6th June 2010 - Who's made a mark this week?

Sarah Wimperis has created another very impressive set of paintings about where she lives in Cornwall.  Painting With a Story in Mind on Watermarks and her blog The Red Shoes explains how she came to paint these images.

 

Paintings by Sarah Wimperis

copyright the artist

With this set of paintings I have tried to let them tell a story.  It is not complicated, it is the walk down to the sea.  It is a walk that I do often, through every season and every kind of weather but here it is early summer.  To me, a walk to the sea, through rich deep green lanes and paths, past billows of wild flowers and beneath towering beech trees, is an essence of Cornwall and hopefully it will say similar things to other people, wanting to buy a little bit of that to hang up at home.

This year Sarah has had her work selected for two prestigious national exhibitions; the Royal Institute for Painters in Watercolour and the Royal Watercolour Society.

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching

• Danny Gregory (Danny Gregory) is slowly getting back into sketching and keeping his journal as life goes on after the very sad death of his wife Patti in March.  

Storm Clouds over Westminster

16.5" x 23.5" coloured pencils on cartridge paper

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• I wrote about how I came about to draw Storm clouds over Westminster
• Sketching at the RA - Friends Room #7 is another sketch in my series about people eating drinking talking in the Friends Room at the Royal Academy of Arts.
• I've also updated my summary post about Interior Landscapes with Food - A Sketchbook
• Matthew Brehm has also been posting about sketching while eating in Eating alone in Rome
• LB Album is Lucia B's sketching blog.  She lives in Italy and her blog posts are in both Italian and English.  Her watercolour sketches of architecture are wonderful.
• The drawings in How to Make Yogurt, Illustrated by Jana Bouc made me want to rush out and make some!

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

Coloured pencil artists were enjoying winning prizes last week

• Last Sunday I featured Leslie Evans (Chisaii) in my coverage of the Wildlife Artist of the Year.  She had three coloured pencil works in the show shipped over the USA.  This week came news that Reverie had won the People's Choice at the 2010 David Shepherd Wildlife Foundations' Wildlife Artist of the Year competition held in London last week.
• Judith Heilbronn-Crown wins 'Best in Show' in UKCPS's 8th World of Coloured Pencils at the Pencil Museum in Cumbria.  The post also has images of other award-winning work in this exhibition which is open to all members of UKCPS irrespective of their experience levels.

Landscape

• The Virtual Paintout location for June is Hawaii!  This is a link to Bill's Virtual Paintout blog and the thread of the Hawaii Virtual Paintout in June 2010.  

 Art and the Economy / Art Collectors

• An amusing article about one collector's behaviour at auctions on ArtNews - Standing By His Bid—Unless He Sat
• A Guardian article by Jonathan Jones and a sign of the (passing) time?  - The YBAs are over. Long live the OBAs!

The death of the British boom in hot! new! young! art has been predicted before, but now it really seems to be happening. In its place a more catholic, and more honest era may be beginning.

Art Competitions and Art Societies

• Sree (Sree's Canvas - Garden of Hues ) in India is a finalist in the BBC Wildlife Artist of the Year 2010  The exhibition of all the finalists' work is at Marwell in August.
  

Art Exhibitions and art fairs

Major Museums

The Musée d'Orsay has an exhibition entitled "Photography Not Art" Naturalism according to P.H. Emerson (1886-1895) 16 March - 1 September 2010

"Photography Not Art" : these three words written by Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), one of the principle exponents of photography as an art form in its own right, say a lot about the complexity of a debate which started with the birth of photography and went on for several years.

Art Exhibitions - the Summer Exhibitions

• It's Friends Previews next week for Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts followed by the exhibition opening to the public on 14th June  
• Chris Beetles Gallery- which is a hope skip and a jump away from the RA is also holding its Summer Exhibition.  You can either view the exhibition or view the online pdf catalogue.  I have to say the latter is the best use of technology for promoting an exhibition cataloguie which I've seen to date.  I imagine it's saving him thousands in printing costs as his customers become more environment aware and want to try reducing their carbon footprints! 
• the Beside The Wave Gallery in Falmouth, Cornwall also has a Summer 2010 exhibition where you can see Sarah Wimperis's work which is displayed at the top of this post. 

Future Exhibitions

• There's a Major Monet Retrospective coming up in the Autumn in Paris.  The exhibitions is on from 20 September 2010 - 24 January 2011 at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais
• Art Knowledge says that Musée d'Orsay Revives Art Nouveau in a Major Exhibition in Paris
• One for the calendars of those who enjoy photography exhibitions.  Brian Duffy died on the 31st May.  Along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he was one the three key photographers working in London during the swinging 60s.  An exhibition of his work, Duffy, will be at the Chris Beetles gallery in London from 14 October until 7 November 2009.  You can see Rarely-seen photographs by Brian Duffy on the Guardian website.  It includes his iconic image of David Bowie as Aladdin Sane.

