5th July 2009 - Who's made a mark this week? #103

(left) Silver Morning (Watercolour 40cm x 50cm or 16 inches x 20 inches)
(right) Homeward Bound (Watercolour. 40cm x 40cm or 16 inches x 16 inches)
copyright Sarah Wimperis

At this time of year there seem to be a lot of competitions - bringing both deadlines and announcements as to who has and hasn't got in. I'm getting emails from people and seeing quite a few blog posts about 'what happened next'

For me the stand out response to date has been by Sarah Wimperis (The Red Shoes) who posted Salty old Sea Dogs on a Saturday Night on our Watermarks blog after she didn't get into a competition. She then followed up on her wonderful watercolours in that post by doing a couple of more posts on her own blog in the week which both had stunning paintings - see Silver Morning and Homeward Bound

Mangetout
oil on cannvas, 25cm x 44cm
copyright Ilaria Rosselli del Turco

Ilaria Roselli Del Turco (Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco - News ) had some better news from the Artists and Illustrated Magazine when she heard that her painting "Mangetout" was the a runner up in their Artist of the Year competition, for the still-life category (see Artists and Illustrators Art Competition)

Art Blogs

Compendium

• I commend June roundup by Anna at See.Be.Draw. to you. It's a thoughtful review of posts she's enjoyed in June

Drawing and sketching

Expanding visual horizons this week - I'm focusing entirely on people who sketch who don't live in North America or the UK!

• Isabel Fiadeiro (Sketching in Mauritania) is an interesting sketcher - but that's partly because she's sketching in Mauretania and I don't often see real live camels in other people's sketchbooks! She does sketches from sketchcrawl in a sandstorm! This is her sketchbook blog (with text in French) of Nouakchott, ses gens et ses marchés (which she's used a bit like a website) and this is where Nouackshott is. Finally this is her sketchbook about Saharauis en exile - Sahara Women in exile
  
• I haven't got a clue what the Italian says - but these sketches of Santa Maria Maggiore by Benedetta Dossi (Urban Sketchers) are absolutely wonderful. Check out his drawings of lots of people as well on Ben's blog CARNET de VOYAGE di Benedetta Dossi - they're great.
  
• Given the number of posts that Urban Sketchers now has, you can click on one of the labels - Italy, for exmple - and get a wonderful stream of drawings and sketches of that country.

Coloured pencils and pastels

• Lauren Milroy is a design engineer with a Masters in Product Design from Stanford University. She had one or two interesting ideas about how you can use up all those little stumpy coloured pencils.........you need new flip flops? Or new heels?

shoes and flip flops made out coloured pencils by Lauren Milroy

Painters

• Canadian Cory Trepanier is painting the Arctic. He's got lots of support from sponsors and lots of ways of 'broadcasting what he's doing including
• video journals
• written and audio journals
  
• photo journals
• plus videos about his paintings - see for example The making of Mount Thor
• and blogs by sponsors - eg Daler Rowney's Into the Arctic - The journey so far
• Postalguarelas is a blog of small watercolour paintings by Paulo J. Mendes of Matosinhos in Portugal. I like how we can see the progression from sketch - as in this recent post - to painting in the following week - as in this post Picking potatoes / A apanha da batata. You can also see a gallery of his delightful work in his Etsy shop Postalguarelas. His work very much reminds of June Berry a member of the Royal Watercolour Society who paints scenes of rural village life in France (but works large)
• Take a look at some neat vs well loved paint boxes in the plein air ning community

Portraiture

• A very inteersting post by Laura Cumming in the Guardian about portraiture - Face to face with your own maker

Artists - David Hockney

• On Friday I reviewed recent work by David Hockney as seen in recent exhibitions in David Hockney - recent exhibitions
• On Thursday I reviewed a television documentary about David Hockney Review: David Hockney - A Bigger Picture. I've now heard from Bruno Wollheim (the man who made the film - filming on his own) and it seems likely that an announcement will be made about the DVD of the documentary in 3-4 weeks.
• Recommended read for all Hockneyphiles: Yesterday I posted Book review: David Hockney - Nur Natur - Just Nature which is about the catalogue of the major David Hocney exhibition in Germany.

