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Sunday, January 24, 2010

24th January 2010 - Who's made a mark this week?

The best thing for me this week - by far - being able to attend the press preview for the new Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts on Tuesday.

The worst thing was when I came to process my photographs and realised that my camera's SD card had malfunctioned!

The next best thing was when I realised I was being incredibly dumb about how my card saved image records!!!

They were there all the time............

Self-portrait as an artist (January 1888)
oil on canvas, 65.5 x 50.5cm
Van Gogh Museum
(Letter 626)

Here’s an impression of mine, which is the result of a portrait that I painted in the mirror, and which Theo has: a pink-grey face with green eyes, ash-coloured hair, wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad, but the lips are full, a blue smock of coarse linen, and a palette with lemon yellow, vermilion, Veronese green, cobalt blue, in short all the colours, except of the orange beard, on the palette, the only whole colours, though. The figure against a grey-white wall.
(Letter 626)
I've now got an awful lot of photos of the works on display and the letters.
Sketching at the RA - Friends Room #6
8" x 10", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in Moleskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Art Blogs


Art of the Landscape

One of the interesting spin-offs from the Art of the landscape project are all the new blogs I'm picking up on. The more interesting/more frequent posters are going straight to the blogroll of The Art of the Landscape
Posts on my new blog this week included:
I'm introducing people slowly to the new ning community so please bear with me if you've not yet had your application approved.

Coloured Pencils and Pastels
  • Thanks to Casey Klahn (The Colorist) for highlighting Pastel News. It features pastel artists - the most recent example being Featured Pastel Artist: Liz Haywood-Sullivan
  • Other pastel blogs I've come across recently which are new to me include:
    • Robert Fafond's Mark and Remark - I'm liking his pastel drawings of winter and fields
    • Artists in Pastel. The site features pastel artists according to a template format. The aim appears to be a directory of pastel artists - which is laudable - although I did not that all the artists seem to be one side of the pond at the moment Somebody sent me this link - and I owe them an aplogy as I failed to make a note of who that was!
    • The Pastel Guild This is the home of the Pastel Guild of Europe which was set up last year following an initiative by some of the pastel artists on Wet Canvas. It has three levels of membership.
Printmaking
Nature Art

Art Business and Marketing

I've looked at a couple thousand art blogs over the last three years, and most of them were broken. Most likely, the way you produce and sell your art are outdated and ineffective. If your art is not selling well, as seems to be the case with most artists, then your art is broken, or your marketing is broken, or more likely both are broken.
most of your potential customers have no idea why your images are any better or more expensive than similar images.

Art and the Economy / Art Collectors

Attendance at art museums was down 13 percent from 2003 to 2008, the index found, while audiences at popular music events were down 6 percent. More people are taking classes in knitting and ceramics

Art Competitions and Art Societies

Art Exhibitions and art fairs

  • Art galleries should think big writes Jonathan Jones in his Guardian blog. With one-off exhibitions and no master plan, our national institutions tell us little about the wider story of art.....
it seems to be expected that if an exhibition does more or less what it says on the tin, and gets a reasonable attendance, it deserves a soft ride from the critics.......if I see a show that is fine on its own terms but totally myopic about the larger history of art and humanity – well, I'll continue to say so.
  • ...which is interesting given that on the same day I posted my Exhibition review of Turner and the Masters at Tate Britain. I'm actually very glad I saw this exhibition after I'd done my initial research around the timeline for the development of landscape art. I'm not sure some other people would have appreciated the exhibition as much as possible without that knowledge. An exhibition which references quite so much of art history probably needs a bit more explanation for the unintiated. If you take a look at this post you'll be able to judge how good my sketch is as a copy of Turner's Palestrina.
Palestrina (after Turner) by me!
8 x 10", pencil and coloured pencils in Moleskine sketchbook
Katherine Tyrrell

Art Education / workshops

Art History

  • The New York Times article Cultural Riches Turn to Rubble in Haiti Quake reminds us that in the midst of the utter devastation and horrendous loss of life in Haiti is the loss of a significant cultural heritage. The Episcopal Church’s Holy Trinity Cathedral is known for its murals of Bible stories with all black figures - in a country which can claim the honour of being the first independent black state. This a link to a pdf document (In French) about Le fresque de la Cathédrale Ste Trinité. It makes one realise that the process of aid and reconstruction goes way beyond the immediate difficulties even if those must be of paramount importance right now.
“The dead are dead, we know that. But if you don’t have the memory of the past, the rest of us can’t continue living.”

Art Studios

Art Supplies

Book reviews

Colour

  • I knew James Gurney had another book on the go and this week he announced the topic on his blog. It's called Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter and you can find out more about it in Color and Light Book and More About the New Book. For those of you voted on the cover design the Cover Poll Results results are in and there was no doubt as to which was the winner.
  • He's also posted recentlu about a Color Isolator
  • This is a post from a colourman about paint colours of the past - such a shame these are colours for buildings and not paintings!

Opinion Poll

  • Don't forget to vote in the January Making A Mark Opinion Poll if you haven't already. At the moment 13% of you have owned up to having made no archive of your images! Are there any more of you out there? The poll is in the right hand column - under blog followers widget

and finally........

From 29 January until 14 March 2010 British artist Michael Landy intends to transform the South London Gallery into a 600m³ container for the disposal of works of art. Art Bin will gradually fill up over the six week course of the exhibition to create ’a monument to creative failure’. Click here to apply to dispose of art works in Art Bin,

He invited some celebraities to contribute to get the project started - read about this in

My week: Michael Landy

The artist considers his most ambitious work yet – junking the works of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin


The Art of the Landscape

3 comments:

  1. Great post and even better, my favorite of your sketches to date. Sketching at the RA is beautiful. I love the soft warm coziness inside and the winter light outside. Beautiful!

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  2. It was such a thrill to have Martin make a monotype after my little sketch. He's such an inspiration to me with his passion for drawing trees and his printmaking talent and skill. As you know, he shares his knowledge so generously. And guess where we met! You have drawn so many artists together through MAM, Sketchercise and now The Art of the Landscape. Thank you.

    Thanks too very much for the link to my Terraskin tests. I'm now addicted to that ground for gouache and am going to have to find a local supplier.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello Katherine,thank you for the kind mentioning of my humble exercise and some more thanks for bringing people together.

    ReplyDelete

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