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

The big news for me this week is that my cyber buddy Louise Sackett achieved the impossible and got all our artwork safely and matted, framed, and fitted out with hardware ready for hanging on Saturday - so that the Fine Line Artists Exhibition at Mission Trails, San Diego, CA can open for business yesterday (Sunday) and continue until 3rd December!

Thanks for all the lovely messages - we wish we were there too!

[UPDATE:  You can now see pictures of the exhibition on Ester Roi's blog - see Fine Line Artists Exhibition for pictures of the hang]

For those of you who do live in the southern Californian area - if you ever been curious about the artwork of fellow bloggers  Nicole Caulfield (Nicole Caulfield Fine Art), Gayle Mason (Fur in the Paint), Vivien Blackburn (Paintings Prints and Stuff) then now's your chance to see it for real - and mine and Louise's too!

Grey, green and pink in Yuma
coloured pencils on Arches HP, 10" x 8" $500
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This drawing comes from my visit to San Diego and the deserts of Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico in the summer of 2006.  Or to be more precise during the historic heatwave of 2006!  I have vivid memories of this cactus next to our breakfast stop in Yuma (see "Breakfast in Yuma") before we headed off for an overnight stop in Tombstone before arriving in Albuquerque for the CPSA convention.  On our way back it was it was 115 degrees when we stopped again in Yuma!

This is Louise - for those of you who don't know her - she's just retired and just moved to New Mexico and is very keen on her painting!

You can see blog posts about some of their work by fellow artists here:

• Vivien's work can be seen in  Mission Trails, California
• Nopales by Nicole Caulfield
  
• This is one of Gayle Mason's pieces Osprey in Acrylic
  

The other major exhibition which happened for me last week was the Sunday Times Watercolour Exhibition at the Mall Galleries which I saw on Friday.  A review will follow - for those thinking of entering next year.

Art Blogs

Drawing and sketching

• Don Low in Singapaore is Chilling & Sketching, Sketching & Chilling on Urban Sketchers
• Laura (Laurelines) has been doing San Francisco sketches! 
• An exercise in posture and floor polish is about me drawing people in an exhibition

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• Derwent have got a blog at last!  It's called - very aptly - Lovepencils!
• Holly Bedrosian's work Kevin has been awarded the Katherine A. Lovell Memorial Award at the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club 114th Annual Exhibition. See Kevin at CLWAC Exhibition on her blog Holly Bedrosian Fine Art
• The Pastel Journal blog - Remembering a Talented, Young Pastelist: Akiko Hoshino
• Cindy Haase (Littleton Studio) has won a Juror's Award at the Estes Park "Lines into Shapes" Exhibit.

Painters and Painting

• For your eyes only, Sean Connery in a thong - in this article about his early career as a life model for painters. The painting was made in 1951 when th actor was working as a life model for Edinburgh art students.  I wonder who else is out there posing for us?
• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) is in France - and painting in watercolour.  See Bourges Watercolor

Art Business and Marketing

• Guess who had to redo her resume for an exhibition this week?! On Thursday I wrote about my latest "resources for artists" site - How to write an Artist's Résumé or CV - which is hosted on Squidoo.  As I expected it's proving to be very popular and has already got into the top 10,000 sites on Squidoo - which given there are now about 1.3 million sites on Squidoo is not bad going given it's only a few days old!  This site references all the best advice which can be found online for free and complements the ever popular How to write an Artist's Statement - Resources for Artists.
• I agree with Alyson B Stanfield (Art Biz Blog) who says Yes, You Still Need a Blog even if you are on Facebook
• Plus Alyson last week announced the end of the Art Marketing Action podcast but not before she downloaded What I’ve Learned about Producing Audio and Podcasts
• While over on Problogger, Gary Arndt of Everything-Everywhere.com is arguing that Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO (807 tweets to date)

The fact that people know who bloggers are is exactly the reason why blogs have a comparative advantage in social media.