Art Business and Marketing

Whilst stories of online gallery sales exist, they're sadly all-too-rare, considering the gazillion online galleries currently choking the web......Online galleries are established and marketed at artists. The gallery promotes itself to attract more artists. The more works displayed on a site, the more it's measured as successful.
But all that marketing and promotion towards getting more artist members doesn't address the issue of buyers!

• Let's talk about which sort of galleries are typically less successful for artists. Tony Moffitt (Tony Moffitt's Art World) has a couple of posts about
• Why Online Galleries Don't Work - excellent post - and I couldn't agree more!
  
• Vanity Galleries
• He also highlights a rather curious view in this post Most Collectors Don't Want To Meet Artists, Claims Gallery

Art and the economy / Art Collectors

• The Rage to Buy Vanishing Art Works is about how the works aren't there any more even if the buyers are. Suddenly there's an enthusiasm for orks on paper!
• An alternative perspective was that Impressionist and modern art sales figures have fallen because Super-rich hunt for the wow factor

Artists Communities and Art Forums

• This week I came across La Asociación Española de Artistas de la Naturaleza for the first time. The link is to their blog. If you'd like to check out what the Spanish wildlife artists are getting up this is a good way to find out!
• WetCanvas is now on Twitter

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

Art Education

Just a reminder about the Life Class is being screened on Channel 4 12.30pm every day this next week. Here are the links to

• Series 1, Episode 1 - the tutor is Maggi Hambling (in Hambling's studio in Clapham)
  
• Series 1, Episode 2 - the tutor is Humphrey Ocean (in the Life Room of the Royal Academy of Art)
  
• Series 1, Episode 3 - the tutor is Gary Hume (in his London studio)
• Series 1, Episode 4 - the tutor is Judy Purbeck (in Hornsey Library)
• Series 1, Episode 5 - the tutor is John Berger (in a dance studio in Paris)
  
• Presumably it's going to be available to view online as well BECAUSE there's also a Flickr group for drawings

Tips and techniques

• Does your white paper look grey when you post a photo or scan online? If it does, try reading my post yesterday about Correcting colour: How to stop your white paper looking grey. I used an example of an image which started off as periwinkle blue!
  

How to get from this (left) to this (right)

• Richard McKinley (Pastel Pointers) has some very sound advice about Plein Air Positioning
• Google knol has various articles on various topics - this is the knol about file formats in digital photography
• Marion Boddy highlights the waterbrush in painting with watercolours
  
• Mona Conner paints in egg tempera and provides useful tips on her blog Grander Joy of Spirit in Portraiture
• tips about working with egg tempera
• "How to Mix Egg Tempera Medium," my video demo

• Charley Parker at Lines and Colors has written Blue and Green or is it? - the topic is about the illusion of colour created by adjacent colours
  
• Here's a really good tip about creating a watercolour workbook from a photograph album

Here's how to stretch watercolour paper (that bit which always seems to get left out of books!)

• How to Stretch Watercolor Paper - the traditional way of doing it
• Or try watching a video about Ken Bromley's Perfect Paper Stretcher a very simple way of stretching watercolour paper
  
• Then again, this is how Cathy Johnson does it
  

Workshops

• Nancy Standlee (Nancy Standlee Art Blog ) has been writing recently about workshops she's been taking with Gerald Brommer (Jerry Brommer Collage Workshop ~ First Projects and Gerald Brommer Workshop ~ Floral Collage ~ Art Journal Pages) and Tony Saladino (Tony Saladino Abstract Acrylic Class). I think blog posts like this are really helpful to people thinking about whether or not to make a booking. I'm always happy to share posts by genuine students and their views about a workshop.
• Richard Bell of Wild West Yorkshire is giving a free workshop 'Drawing on Reserves' workshop at Brown Knowles Farm, Stocksmoor, near Huddersfield (9.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m.. The workshop is free but you must book in advance

Art Exhibitions

• Garden Museum: I visited the exhibition of the original botanical art paintings which went to make up the Highgrove Florilegium at the last week - I'll be blogging about this next week. This was my blog post about it last year - Volume 1 of The Highgrove Florilegium is published
  
