Sunday, July 12, 2009

12th July 2009 - Who's made a mark this week? #104

Standing Tall
6" x 10", coloured pencils on Arches HP

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Last week's featured artist Sarah Wimperis (The Red Shoes) definitely wasn't expecting this but today she's the recipient of a Blogging Birthday Card on the occasion of her 50th Birthday which is TODAY!

Sarah's celebrating all this weekend down in Cornwall but if you'd like to say Happy Birthday you can do so on It's only half a hundred! on our group blog Watermarks.

The drawing up above is my pictorial contribution to the card and is of some of the pines which stand above the River Helford near where she lives and which she often paints.

Art Blogs

Making A Mark made it into the ‘Best Artists Blog’ section of the 100 Best Scholarly Art Blogs list this week. I was joined by Kirsty Hall (Up all night again......), William Wray (Urban Painter William Wray), Charley Parker (Lines And Colors) and Laura Frankstone (Laurelines)

This is a list which definitely is worth reviewing. It contains a lot of very good art blogs - although I don't know that it would have been the selection I would have made. (Now there's an idea for the end of year blogging poll!). My only reservation about the listing is that I'm not sure about the site it's on Online University Reviews (what's an online university?)

I've only just noticed that Sketchercise also made it into the list of 'best art communities' - which seems a bit odd! It's also not described accurately - which might account for the number of applications I've had to reject this week!

23rd international sketchcrawl

It's looking very quiet on the sketchcrawl front at the moment - based on searching for blogs for references to it. I know I didn't go out - but that was because it looked the clouds were threatening to dump rain in a significant way all day - and then helf off until the evening before doing so! Always the way!
Life Class

Matthew's back,
Life Class with Maggi Hambling, Channel 4
pencil on heavy cartridge paper
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

On Monday I started following Life Class on Channel 4 - - and a number of other people. These are the daily posts I did last week. The series was generally 'voted' a success by all those who participated in it.
Plus you can see the drawings done by other people and posted in the Flickr Group Pool and read various comments such as
Section 1.18 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code says: "Nudity before the watershed must be justified by the context."
Meanwhile Wally Torta (Crackskull Bob) shows us all how its done with a digital tablet in FIGURE DRAWING GROUP and also provided trenchant comment (I always wanted to use that adjective)
I think it's time to change our name to Norfolk Figure Drawing Crowd. It's a well-known sociological fact that in times of economic recession people turn to frivolous movies and naked models. As opposed to your senators and congressmen, who will turn to naked models during any old economic climate.
FIGURE DRAWING GROUP
Plus I also posted Another way of drawing people on my sketchbook blog. This relates to people who aren't posing for you and don't keep still!

Drawing and sketching
Coloured pencils and pastels
  • CPSA (Colored Pencil Society of America News) published an update Summer Updates from CPSA prior to the Annual Convention and Exhibitoon which starts later this month
  • In it you can find a link to the Silent Auction which CPSA does each year at the convention. The idea is the artist donates a small work and CPSA benefits from the proceeds. Having witnessed one of these and the bids process I can tell you there's a little bit of an edge to the 'competition' to submit a work which attracts a lot of bids and/or bids which are a worthwhile value. The link takes you to an exhibition of the submitted work - but you have to be present to make a bid.
Painters
  • Jos van Riswick is a Dutch contemporary still life painter who lives and works in living and working in Nijmegen in Holland. He's been working on paintings for an exhibition recently and is displaying some very fine paintings in a modern classics vein in Daily Painting - Postcard from Holland. His work is not cheap but then good quality almost never is...
  • Read the American Artist article Qiang Huang: Myth Buster. You can also see his work on his blog or his website
  • Thanks to Neil Hollingsworth (Paintings in Oil ) for highlighting a painting blog which is new to me (and him). It's called Paintblog and is a Canadian blog which was established to highlight the great art which can be found online. It focuses on featuring different artists - typically painters.
  • Susan Abbott (A Painter's Year) has been painting in one of my favourite painting spots - the Ochre Quarry near Roussillon
Portraiture
  • See 'and finally...'
Sculpture
NEW CURATOR will look at topics, issues and news surrounding museums and politics, technology, internationalism, individualism, expansionism, presentism and architecture. All together acting as a lens to see how the future of museums is being planned out.

Art Business and Marketing

Art and the economy / Art Collectors

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

Art Education
  • A VERY HELPFUL online guide by Nita Leland (Exploring Color and Creativity) on using triads - Painting With Three Colors. I love the fact that she identifies specific colours with compatible harmonies to to specific types of triads. Recommended
  • There's a NYC Central Park Paint-out next Saturday, July 18, 2009 (from 8:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m). The master artists featured on the new public television series Passport & Palette, Kevin Macpherson, Joe Anna Arnett, Kenn Backhaus and James Asher, will be painting in areas between the Bethesda Fountain and the Lake. Artists and art enthusiasts alike are invited to join them by painting and sketching along with the master artists and/or simply observing them at work. The location is Central Park Between the Bethesda Fountain and the Lake in Manhattan.