• The Etsy Blog - The Storque has yet again produced a very timely marketing post which is well worth a read - Holiday Season Marketing: How to Engage Your Buyers

A couple of posts about licensing your art

• Kate Harper (Kate Harper's blog) licences her art and designs for greeting cards - and has developed an Art Licensing Directory on her blog.  This provides a list of artist's submission guidelines for companies that purchase and license art for gifts, greeting cards and houseware products.  Well worth taking a look for anybody interested in using their artwork in this way.
• Empty Easel has an Art Licensing Interview with Phyllis Dobbs

Art and the Economy / Art Collectors 

Between them, Sotheby’s and Christie’s sold close to half a billion dollars worth of paintings, drawings and sculptures last week.  Here are different takes on the auctions sales in New York last week

• The Guardian comments Investors return to modern masters Record price for a Modigliani nude confirms the move away from risky contemporary art  
• What's in a Name? At Art Auctions, Lots of Money by Soren Melikian (New York Times). Anxious buyers at major auctions in New York of Impressionist and Modern art this week paid hefty sums for gems and duds alike - and he provides an insightful commentary. 
• Less so in another article from the same paper - Modigliani Sells for $68.9 Million At Sotheby's, 46 works were sold for a total of $227.5 million.

Meanwhile

• Here's Forbes Magazine on the topic of collecting Old Master Drawings
• Art Info has an article on yet more alleged art frard Art Dealer Guy Wildenstein Investigated in France for Tax Fraud and Corruption

Art Competitions and Art Societies

Calls for Entries

• I do a post at the beginning of January each year about the deadlines for submission to various national art societies - and always feel that those who have deadlines in January get very short notice.  So here's a notice about two national art societies withj handing in dates in january:
• The submission dates for the 2011 Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) are Friday 14 and Saturday 15 January 2011, 10am-5pm. Select this link for information on regional handing-in points. The exhibition will run from Tuesday 1st of March to Saturday 12th of March.
• the submission dates for 2011 Annual Exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours (RI) are Friday 28 and Saturday 29 January 2011, 10am-5pm.  Select this link for information on regional handing-in points.  This is the link to the RI website - how to exhibit page. Exhibition dates are Wednesday 30 March to Sunday 10 April 2011

The Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours define a watercolour painting as:
A painting made using water soluble media, on a paper based support.

Art Society / Art Competition Exhibitions

• Following on from a series of artists’ residencies at Seahouse in Northumberland in October 2010, FiFieFoFum Gallery will be staging an exhibition of the resulting work plus other works from 17 artists who are members of the Society of Wildlife Artists.  The exhibition runs to the end of December.  Click the link to see a group of grinning artists all togged up for painting the Northumberland coast, birds and wildlife in Autumn.
• The ING Discerning Eye exhibition opens this week at the Mall Galleries
• The RI are having a pre-Christmas exhibition in Bath at the Gallery LeFort Fine Art in Bath's "Cork street"

Art Fairs

• This is the Affordable Art Fair, Sydney is on in Sydney, Australia - 11th-14th November

Art Galleries and Museums / Art Exhibitions

• Laura Cumming's review of the Glasgow boys at the RA for The Observer was published today - see Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900 – review and I'm beginning to learn that this is not quite the exhibition I'd expected

this cut-down version of Kelvingrove's enormous exhibition, which broke attendance records earlier this year, is short on both the best and the most original works by the 20 or so painters collectively known as the Glasgow Boys

• The Serpentine Gallery has Anish Kapoor - Turning the World Upside Down in Kensington Gardens until 13 March 2011.  This major exhibition of large scale outdoor sculptures has its very own website Kapoor in Kensington.  You can upload your own photograph of the work.
• is the title of a recently opened exhibition at 
• The National Gallery of Art in Washington has two concurrent exhibitions about British art and artists
• The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875 which runs until January 30, 2011 explores . This is a slideshow which permits the exploration of the themes of landscape, portraiture, literary and historical narratives, and modern-life subjects through some 30 photographs and paintings from the exhibition.
• Picturing the Victorians: British Photographs and Reproductive Prints from the Department of Image Collections runs November 1, 2010–January 28, 2011
• This is a site about the Pittenweem Arts Festival held in August each year which I'd heard about but knew very little.  Obviously the Scots take their arts festivals very seriously!

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

Art Television

 I'm really enjoying the surfeit of television about art which we're having this autumn - and there's yet more to come.  I really need the iPlayer to get a "upcoming listings" section so I can see what is coming up and how long it will be available on iPlayer if at all!  (I'm also really enjoying my 27" iMac screen - I'm more and more of a Mac convert as every day passes!)