• Royal Academy of Arts: This Daily Telegraph slideshow is of images from J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite - which opened at the RA on 27 June and continues until 13th September. This is review by Laura Cumming in The Guardian - Who needs another lurid damsel?
• Compton Verney in Warwickshire: Constable Portraits: The Painter and His Circle has moved here from the National Portrait Gallery. This is the gallery guide to the exhibition

Joe - Boy 2
copyright Peter Monkman

• Peter Monkman, winner of the BP portrait prize this year, wrote to tell me that he more Changeling portraits and some new work in an exhibition Uncanny Likeness about New Perspectives on Contemporary Portraiture (11th July to 22nd August 2009) under the auspices of Ovada (the The Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency). Peter will be exhibiting Joe - Boy2 and Changeling 1 and Changeling 4.
• St Louis, Missouri: A new sculpture park in St. Louis, filled with works by Fernand Léger, Tony Smith, Jim Dine and Bernar Venet, has been created to draw tourists and art fans to the city - as described in this New York Times article Sculpture to Invigorate a Shrinking City. You can also see it here in this slideshow A Look Inside Citygarden
• This New York Times article is interesting Where Art Meets Social Networking Sites. It focuses on the artist who come to digital technology of later and how it generated “Status Update” which comrpises nearly 50 works by more than a dozen artists. See it at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven

“Is it art to do art on an iPhone and put it on an easel?” he asked. “If you go back to Duchamp and put a toilet on the wall — is it art? Yes, it is.”

Art Museums and Galleries

De-accessinioning is what happens when art galleries and museums sell of parts of their collection.

• De-accessioning - Public art sell-offs heading into troubled waters
• Another perspective from The Art Law Blog is Debating Deaccessioning II
• This is The Deaccessioning Blog

Book reviews

• Yesterday I posted Book review: David Hockney - Nur Natur - Just Nature which is about the catalogue of the major David Hocney exhibition in Germany.
  

Opinion Polls

• MAM Poll July: Which are your preferred media for painting in the studio? has got off to a very good start. Have you responded to this poll yet? 68 people have already voted last time I looked - and it's a quite different response to painting plein air
  
• On Tuesday I posted MAM Poll June RESULTS: Preferred plein air painting media and commented on my theory about why people seem to stick to more traditional painting media for painting plein air

Websites, webware and blogging

• When you want to show the computer who's boss! is about what happened to me on Monday and how I lost a very long posted which I'd drafted using Google Docs. Thanks to:
• all the people who commented on strategies for dealing with computer angst
• Zsu who told me about a feature of Google Docs which meant I hadn't lost all my draft post - and it was duly retrieved

if you use Google Docs, it has revision history, which lets you go back to any previously saved point! So you should be able to undo the cut even after it saves the modification. You can get to it from the Tools menu.

• For all of us who were original Compuserve members/numbers (those were the days!) - read the requiem.
• Twitter: What is a retweet, what does it look like and how do you make one
• reteewist tells you how
• plus mashable also has its own perspective on retweets
• You can now Flickr 2 Twitter, members need to first authorize Flickr to post to their Twitter accounts.
• Some interesting lessons in New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. (OK - so I read the Harvard Business Blog!)
• Have you taken a look at Google Wave yet? It's got some interesting possibilities for online marketing of art. (But let's just remind ourselves that there's a fair few galleries which struggle to deal with email and don't have websites!)

and finally........

Tomorrow the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square starts to be occupied by a series of people for an hour at a time. Read all about it:

• The Fourth Plinth....
  
• which is currently the home of Antony Gormley's project One & Other (which is an incredibly slow website)
  
• This is the explanation of the project

Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own. If you're selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you're 16 or over and are living or staying in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment.

• Those commenting on it include The Times - Fun, but is it art? and the BBC Empty plinth volunteers step up

So far 15,374 people have applied for the 2,400 places. You can read the blog about the project here.

I can see sketching opportunities. Maybe we should have a special Trafalgar square sketchcrawl?