Workshops

Tips and techniques

Art Exhibitions

One & Other website and webcam
Graeme gets on with being an artist (Sunday 12th July 2pm - 3pm)

This loan exhibition of more than 100 masterpieces of American painting explores a major mode of artistic expression from the pre-Revolutionary era to the beginning of World War I: figural scenes of ordinary people engaged in life’s tasks and pleasures.
  • Artists involved with exhibitions at the Tate are providing free content on iTunes. Featured artists include David Hockney, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois and Turner Prize winner Martin Creed. See Tate on iTunes U
Tate on iTunes U creates easy access to the range of media, over 400 videos and audio files categorised to enable users to go directly to their area of interest and browse thematically under artist, exhibition, Tate Voices, Tate Live, Tate IQ and guides for teachers.

Examples of my drawings of cacti and succulents
coloured pencils
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Art Museums and Galleries

Book reviews

  • I love drawing gardens and was very pleased to review a new book about contemporary artists who paint gardens - see Book Review: Garden Painters. It's a qualified approval from me as I can think of some ways in which it might have been improved. The blog post includes lots of links to work of the artists in the book

Websites, webware and blogging

and finally........

In the light of the riots in Uighur last week (see today's article Security chiefs failed to spot signs calling for Uighur revolt in The Sunday Times) It's worth reminding you that the National Portrait Gallery is currently displaying a very topical exhibition of work by Emmanouil Bitsakis. He won the BP Travel Award in 2008 and his portrait project involved visiting Xinjiang-Uigur Autonomous Region (north west China). The exhibition amply demonstrates a completely different perspective of the Uighur people living in China.

See
PS Did everybody have problems with Google and Blogger today or was it just in the UK?

7 comments:

  1. Hi Katharine, I wanted to tell you what a goldmine I found on YouTube when I went to view the Hockney interview you linked to in a previous post. One of my finds was an interview with Lucien Freud (in 5 parts). I'd always found his work fascinating and disturbing but knew little about him. Hockney talked about him on his interview, which made me even more interested to know more. Here's a quasi link (since Blogger doesn't allow real ones) to part 1 of the interview: http://www.youtube dot com/watch?v=3D_euSA7ryg

    Also, I tried every which way to be able to view from the U.S. the Channel 4 series, and did finally find a way to do it, for $8.00 a month AND tuning in on my computer at 4:30 a.m. Decided to attend a life class in person instead.
    Thanks,
    Jana

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  2. Katherine, I didn't even email you this time about our being on that list together, but now that you've mentioned it on your blog, I'm going to do likewise ;D. I emailed Suzane Smith back to ask her to give me more info about her organization and how they chose us, but I've yet to get a response. Enough of that--- judging from today's post, there's been lots of good mark making this week! I'm going back to reread now.

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  3. Oh, no! My long comment was vaporized! I ended by commenting on all the worthy mark-making that occurred in the art world this week and I thanked you, as always, for reporting it to us.

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  4. Thanks for the mention Katherine - my post was more about customer service, which I hope we can all take to heart. :)

    Back in the UK at long last and catching up on the blog now...

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  5. Jana - those are the Jake Auerbach interviews. I've seen the film in its entirety (rather than split into 10 minute chunks for You Tube) when it was screened at the Princes Drawing School - and introduced by Jake Auerbach. I agree it's a fabulous interview. It was originally made for the BBC Omnibus programme on the occasion of the Freud retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank.

    This is my blog post about it Lucian Freud - on film, in words and ink

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  6. Laura - I found your comment in my comment archives!

    I also don't normally comment on these "100 best art blogs" sites - particularly those which are set up purely to drive links to the individual's website.

    However this one is good in terms of many (but not all) of the blogs highlighted!

    As opposed to another one which gets advertised on many blogs which has no curatorial input at all! Last time I looked that had a blog by a youngster who had a very new blog at #1. COMPLETE TOSH!

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  7. It's taken me so long to get back here to comment this week, Katherine because of all the enticing links in this post! I love Nita Leland's Compatible Harmony Triads and have had a terrific day experimenting as a result.

    Congratulations on your selection for the California show!

    I followed that Tate link on David Hockney and accently downloaded ALL the videos - I have almost no hard disk memory left but there is so much I want to watch, I'll have to hang on to some of them.

    Great post. thank you!!!

    ReplyDelete

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