• I really enjoyed Laura Cumming's BBC4 programme in the week about Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits. I highly recommend it, if you've not watched it so far and can access it via iPlayer or "other means" you know who you are! ;) .  Here you can see her trip to the Vasari corridor in Florence. I enjoyed watching Tai Shan Schierenberg painting his own self-portrait - and smiled when he declared he'd got all the proportions wrong!  So nice to see we all make the same mistakes.
• Ditto - the first two episodes of the BBC4 series about the Pre-Raphelites has been a huge improvement over the rather silly 'drama-documentary' series the BBC had previously televised.

Incidentally I found this Art Newspaper article about Arts programming at the BBC: behind the scenes.  I'm wondering how the ceiling on licence fee increases and imperatives to make changes will impact on art on television.  It did occur to me that it was entirely possible that this was a cheaper form of programming and hence we might see more of it.  We can but live in hope.

Workshops

• See Gyotaku workshop registration if you'd like Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life) to teach you all about the art of gyotaku printing 
• Belinda Lindhardt (Belinda Lindhardt) now has dates and venues booked for August 2011 Coloured Pencil Workshops at the Gosford Gallery in New South Wales,  Australia 

Tips and techniques

• I've collected lots and lots of tips for How to draw and paint trees from three artists Stapleton Kearns, Martin Stankewitz (How to draw a tree) and Richard McKinley (Pastel Pointers).  This post has been file on the Improve Your Landscapes page on The Art of the Landscape

Art Galleries & Museums / History

A very weird situation has developed in the UK - where the Treasury is currently withholding museum donations ie money donated to the museums and which belongs to them.  I'm going to take a closer look at this as it seems very odd.

Book reviews

• On Monday I highlighted Makingamark's Top Ten Art Books in October.  It strikes me we're entering the period where gift purchases for Christmas are starting and hence those books which have done well earlier in the year start coming back into the frame or those which have done well consistently throughout the year fight off all comers.  It takes a really good new book to rise above those which have already earned their fans - and one such might just be James Gurney's new book if the popularity of the last one is anything to go by.
• On Making A Mark Reviews, I've posed the question Which is the most helpful art business book?.  This links to the poll which is running on one of my information sites - do please vote so that others have a sense of the relative popularity of the different books which have proved popular to date.
• Parka (Parka Blogs) has a Book Review: Drawing Shortcuts: Developing Quick Drawing Skills Using Today's Technology although he comments it's aimed at architecture or landscaping students.
• I wonder which art books you've got on your wish lists for Christmas?

Colour

Check out James Gurney's new book on colour Colour and Light - a YouTube Preview.

• Meanwhile James continues to post about colour - and the idea of isolating a part of the color wheel to explore the possibilities of limited color schemes- see Color Harmony Dials
• and Charley Parker (Lines and Color) writes about Color Vision & Art

Copyright

• The Copyhype Blog - which focuses on the copyright wars - has an article about the Copyright Principles Project: Increasing the US Copyright Office’s Role

According to the press release, the Project “attempts to ignite an informed debate about how to best balance the interests of copyright owners and users” by examining “several ways to improve and update the law in an era of rapid technological change.”

Opinion Poll

• The Poll Results for the October Making A Mark Poll - see What do you do when not being an artist? (POLL RESULTS) - reveal that the readers of this blog have a bias towards being professionals, the retired and homemakers and parents.  Maybe a combination of all three?
• POLL: What price is affordable art? The November Making A Mark Poll is about affordable art PLUS what price is perceived to make art affordable (in $ and £) and the reasons why art is determined to be affordable.  Lots of votes but not a lot of comments as yet.  Do please feel free to say something about what makes art affordable.  Is it just the price?

Websites, webware and blogging

• I honestly don't get Technorati.  Why would they go to the trouble of publishing the results of a "State of the Blogosphere" survey when it is quite obviously based on a very biased sample of survey responses?  It's just too easy to pick holes..... See State of the Blogosphere - needs a lesson in stat

and finally........

For the Mac fans we have

• Finger Painting on the Apple iPad from the live model David Kassan - very impressive and really shows what you can do with Brushes

and the

• The New Mac iBox - the last one is the smallest yet - the inventor must be a genius!