7th February 2010 - Who's made a mark this week?

Watercolour artist and former Making A Mark awardwinner Carol Carter (Carol Carter) has an interesting project ' on the go'. She's creating a series of portrais of her son - and she started 23 years ago! She's wondering whether, if she continues, he will become the only person documented throughout his life in paint.

You can read about a recent exhibition of these portraits in Opening! Schmidt Art Center and you can see them at Here's Looking at You Contemporary Portraits Schmidt Art Center, Southwestern Illinois College, Belleville, IL. The Exhibition continues until March 6th.

Watercolour portraits of her son by Carol Carter

Before I get started on the rest of the posts, I'd like to apologise for the lack of a post last week with no notice. I was having a major problem with my sight and needed a break from eye-slogging on the computer. Hence this week there's two weeks being highlighted in this post! Hopefully back to normal next week.

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching

• I was going to write about Liz Steel (Liz and Borromini) - who lives in Sydney Australia - in this post - but have now decided to mention in her in the context of an important blog post next week (on Tuesday) so you'll just have to wait to see why! ;)
• These are Judith Nijholt-Strongs (Kats in Klompen ) Moleskine: Ink & Colored Pencil Sketches from Antwerp, Belgium trips
• I've long been a believer that some of the most interesting people to draw in a life class are the other artists! I love Wally's drawings of people participating in Figure Drawing Group on Crackskull Bob

copyright Wally Torta / Crackskull Bob

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• Congratulations to Ester Roi who won the major prize in the CPSA Explore This! 6 exhibition - see my comments in CPSA - Explore This! 6 now online
• Casey Klahn (The Colorist) has started a new Prairie Series

Illustration

• Did you know that nearly 50 artists have illustrated The Wind in the Willows over the years. I found this out in this article Inga Moore, illustrator of The Wind in the Willows in which Joanna Carey talks to Inga Moore about her determination to illustrate a classic of children's literature

Landscapes

• Charlene Brown's Landscape Painting Timeline is amazing!
• Other posts about landscape art are scattered throughout this post.
  

Painters and Painting

• congrats to Jeff Hayes (Jeffrey Hayes) who was featured on Lines and Colors (Jeffrey Hayes (update)
• another followre of Duane Keiser and Julian Merrow Smith also featured on Lines and Colors is J. Bernard Koch
• a wonderful watercolour painting of Koi on masa by Jeanette Jobson on Illustrated Life. This is what Jeanette gets up to during a blizzard! I wonder what other people were painting during Snowmageddon?
• The Virtual Paint-Out is visiting San Francisco Bay area (in) February 2010
• Good for Jeanne Grant for NOT doing for the obvious during the abovementioned paintout. See Virtual Paintout on her blog Jeanne Grant. Sounds a bit like she has more planned!

Art Business and Marketing

• Artists and Illustrators Magazine has got its act together and got a blog - see Artists & Illustrators! However, judging by the dates of the entries, it looks as if the journalists haven't quite got the hang of blogging yet.............

Art and the Economy / Art Collectors

• The BBC's Arts Editor comments on Giacometti: What makes an artwork worth £65m?
• An article by Simon Schama in the Financial Times What objects say about our times
  

Art Competitions and Art Societies

• This is my post about Major Art Competitions in the UK - a timetable
• On Friday I highlighted one of the major art competitions in the UK (first prize £25k) in John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize 2010
• This is a reminder that the BP Portrait prize closes on 14th Feb - see my blog post BP Portrait Award 2010 - Call For Entries

In 2009, there were a record 1,902 entries and the resulting exhibition of fifty-six selected works was seen by over 298,000 people in London alone.

• The deadline for the Art competition: Wildlife Artist of the Year was 31st January. I wonder who got accepted?
• Pastel artists cleaned up in the Best of Wet Canvas 2009 art competition

Art Societies

• Submissions to the following art society exhibitions is coming up
• Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour - submission 19/20th February 2010
• Society of Botanical Artists Submission 15 February 2010 web site See Society of Botanical Artists - Silver Jubilee Exhibition
• Royal Academy Summer exhibition March/April web site See How to enter the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2010
• If you wanted to submit to the Pastel Society - tough! The entry closed yesterday.