Art Societies

• A World of Coloured Pencil, the annual exhibition for UK Coloured Pencil Society members of all abilities opened in Keswick last week and continues until the end of the month at the Pencil Museum in Keswick
  
• I've updated Art Societies in the UK - Resources for Artists and Art Society Exhibitions (UK) - Resources for Artists

Open Studios

• Tiffany Budd is participating in Surrey's Open Studios

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques 

Workshops

• 1st International Urban Sketching Symposium:  You can find details about the schedule, FAQs, instructors and accommodation on the blog.  This is the registration page for the 3 day symposium.  The fee is $350 excluding travel, accommodation and meals

Tips and techniques

• Mark Lomas on photographing your work  Open College of the Arts photographer Mark Lomas demonstrates how to get the best results when photographing artwork.

Art Studios

• an interesting chat I found on Degrees Unedited's Facebook page about Finding a studio after graduating

Art Supplies

• Jonathan Linton (Theory and Practice) has been preparing a post about white paint for the last five years.  He's done a series of tests to see how much white oil paints will yellow over time.  The White Test. . . 5 Years in the Making  .  He includes some amazing colour charts - and a ranked list for those which remained white, those which practically turned orange and those which had a distinct lemon yellow tint.  Definitely a RECOMMENDED READ for all painters.  Thanks to James Gurney for highlighting this on his blog.

I give you the results of this expanded White Test (or Off-White Test, as it is known in-house.) 

• Urban Sketchers have beeen posting about their sketching gear on the blog for the 1st International Urban Sketching Symposium. The links below are to the original posts on their personal blogs.

• Matthew Brehm (Sketchblog), Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Idaho, and a correspondent for Urban Sketchers has posted about his Sketching Gear today.  Like so many of he is still searching for the sepia ink which won't bleed if touched by water. 
• Last week Lapin (Les Calepins de Lapin) posted about his sketching gear originally posted on his blog My secret sketching gear

ART TV

• "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist" starts on cable channel Bravo in the USA next Wednesday.  The formaty involves 14 very different artists being pitted against one aother in weekly challenges and awards the winner a $100,000 prize and a solo exhibition.
  

Art Videos

• Pat Hodson (the Open College of the Arts Blog) has a video about her Herbal Notebook

Book Reviews

• Jonathan Jones has a book out.  Trying to revive the Renaissance is an article in which he explains - in a polemical fashion - how he came to write it. 
• Here's a review of The Lost Battles by Jonathan Jones by another Guardian writer.  It's an account of the rivalry and competition between the Renaissance geniuses Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Copyright

• An article about Art Theft and Copyright Infringement from Ken Powers on Fine Art America

Opinion Poll

• The new Making A Mark Opinion Poll for June has started - with lots of responses  It focuses on What's your favourite magazine for artists?.  This month it's a two part survey.  We have one magazine with an early lead - but don't look until after you've voted! ;)  Remember also that the results for the second part of this poll are going to be distorted by the ease of availability of magazines.  However the first part has messages for all magazine publishers - irrespective of where you live.
• I also asked Have you reviewed an art magazine?
• The results of last month's Poll are set out in Have you bought a painting DVD? (MAM Poll results)

Websites, webware and blogging

"The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory." Newsweek - Who Needs Friends Like Facebook?

• This Newsweek quote about Facebook made me sit up and pay attention! Do read Who Needs Friends Like Facebook?  I'm on the verge of leaving Facebook again as I'm entirely sympathetic to the sentiments of this article 

The problem now is that Facebook has shown its hand. Now we know what we’re dealing with. If you really expect this company to suddenly become trustworthy, you’ve lost your mind. Over the past five years Facebook has repeatedly changed its privacy policy, always in one direction, and every time this happens, the same movie plays out. People complain. Facebook stonewalls, then spins, then pretends to be contrite, then finally walks things back—but only a little. Nobody seems to notice that after the walk-back Facebook is still grabbing more personal info than it was before. 

• How to avoid being harvested by spambots.  Every time you leave your email on a blog, website or online forum you run the very high risk of having it harvested by spambots and becoming the target for lots of spam - and worse.  However if you do have to identify your email address, it's best mask it in some way.  I've alwats made jpegs out of mine.  however another way is to use software like Project Honeypot.  Thanks to Sarah Longrigg, Moderator of the UKCPS Yahoo Forum for the tip about this software.  Updates are highlighted at
• Facebook page
• Twitter ID

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website.

• This is the website of TheInternetSpamPolice and it has some useful tips

and finally........

Sound installations are becoming a new art form.  We went to Kew Gardens yesterday where there is a new installation called Whispering in the Leaves in the Palm House.

Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves is an extraordinary sound installation that immerses visitors to Kew Gardens’ Palm House in the dawn and dusk choruses of the Central and South American rainforests.

This is the Whispering in the Leaves website where you can listen and/or download the sounds.  I think you can all enjoy it but I'm guessing the wildlife artists will particularly like it.  It goes rather well with reading my new catalpogue of the new botanical art exhibition about Old and New South American Botanical Art!  Not bad for getting in the mood while painting!