25th October 2009 - Who's made a mark this week?

Britanny sketches: Ebb tide and Rocky Shore, Golfe de Morbihan,
coyright Laura Frankstone (Laurelines)

I wasn't the only person visiting France and sketching in recent weeks. Laura Frankstone of Laurelines has been posting more of her delightful Britanny sketches - some of which you can see above and more of which you can see in:

• First sketches, Brittany - posted while she was still there
• My little French studio
• Brittany sketches, part three!
• Brittany sketches, part four!

Carnac Standing Stones
coyright Laura Frankstone (Laurelines)

We did try to see whether we could meet up and I think we got within 30 km - but we were driving south to the Loire as Laura was returning to her cottage with husband and friends who'd flown in.

However Laura earlier had the company of Casey Touissaint (Rue Manual Bis) who posted about In Brittany with Laura.

Artists and art blogs

I came across three sites which were new to me last week

• Neil Hollingworth's blog (Paintings in Oil) highlighted - in My Interview with Jim Thalassoudis - a relatively new blog In The Real Art World which alerts you to the best exhibitions of representational "realism". You can read an interview with Neil on it.

I was fifty years old before I actually began to paint full-time, but drawing was part of my life since childhood. I spent much more time in school sketching in the margins of my papers than taking notes

• I've discovered that Kitty Wallis (pastel artist / owner of Wallis Paper) now has a blog - called Kitty Wallis - but ti's very early days. How about lending some encouragement? I'd certainly like to see more of Kitty's very fine pastel work.
• I also came across botanical artist Mindy Lighthipe's website - she works in a similar way to Maria Sibylla Merian with an emphasis on drawing the insects together with planst and flowers

While old favourites were also blogging about diverse topics

• Julie Oakley won my competition to win a ticket to go to Brussels - and this is her blog post about her trip Brussels break
• Check out Enrique Flores's sketches in Book with Cuba sketches and Book with Cuba sketches/2 plus a video of his book of sketches done in cuba.
• I'm loving the fish that Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life) is producing - see The remains of the day (on Watermarks) and Puttering. I think she may well have found a signature theme! You can see more of her artwork and prints here.
• Has anybody else noticed how the paintings posted on Different Strokes from Different Folks are becoming more diverse as people find ways of creating representational relaism without looking like the photograph? See for example Week 49-51 Challenge - City Rooftops. You've still got time to enter this challenge - it finishes on 28th October.
  
• Gabi Campanario (founder of Urban Sketchers) has got a neat little teaser going on his blog - which is now on the Seattle Times - called TGIF, where's the sketcher?

and I'm still posting about my trip to France - but fewer postrs last week for two reasons. First my time has been hijacked by trying to protest about my local Council's plans to ruin my local neighbourhood - so fewer than I had hoped. Second I needed to learn how to make a video! Which I did - you can now follow me on my You Tube channel as I work my way through my camcorder memories!

Petit déjeuner @ Dolce e Amaro
8" x 10" in Moleskine - while sat having breakfast
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• Petit déjeuner @ Dolce e Amaro
• Musée de l'Orangerie, Tuileries, Notre Dame and St Germain
• and this is the video of Monet's Waterlilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie Paris

Plus this is where I was last Sunday morning - Columbia Road Market on a Sunday morning

Note also that Urban Sketchers member Steven White has started a weekly sketching challenge in our flickr group. This week the challenge was trees.

Art photography

I had a couple of items about photography this week. I keep wanting to learn more and more about photography.........

• There's a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which I reviewed here Exhibition Review: Beatles to Bowie - 60s exposed
• Plus the results of Landscape photographer of the year 2009 were announced. There are to be books associated with this very popular competition

Art business and marketing

After my comments about the availability of free information about marketing your art last week I thought it might be instructive to go looking for some more sites which also offer free information of the reputable variety - and it was! You can subscribe to both of the sites identified below for free to get articles like these.

• I've got a lot of time for Art Calendar. Could be because they asked my view and quoted me once in an article! However I do like the way they share articles from their journal for free. You can get access to the full version of some of their recent articles on their website. Here are some examples:
• Social Networking for Artists - Tips for Success by Renee Phillips
  

It is entirely possible for you to sell your art in this marketplace even in this current climate, as long as you understand luxe buyers and their behavioral patterns, and can then develop and implement a marketing plan geared toward this audience.