Art Exhibitions and art fairs

• I'd hoped to see Charlie reviewing The Drawings of Bronzino
• More posts from me about the new Van Gogh exhibition at the RA:
• Van Gogh's Perspective Frame
• Van Gogh's Palette 1882
• The Real Van Gogh - Portraits

• The Financial Times reviews Chris Ofili in Chris Ofili at Tate Britain

This show concludes with a question mark: is this a closed retrospective of the painter’s greatest hits, or an open-ended exhibition of work-in-progress, with Ofili midway to reinventing himself?

• Meanwhile Laura Cumming for the Guardian reviews Afro Modern at Tate Liverpool. While Jonathan Jones gives it 4 stars Afro Modern at Tate Liverpool: Voyage of rediscovery. This is the Tate Liverpool Afro Modern exhibition website . Anybody planning to visit can also take the opportunity to see Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals

This journey through the culture of the Black Atlantic – from Primitivist modernism through to postmodern video work – is full of startling insights, even if it eventually loses its way

• I'm just wondering whether anybody considered timetabling either or both exhibitions for October which is Black History Month in the UK!
• Colored Pencil Society of America News announced the uploading of the Explore This! exhibition to the CPSA website in DRUM ROLL PLEASE! The Explore This! 6 Exhibition is now on line.

Openings

• Other new exhibitions at the Tate include: Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective opens at Tate Modern on 10th February and Henry Moore (24 February – 8 August 2010) at Tate Britain
• This next week I'm hoping to get to see the exhibition at Christies of the art collection of Michael Crichton.
• There's an opportunity to see Kevin McPherson's exhibition Reflections on a Pond at the Salmagundi Club in New York from February 15th until the 26th. It's very odd - the Salmagundi website didn't have any specific information on the website for exhibitions and events in February when I looked earlier this week (I don't count efforts toget me to download a pdf as a listing!). Their explanation is the website is having an overhaul. To my mind the principle that the basics need to be kept going even during an overhaul is absolutely fundamental! Meanwhile the Reflections on a Pond website doesn't have a link to Kevin McPherson's website............
  

Art Bloggers

• James Gurney's Dinotopia Opening at the Delaware Art Museum was delayed because of snowmageddon. See the exhibition website Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney. It's opening today instead and James is giving a talk starting at 2pm! Here os a list of his other Upcoming Appearances
• Tomorrow eveining I'm at the Private View for the exhibition by the Drawing London Group at the Barbican - see Drawing London: 2-24 February 2010 and Alleyways and Waterways of London. To say we were pleased to get picked up by the New York Times is an understatement

(left) 'The Magic Hour' and 'October at the Sackler Crossing, Kew'
(right) Old Ford Lock, River Lea and Ecology Park Pond #1
coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

Art education

• How to critique art is proving to be a very popular post. The resource site which I'm developing is now online at How to Critique Art - Resources for Artists I've split out the links to information and advice into different contexts. I'd still like to get more links to good quality information and advice for this site - plus links to any blog posts where individuals discuss their own thoughts on this topic. Do please leave a comment on the post if you have anything useful to contribute.

Workshops

• Fans of Billy Showell's botanical art books might like to know that she's doing a workshop about orchids and tropical flowers on Sri Lanka at Easter (4th-10th & 11th-17th April 2010). It includes being taken to see orchids growing in the wild in a rainforest reserve!
  

Tips and techniques

Some useful tips this week

• Jeff Hayes (Jeffrey Hayes) explains about Building a Shadow Box. He reckons it can be done for under $50 and would take an evening's work.
  
• R Garriott (R. Garriott) has a wonderful simply ' oh so obvious/why didn't I think of that' suggestion for a very important Artist's Tool - a brush rest. It just goes to show that it's definitely worth revisiting some older posts!
  
• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) has three tips fordrawing Hands
• ...and another one about Dead Tech: Proportional Scale. I've not seen one of these in a long time!
• American Artist has come up with an e-book for Free Watercolour tips and techniques. The artist's work reminded me of that done by Charles Reid's students. This is the link to the free eBook, “23 Free Watercolor Lessons for Portrait Painting,

Art History

• The Visual Telling of Stories is a lovely website - recommended by me (but you've got to be an inveterate surfer to work out why)
  
• What's thought to be a Tudor Shropshire Scroll painting has been found on Broadway in Shifnal, hidden behind a new wall in a Grade II listed property.
• In connection with the Chris Ofili show, Jonathan Jones asks Was Britart ever really that good? I guess this explains his recent conversion re Hirst.
  

Numerous British artists of the 1990s haven't quite lived up to the hype. But we shouldn't worry: art carries on regardless

Art Museums

• Very cool! This is a virtual tour of The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin

Art Supplies

• Jeff Hayes has posted a Lament for an Art Store. This is what happens folks when we buy everything online!

I read yesterday that 8 of the 16 Pearl stores across the country were closing, but the article did not mention what would happen in Cambridge, the chain's only store in the Boston area. Since I was in the neighborhood late this afternoon, I decided to stop by. Today was it's final day, and the doors closed at 6:30.

I arrived at 6:33, and was turned away.

• I came across this UK website this week - Apex Mounts provides a virtual mount service
• I spotted Faber Castell pencils in the Van Gogh exhibition and now I've come across a post about them on Palimpsest - Faber Pencil and Vincent Van Gogh:The Artist and his Letters (or his Pencils)

Book reviews

• The week before last I posted about The Best Books about Landscape Art - A Review and Which are the best books about Landscape Art? I've had a go with my list - what do you thiink?
• This last week I became a convert to good libraries and second hand books bought online! See Used Books about Landscape Art
• Wally (Crackskull Bob) has a new book out on Lulu Sunday Morning Talking Heads

Opinion Poll

• The resuls of the January MAM Opinion Poll are available in How do you archive your images? (MAM Poll Results)
• After the results of the January MAM opinion poll I decided to look into back up and arching a little more. This post asks the question What brands do you favour for backup? invites you to nominate
• The February MAM Opinion Poll asks the question Where do you start when making art?. To date, 66 people have responded. If you've not yet ticked the options you favour, you can find the poll in the right hand column - just below the blogger followers widget
• You can see other Making A Mark Polls - oriented towards art media, art practice and the art business - in The Making A Mark Poll - Resources for Artists.

The Web: networking, blogging, webware and websites

• There's a very Important Note to FTP Users for the tiny minority of Blogger users who FTP

SEO

• Bill Gates gets some free SEO advice - and so do you | guardian.co.uk http://bit.ly/54rJru - after a fake BG blog outranks him on Google!!!
• this is the fake blog which outranks him Bill Gates' blog
• and this is the real Bill Gates Blog - The Gates Notes
• and this is the advice that Dan Sullivan (search engine land) offered Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates

Every page on your web site has the same title, even though each page is about a different topic. This is the same as publishing a bunch of different books, on different topics, but giving them all the same title. It hurts your potential to be found for what those pages are about. It hurts the chances for people trying to find the good information you're putting out to locate it.

• At least Bill Gates is polite

@dannysullivan, thanks for the advice - the people who work on the site are on this now, should see improvements tonight...

• Personally I think he could do with a little help in writing letters for the internet as well - see Bill Gates Annual Letter
• These are the Top 10 web widgets as suggested by ReadWriteWeb
  

and finally........

You may have noticed a difference to The Art of the Landscape Blog and Making A Mark - or even read New 'tab' pages for The Art of the Landscape Blog. They both now have new Blogger Pages (underneath the banner masthead). I've taken a different approach with both and tomorrow I'm going to comment on how easy they are to use and what I think they might best be used for.