Sunday, October 31, 2010

31st October 2010 - Who's made a mark this week?

This week:
The Top 25 UK Arts & Culture Blogs.  Online now: the October edition of the Top 25 UK Arts & Culture Blogs. Guardian favourites and a slew of independent bloggers racing up the charts – it’s all here.

Wet evening at Burlington House
sketched from the leather sofas of the Friends Room, 
Royal Academy of Arts
Brushes iPad app and iPad

copyright Katherine Tyrrell
  • I bought an iPad on Wednesday (does this mean I now qualify as a confirmed Apple fan?).  On Friday I drew my very first ever digital sketch using the Brushes iPad app on Friday while sat in the Friends Room at the Royal Academy.  When I started this post there was just the small business of now needing to work out how to get it off the iPad!  I'd not yet got that far in The Missing Manual!  However in wanting to post it to my sketchbook blog - see Wet evening at Burlington House- I worked out I could get it off by sending it to Flickr.  I hope to be reviewing the iPad Brushes App when I've used it more (bear in mind I got this far with no manual whatsoever!)  - and would be interested to know what else other people are using for their digital sketching.
  • I stepped down today (see A Birthday and a Goodbye) from two years of being the blogmaster for UKCPS News, the blog of the UK Coloured Pencil Society.  I'm currently nurturing a new and related development which I'm hoping to say more about in the near future.
Art Blogs and Artists

Drawing and sketching
  • Drawing as an End, Not a Means is about an exhibition by veteran abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski.  It's also about Drawing to Cool Down. However it's interesting because it focuses on drawing as a means of resolving emotional entanglements with paintings - and relates to drawing at the end rather than the beginning. What's especially interesting is that Nozkowski, having been taught by Abstract Expressionists, believes in the principle of avoiding the preparatory sketch and any preconception of where to go with a painting and the act of painting as a 'hot' activity.  He has started to use drawing as a cool-down exercise rather than a warm-up. The show features 19 pairs of works, each one a painting and a smaller, corresponding work on paper in ink, pencil and gouache.  I guess this may perplex those who think anything done with a brush is a painting rather than a drawing?
  • Paul (Learning to See) is back posting again - see Sargent Portrait Copy, Part 4: Light, Value and Form
Painters and Painting
Coloured Pencils and Pastels
Landscape
  • I took a look this week at the websites of the jurors for the recent exhibition by the International Association of Pastel Societues and you can see the results in Contemporary Pastel Landscape Artists
Wildlife Art

Round about now the wildife and bird artists in the UK are totally absorbed by the migrant birds arriving for winter
Art Business and Marketing
Remember, the goal isn’t to be good at Facebook. The goal is to be good at business because of Facebook. And on that front, we’ve totally overvalued “likes”.
The country has the biggest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita, BCG found.
Art and the Economy, Art Fairs and Art Collectors
 Art Fairs
Art Competitions and Art Societies

It's a busy time for calls for entries, deadline reminders and listings of who's got into what and my blog has been very biased towards open exhibitions and art competitions this week
Sunday Times Watercolour Competition: Visiting Clovelly by Juliette Palmer
The exhibition for the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition opens tomorrow at the Mall Galleries for one week only - Monday 1st - Sunday 7th November 2010, 10am - 5pm
    Art Exhibitions and Art Fairs
    • On Friday I had intended to go and see a Japanese Botanical Artist at Kew Gardens but the weather dictated otherwise and I went to see the preview of “Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys, 1880-1900” which opened at the Royal Academy of Art yesterday.  Prior to this it has been the most popular art exhibition ever held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow - where it generated and unprecedented £1 million in income!  Not a lot of reviews as yet - and I'm thinking this might possibly be because critics like me could do with being a bit more knwledgeable about the Glasgow Boys!  For me it is recommended exhibition as it includes some absolutely stunning paintings.  I'll have a blog post about the exhibition later this week and I also intend to do some posts about their art and in particular their paintings of rural life and urban realism - in the meantime here are the comments so far.
    The Glasgow Boys' achievement was to be the most significant non-metropolitan movement in Britain's visual arts in the past 200 years (not forgetting the now more fashionable Scottish colourists who came soon after). Their best pictures are pleasing and tender and use colour beautifully.
    Upcoming exhibitions
    Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

    Classes and Workshops
    Tips and techniques
    when that uncommon spirit of encouragement and generosity happen with a group of artists, sparks fly, courage grows, art expands!
    Art History & Art Museums
    Art Studios
    • Bridget Hunter (Bridget Hunter Paintings) is Painting in the attic! 
    • Do let me know if you post a picture of your studio or where you work
    Art Supplies
    Book Reviews
    Grant Wood - Self-Portrait 
    • It also includes another book which I KNOW will be included in a lot of people's seasonal wishlists.
    • In the meantime I've got to confess that my intended aim this month of reviewing art books about drawing and painting people got totally side-swiped this month by a rather disagreeable incident.  However, moving on, I shall be returning to this project as soon as possible.
    Copyright
    Creativity
    • Never Satisfied is a great post by Robert Genn about the four main types of creative dissatisfaction and their antidotes.
    Websites, webware and blogging 
    • Have you tried flexing the size of your images on Blogger?  See the impact it's had on Ohla Pryymak's work on her blog Olechko.  See Making a Mark post featuring the Blue Chairs
    • For those using Google Groups for marketing purposes, you should note the big red notice about how Google Groups will no longer be supporting Files! 
    Google Groups will no longer be supporting the Pages and Files features. Starting January 13, you won't be able to upload new content, but you will still be able to view and download existing content. See this announcement for more information and other options for storing your content.
    and finally........

    Last night the clocks went back. So we're now back to Greenwich Mean Time here in London. I think this is the bit of the year where were are out of synch on normal time differences for a short while.

    Meanwhile Art Spoofs: American Gothic is an amazing film on YouTube documenting all the various types of creativity sparked by Grant Wood's American Gothic painting.  Who knew?

    6 comments:

    1. Thanks for the nice mention, Katherine!

      I'm making a more conscious effort to ask myself, "Do I really think I received an e-mail, a hit, a response, a comment, or a 'like' in the last 10 mins and is it necessary for me to check?" before I log-in. Hopefully my connections can be more thru my art. :)

      ReplyDelete
    2. thanks for the mention :>)

      I like a black background as it makes the colours sing against it :>)

      ReplyDelete
    3. I think it might just be that I find black very depressing! That and the fact I find it difficult to read in reverse (ie white on black).

      I also spent ages trying to find the right sort of neutral background colour for my landscape blog which all the pics look good on.

      ReplyDelete
    4. Congratulations on maintaining a well deserved "Number Three" position Katherine!

      ReplyDelete
    5. Regarding making the pictures bigger - the feedback I've gotten so far from people is - yes, it's a good idea, well at least in my case.

      Congratulations on getting an IPad!! The image you posted here stopped me in my tracks - a finger drawing! I love it and wish to see more here to come. Also, I hope your future posts will be about the value of those drawings in the art market (more so - their prints, like Hockney's) and whether they are considered good USk material, etc.

      ReplyDelete
    6. Hi Katherine, Thank you for the mention! I always love reading your blog, especially the "who has made a mark" as it always introduces me to new people.
      On another note I agree with you that white on black is hard to read. When blogs are like that I tend to look and not read.
      PS Congrats on the ipad. Wow you have gone from baby Mac owner to the full package. Don't you just love your Macs?

      ReplyDelete

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