• Luxury Marketing Part I: Finding Your Place in the Luxury Market - very interesting comments in the nature of the marketplace and the buyers and of this information will surprised me!
  
• Luxury Marketing Part II: Studying Your Target Market
• Luxury Marketing Part III: Do you make the luxe list?
• Luxury Marketing Part IV: Creating a Luxury Brand
• one more to come in this series!
  
• Plus did you also know that you can purchase digital copies of back issues of Art Calendar for $2.95? I've not seen this done before but it seems like an excellent idea to me.
  

• Another new blog (to me) this week is Art Marketing Secrets - which has some interesting posts
  
• Big Artist Website Mistake #1: Poor Image Quality
• Big Artist Website Mistake #2: Inconsistent Work
• Big Artist Website Mistake #3: Distract Your Visitors
• Big Artist Website Mistake #4 – Ask Harry Potter!
• Big Artist Website Mistake #5 – Poor Quality Bio

Art competitions

• Art Sleuth has written about The Turner Prize 2009 - in which he reviews the entries
  

Art exhibitions, galleries and museums

• I made my first video this week and the second one is in this post Monet's Nympheas in the Musée de l'Orangerie. I'm planning a series of posts about the art museums I visited in Paris
• The Sacred Made Real (21 October 2009 – 24 January 2010) exhibition opened last week at the National Gallery. It explores the intense dialogue between the arts of sculpture and painting - in realtion to relgious art - revealing that they were both intricately linked and Interdependent and a particular focus on hyperrealism

Paintings, including masterpieces by Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, are displayed for the very first time alongside Spain’s remarkable polychrome woodden sculptures

• RWS/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2009 has moved to The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TS until 10 November 2009.
  

This prestigious competition aims to encourage the use of watercolour and water based media paintings among both contemporary artists and the public. A selection of works from the exhibition is on tour until the end of the year.

• You can see fellow Watermarks blogger Tina Mammoser's work On the walls, in Blackheath at the Blackheath Gallery in Tranquil Vale (I've always loved that street name!)
• Meanwhile I came across a bit of a different perspective on Damien Hirst's latest exhibition in Michael Savage (Culture Wars). In A tragic aspiration to cool he suggests that its the people at the Wallace Collection who should be criticised for allowing such bad paintings site alongside some real greats.

  In fact, Hirst’s paintings are shockingly bad. They are crudely painted, shallowly conceived, derivative and trite. They are pastiches of Francis Bacon, hewing close to the original but with none of the panache. But they are not only poorly crafted. The symbolism is laughably shallow – a skull and an ashtray, for example. Oh my gosh – I get it, smoking and death, that’s soooo clever…

Opinion Polls

• I'm running a short poll this month (see right hand column) - all about how you acquired your current style - see MAM Poll: What has influenced your style of art?

Websites and blogging

• The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs - was written two years and is mostly about wordpress blog themes. However it looks like it's still a good read for those who want to check out if their blog is behaving properly in delivering the goods to search engines. What do people with wordpress blogs think?
  
• Social Media: The Need For Measurement is about what happens when people confuse the medium with the message and start using a communications channel without first deciding what they are going to do with it. Lots of great free tips and pointers.
  

The fist step should be to ask "why"? The same question applies to any marketing campaign, be it search marketing, radio, television, or anything else. Why does this website exist? Why am I doing this and what result am I trying to achieve?

Is it to boost traffic? Is it to make more money? Is it to cut costs in other marketing activities by replacing one with another? Is it to grow the RSS subscriber base? Get more links? Grow the mail list? A combination of all these things? And how do these relate back to the purpose of the site?

and finally......Just in case you missed the announcement on Friday and the very yellow image in both blog post and in my side column. :D

I got a very welcome email on Friday telling me that Making A Mark has been officially rated #4 in Top 25 UK Arts & Culture Blog.

When I finally got over the shock of having beaten the blogs of the Guardian, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph, I began to realise that quite a few of the other blogs are team blogs and what look like paid enterprises.

So I'm feelin even more cockahoop! It really does feel like Making A Mark - which is just me - has very definitely made a mark!

Many thanks to all my blog readers who left very nice comments on this blog post.