17th May 2009 - Who made a mark this week?

I'm intrigued by the way the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers manage to combine their support for very old and traditional ways of making prints while at the same time providing scope for printmaker members to experiment with new forms of print-making.

Blooming by Ursula Leach RE
carborundum, hand coloured etching, 36 x 36 cm

Their Annual Exhibition of original prints includes techniques ranging from traditional etching, lithography, wood engraving and mezzotints, to the latest in digital and photographic media. This exhibition is now on at Bankside Gallery and will continue until 7th June.

One of the excellent aspects of this exhibition is the range of events and educational activities which are held throughout the exhibition:

• Sat 23rd May - wood engraving & relief prints - Kate Dicker & Sasa Marinkov
• Sun 24th May - etching - Daphne Casdagli & Martin Ridgwell
• Sat 30th May - monoprints & carborundum prints - Howard Jeffs
• Sun 31st May - printmaking - Anita Klein (President of the RE)
  
• Sat 6th June - wood engraving - Hilary Paynter (Chairman of the Society of Wood Engravers)
  
• Sun 7th June - etching - Karen Keogh

They've also used the exhibition to launch their new book “Printmakers’ Secrets”. This contains intriguing accounts of the work of nearly seventy of the Members.

Isn't it interesting how many art societies of international repute are producing books? I hope all the printmaking fans who read this blog enjoy the above links to artist/printmakers - they contain some impressive work.

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching

• Laura Frankstone (Laurelines) is very busy these days but she has devised the perfect wedding present - a sketchbook of sketches of the wedding - see Grace's wedding sketches, first installment; Grace's wedding sketches, second installment and Grace's wedding sketches, last installment. Check out her spendid new blog header as well!
• Roz Stendahl writes about Journaling Superstitions #7: You Can't Use Photos in Your Visual Journal in Roz Wound Up
• Andrea Joseph (Andrea Joseph's sketchbook) has switched to A3 sketchbooks for her drawings - which means no scans - see blink and you'll miss it. I love her latest drawing of the history of the pixie boot!
• Pete Scully (Pete Scully) has finished his square clutter drawing - miscellaneous details - which can be viewed from all angles!
• Vivien Blackburn (Painting, Prints and Stuff) has been on holiday in Cornwall all week - and I've been following the weather forecsasts for two places! She starts her posts about sketching the North Cornwall coast with Stormy seas, Sennen Cove - graphite and moleskine
• I've had a bit of a "pencil contre jour" week sketching scultures. On Tuesday evening at 7pm I found myself Sitting on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in the sun while on Thursday evening round about the same time I was engaged with Reflection in the British Museum while sketching a bronze deity from the Ming era.
  

(Left) Ludgate Hill from the steps of St Paul's Cathedral 11th May 2009 7pm
(right) Bronze figure of a deity
pencil sketches in sketchbook by Katherine Tyrrell

Coloured pencils and pastels

• Nicole Caulfield is posting about Black Backgrounds... on her blog Nicole Caulfield Art Journal
• Michael Chesley Johnson (A Plein Air Painter's Blog) is writing about Preparing for IAPS
• The Eighth Biennial Convention of the International Association of Pastel Societies is in Albuquerque at the end of this month.

Nature drawing

• I loved the birdies in The Art of Gathering Twigs on Cathy Johnson's new blog Sketching in Nature
• Has Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life) taken to holding her drawing models hostage? See 202 guests for the answer.
  

Painters

• Gesa Helms (paint and pastel) has been combining great painting and interesting blog posts of late - I must confess I do like blogs where an artist can write thought-provoking posts as well as paint.
  
• This is drawing and it's digital but I think it's painting! See Wally Torta's take on a New Orleans Bar on Crackskullbob
• I giggled at Ruth's explanation, on meanwhile, here in France of the name of the home of Postcard from Provence - do read Life in the Cuckoo

Portraits

• Thanks to Belinda del Pesco for highlighting Peter Yesis (Daily Painting Practice) and his project to produce 30 self portraits in 30 days
  
• Check out the portrait drawings on Nathan Fowkes blog (Nathan Fowkes )

Art Group Blogs

• I think Stacy Rowan's comments in 3 Things I’ve Learned in the School of Group Challenges (Stop and Draw the Roses) are spot on.

Art Business and Marketing

• Empty Easel has an item which discusses The 50/50 Method for Pricing Your Artwork
  

Art and the economy

• The Financial Times commented on the art market in Skinny sales and demoted billionaires
  
• Contemporary art continues to decline in value with a few bright spots. According to Bloomberg:
  
• David Hockney's Betty Freeman Portrait Fetched $7.9 Million in N.Y. Auction
• Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Sale Slumps 87% From Year-Ago Record Even Jeff Koons eggs are sliding in value.
  

Art Collectors

• I wrote this week about a couple of major public collections of art in the UK
  
• Art of the state - and the state of the art and the work of the Public Catalogue Foundation - to catalogue all the oil paintings in all the publicly owned collections in the UK
  
• The Government Art Collection which comprises over 13,000 works
  

Artists Communities and Art Forums

• The BBC has launched the Blast Studio . This an interactive art installation which is housed in The Topolski Studio at London's Southbank Centre, that will allow young people to create a piece of collaborative work in real-time over the internet. BBC Blast is the social learning initiative that supports the development of creative skills in 13 to 19 year olds.This is the Blast Message Board for Art & Design.
• I came across Canada's Group of Twelve this week.

