14th February 2010 - Who's made a mark this week?

a small sample of 118 paintings of Karin Jurick
A project by the arrtist bloggers on Different Strokes from Different Folks

I was delighted this morning to wake up to an email from Karin Jurick ( My Painting Today) who wanted to share the fact she had herself woken up to find 118 portraits of herself!

Karin has been very busy preparing for an exhibition in March and consequently wasn't able to lead her Different Strokes for Different Folks crew in their normal monthly project (see My Regrets).

However her monthly painting project blog is so popular that her 'students' decided to do a project off their own bat and surprise her with it. So 118 artist bloggers all painted a photo of Karin!

You can see all 118 paintings on Picasa here. I particularly liked the one by Annnarie Thomas (see right)
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I'm finishing getting my submission to the Society of Botanical Artists ready today - so this post is a "quickie" and some links have a bit less explanatory text than usual. I'll come back and finish of if I have time later.

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• The Winter Landscapes in Soft Pastel on Pastel News

Botanical Art

• A botanical art blog Pencil and Leaf by Valerie Littlewood which I don't think I've featured before. It features lots of insects and creepy crawlies in amongst the leaves and flowers. It's nice to see an artist following in the footsteps of Maria Sybilla Merian (see Maria Sibylla Merian - Resources for Botanical Art Lovers)

Landscapes

Posts on The Art of the Landscape blog last week covered the following diverse range of topics related to the visual landscape

• Visiting Constable Country
• The Sight-Size Method en Plein Air
• Extreme Plein Air - painting the Antarctic!
• Marine Art - Resources for Artists
• TIP: Foliage and Sky Holes
• Framing the West

Carole Buschman (Color Creates) joined The Art of the Landscape Ning Community this week and has posted on her blog about a landscape artist who currently have shows in Denver - Joellyn Duesberry. Lots of really great images to look at in With love/ Out and About! and on the artist's website.

Painters and Painting

• Bill Guffey (Bill Guffey) in Kentucky who started the blog Virtual Paintout wrote about Virtual Paintout in School. It was really pleasing to hear him write about what happened

One of the folks that has started to participate is Melinda Campbell. Melinda is an art teacher of sixth grade students in a public school system here in the States. She has integrated the VP idea into her class, and said she was surprised at how many students chose Washington, D.C. and New York City. She said that many chose their on homes as a subject also. And that their behavior was excellent, they were involved, and so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.

• I am incidentally fascinated to see the range of paintings which are coming in during February for the San Francisco Bay area - February 2010 on the Virtual Paintout
  
• Interesting comments from Linda Blondheim (Linda Blondheim Art Journal) about Detail and Flat

Art Marketing / Art Collectors

• Marketing Mondays: Do You Really Need a Gallery?
• Giacometti sale is a reminder why banks are betting big on art a comment in the financial pages of the Thelegraph
  
• Free art for everyone—if you can find it - a novel approach to marketing your art can be found in Chicago (if you look hard enough). Treasure hunting for collectors?
  

Art Competitions and Art Societies

• Two posts this week by me about art competitions
• 20 tips for entering art competitions
• Making A Mark Awards 2010 - The Contenders
• On UKCPS News there's a post about Richard Klekociuk wins $1,000 First Prize with a coloured pencil drawing in The Launceston Society Annual Exhibition in Tasmania
  
• Malcolm Cudmore wins Derwent Artists Pencils competition reveals the benefits of working from your own reference photos.
• Michael Richards sent me this link to the Bookmark winners on the Book Depository website. The competition was held in November and December last year and they received over 600 entries and selected winners from ten countries aged between 8 and 55 - including one by Michael.
• More about art competitions in the UK on Art Competitions in the UK - Resources for Artists

Art Exhibitions and art fairs

• an exhibition of Bob Dylan on canvas opened at the Halycon Gallery yesterday and continues until 10th April. The gallery is at 24 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QQ

Halcyon Gallery presents an exclusive exhibition of Bob Dylan’s first paintings on canvas, based on drawings and sketches made while on the road during the period of 1989 - 1992. These paintings are the grand finale of The Drawn Blank Series and testament to his artistic progression: from drawings to works on paper and now finally to canvas.

• Gold medal winning coloured pencil artist Ann Swan is an exhibition displaying RHS gold medal winning artwork by a group of botanical artists at Fulham Palace see Ann Swan in Gold Standard exhibition
• Teylers Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands currently has an exhibiition of The Highgrove Florilegium of HRH The Prince of Wales From January 30 until May 9 2010 at Teylers Museum, Spaarne16, 2011CH Haarlem, The Netherlands. This is the first and oldest museum in the Netherlands. Read my blog post about when I visited the exhibition at the Garden Museum in London

• Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan opened on Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC and continues until May 9th
  

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

• Linda Blondheim has a thoughful perspective on being influenced (or not) by other artists
• Katherine Cartwright (Katharine A. Cartwright Studio) describes her blog as a blog dedicated to the advancement of critical thinking in art. She also comments on inputs from other artists in two posts
  
• The Creative Process Loop
• The Creative Process Loop, continued

Tips and techniques

• Michael Chesley Johnson has been writing about Painting with Neutrals
• Landscape - TIP: Foliage and Sky Holes by Richard McKinley (Pastel Pointers)

Art History

• I wrote about Van Gogh and the Yellow House in Arles after seeing both the drawing and the painting of the Yellow House - and finding the site on Streetview!

Book reviews

• The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed (180) is the 14th most downloaded e-book in Project Gutenburg
  

The Web: networking, blogging, webware and websites

Blogger

Apparently my post last Monday was very popular as a lot of you have been visiting How to make Blogger pages work for you. What's the consensus - are you implementing this new functionality or not?

Have you visited my new STATIC blog pages (listed under the blog title)?

• Home
• MAM Awards
• My blogs and websites
• Art Business
• Artists
• Competitions | Exhibitions
• Books
• Resources for Artists

Buzz/ Facebook / social networking

• There have been a lot of critics of Google Buzz - for example see the New York Times article Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service . For the record I too have concerns about privacy, have got it switched off and will NOT be using it. Did they drive a coach and horses through the Google Privacy Policy? Or do they now need to rewrite the policy to strengthen it and prevent this happening again. I'm inclined to think the answer is 'Yes' to both.
  
• I'm not sure I like the latest change on Facebook - but I do like Facebook Lite See comments about this
  
• Plus Facebook Still Rules, But Rivals Gain Share

According to comScore's "The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review" report nearly four out of five US Internet users visited a social networking site in December 2009.

and finally........

If you've produced an arty blog post about Valentines Day please share it below and I'll feature the best in this post next week.