery owner of Salander Oreilly Gallaries (once identified as the best in the world!) was last week indicted on 100 counts including fraud, forgery and falsifying business records - see New York art dealer charged in $88m scheme. I wonder if, like Madoff, yet more will surface?

Art competitions, exhibitions and galleries

• I guess we shouldn't be surprised at the nature of the pictures which have won awards from the American Watercolour Society this year! Congratulations to Pat Holscher on winning the gold medal with a delightfully sketchy work called Family Relations. The works accepted for exhibition go on display at the Salmagundi Club in New York from March 31 to April 26, 2009.
• The winner of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize 2009 is Michael Visocchi . He wins a £25,0000 commision for his proposal Yield which will be produced as a large-scale, permanent sculpture of an 18-metre-high pylon to be unveiled at the Jerwood Sculpture Park, in the grounds of Ragley Hall, Warwickshire in spring 2010. You can see a picture of it in the Guardian's visual round-up of the week in art
  
• On Wednesday I reviewed the Royal Watercolour Society - Spring Exhibition 2009
• The big new exhibition that I really want to get to see asap (once as in a small problem with an elevated leg on doctor's orders has been sorted) is the Kuniyoshi exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts which is the is the third exhibition in a series dedicated to Japanese Artists and Printmaker. The Times gave it a four star review.
  
• The Whitechapel Art Gallery reopens on 5th April and the Guardian has provided a video tour of the new gallery space
• Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s, March 7 to May 10, 2009. - includes Chuck Close
• Turner and Italy is on at the Royal Scottish Academy Building in Edinburgh (27th March to 7th June 2000). This is a major one-off exhibition which explores the enduring relationship between JMW Turner and Italy.
• This week I discovered the art gallery page on The First Post (a sort of anglicised Huffington Post produced by art college dropout Felix Dennis who was identified as the 101st richest man in Britain last year)
  

Tips and techniques

• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) as ever provides great support and tips
• Using Photo Reference
• Drawing from Maquettes
• and today's Plane Heads

Websites and blogging

• Check out 7 Popular Blogging Styles for Artists to Choose From by Dan at EmptyEasel.com
• On Wednesday Feedblitz News announced A FeedBurner Alternative: Blitz Your RSS!. Has anybody tried this? I read the post but have not investigated any further as yet
• Has anybody with gmail started to use the tasks function? It now sits there in the corner of my screen when I've got my inbox up - looking at me with the list of things not done! Beats the bit of paper I keep burying!

and finally......

Have you seen this before - artists in their studios - from long ago! I liked the one of John Singer Sargent in his studio, circa. 1884.

PS

• The good news - I've lost another half stone.
  
• The bad news is that I'm having very major problems with my computer (and I'm already on the back-up one) which is freezing repeatedly. The latest theory I'm testing is that it's the latest version of Firefox which has just been uninstalled! The computer only froze five times during the writing of this post(which involved crashing out each time!!!) and I'm now publishing while I've still got a computer which is running! You may find this post updates in the next hour or so!