Art Education / Tips and techniques

• My post about Creating a signature on your art proved to be very popular this week and attracted a lot of comments from artists who've worked out solutions to people who realise they need to think more about this issue
• What Do You Want To See? is all about Sue Favinger Smith's (Ancient Artist: Developing an art career after 50) experience of getting an art critique from a master artist who teaches at the Art Student's League in New York - and then thinking about how to apply the points raised. This occurred as part of the Critique Service offered by Oil Painters of America.
• Great post from James Gurney (Gurney Journey) on Tangencies - sooooooooo important!
  
• The Painter's Post is Robert Genn's new website - but there's no RSS feed.....
  
• The Guardian reports that David Hockney condemns Ofsted report on art which I mentioned recently
• ‘Mangaisme’ – the New Japonisme? Comics as Cultural Heritage and Global Phenomenon is a talk which is being given by Paul Gravett at Royal Academy of Arts in London on May 29, 2009, 6.30pm to 7.30pm. Paul is an author (I saw one of his books in the British Museum this week!) and Director of Comica (London’s International Comics Festival)) He will explore the evolution of modern manga and their connections and contrasts with Japanese artistic traditions.
  
• a Colour chart - plus names - plus Red Blue Green Codes - plus hex codes for website colours
• A post on UKCPS News highlights Coloured pencil workshops and courses

Art Exhibitions

• On Tuesday I wrote my Exhibition review: Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy of Arts
• The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers Annual Exhibition 2009 continues until Sun 7th June at the Bankside Gallery.
• Two for the diaries of all wood engraving enthusiasts:
  
• The 71st annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers opens in Art Jericho in Oxford on 27 May 2009 and runs until 27 June 2009.
• At more or less tha same time, 6/25: Wood engravings by the Six Chairmen is an exhibition by the six Chairmen of the Society of Wood Engravers - to celebrate its 25th anniversary. This exhibition is also in Oxford - it opens in the North Wall Gallery in Summertown on 1 June 2009 and runs until 20 June 2009. Apparently the Gallery is in a brand new arts complex.
  

Art History

Iris flowers and grasshopper (1830-31)
woodblock colour prints
Hokusai Katsushika (1760 - 1849) Source: wikimedia

• I've been looking for inspiration about how to draw irises and wrote about this in Hokusai, Van Gogh and the iris paintings. It seems a lot of you have also been looking at irises recently!

Art Studios

• Lisa Call (Lisa Call - Contemporary Textile Art) has moved on in the great studio build project to Building a Studio - The Dye Studio

Book reviews

• I did my first Art Bookshop Review: The National Gallery Bookshop on Making a Mark reviews...... Now all I have to do is get my camera into the rest of them!
• On Monday I also reviewed Botanical Illustration by Valerie Oxley - definitely a recommended read!
  

Websites and Blogging

• Rose Welty (Rose Welty - blog) changed blogging platforms recently and has written about it in Changing Blog Platforms: Was It Worth It?
• The Download Blog reviewed the next generation of Windows in Everything Windows 7 RC. Plus here's a Contrasting Windows: New feature comparison from the same blog which looks at Windows 7 alongside Vista and XP.
• I came across Feedmil for the first time - it looks promising. It made me think it had been spawned by Google Blog Search after a close encounter with StumbleUpon! What I found really interesting is that it tells you about popularity, authority and frequency. Try searching for topics of interest to you. My feeling is that it doesn't discriminate enough as yet about what content actually is as opposed to what authors would like it to be.
  

Feedmil is a feed search engine featuring a spam-free, topic-focused search for a variety of feed types including blogs, microblogs, public and social media feeds as well as podcasts. Feedmil’s goal is to help people search feeds of interest in the most efficient and easiest possible way through the use of innovative technologies and user interfaces.

• Tina Mammoser (The Cycling Artist) sent me her newsletter and I checked out the email software she's using yourmailinglistprovider . It's got a feature list on its home page and looks interesting. I've added it into the collection of information you can find in Email Newsletter Software - Resources for Artists

and finally.........

I'm now off to Hays Galleria and the Pool of London to sketch with the Friends of the RWS. Doubtless you'll see the results very soon on my sketchbook blog! Guess what - it's just started raining! [Update: I got to the station only to find that the London Underground is experiencing major disruption to my tube lines today so I'm not going to sketch - and get wet - today after all!]

For those who have not yet found it, I'll leave you with a link to the story that changed politics in the UK and "the raging storm" which is the Daily Telegraph Letters page which is much preoccupied with MPs expenses - the topic which has been a constant topic of conversation in the UK this week. I'll leave you with a quote from one of them.........

My cousin in Boston, Massachusetts, says that your continuing exposure of our sordid parliamentary doings is holding people spellbound on the other side of the Atlantic. My friends in Australia are also agog, emailing daily comments and jokes.