30 January 2011: Who's made a mark this week?

A Daily Self Reflection by Gillian Holding

Art Blogs

There's rather more of my posts in this "who's made a mark this week" and that's because of the hiatus caused by my domestic emergencies and the fact that we've missed two Sunday posts. So this one is making up for it........

I'll start with the fact that it still gives me great pleasure to reiterate the fact that Making A Mark achieves #2 in Top Ten Blogs of 2010!

NEW art blogs

• A Postcard from my Walk is a new group blog.  I'm very happy to say that during my short respite from blogging I helped give birth to a new group blog.  This one is a spin off from Sketchercise which I founded in 2009 and this is my post on this blog Introducing 'A Postcard from my Walk'. 
• A Postcard from my Walk aims to provide "the real thing" and not just the digital version to those of us who have been involved in a group which focuses on sketching and exercising.  
• Postcards will be posted in the last week of every month - and will appear on the blog when received by the person they were posted to.
• I've got a major challenge which is that I rarely sketch as small as 7" x 5" and I think I'm going to get group dispensation to deliver bigger postcards!  My very first effort certainly left me with a new found respect for those who produce small works of art!  Next week there will be a post about sketching small on Travels with a Sketchbook

• By way of contrast, I've been fascinated by Gillian Holding's blog #adailyselfreflection - partly because it involves the production of an artwork daily  - a daily digital self-portrait - but also because it involves the use of digital software which is beginning to interest me as I load my iPad with art apps!  This is a link to her gallery of artwork produced this month.  This is her other blog Life and Art

The dishwasher - by Gillian Holding

#adailyselfreflection began when I realised there was a great forum in cyberspace for showing digitally generated work, and I loved the idea that artwork with no tangible existence could be viewed in the exact form in which it had been created.

• New artinfo blogger Karen Archey comments on the naurte of art blogging in Addicted to Hits: On Art Blogging.  However I think she forgets that not everybody who has an art blog does it for commercial reasons and not all content on art blogs is always driven by the need to make a buck or get a speaking engagement.  

About the Artist

This is a new section devoted to posts about the artist in conceptual or practical terms.

• Joanne Mattera (Joanne Mattera Art Blog) kicks us off with Marketing Mondays: How Do You Define "Emerging Artist" And Other Career Levels?  It seems 'emerging' now means 'beginning' but could also be code relevant to status in the marketplace.  Some great comments discussing the notions also of 'mid-career' and' late-career' and the commodification of artists.

Emerging is a coded term that is supposed to alert collectors and the public that the artist is all set to earn some serious cash. 

• I also liked Robert Genn's (The Painter's Keys)  The Feminine Mystique - particularly the list of characteristics and attributes at the end which he observes in highly optimistic, ambitious women who value education and are willing to put in time and treasure (when they have it) to achieve their goals.

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• It was great to see a Master Pastellist and an ex-tutor of mine - Sally Strand - being featured on Lines and Colors.  Here's Charley Parker's blog post about Sally Strand.  I've always loved the way she deals with light - and having done one of her workshops I know how she does it!  This is a link to my review of her workshop on her website - Read The Best Ever Workshop - Pastel Painting With Sally Strand

Awake by Sally Strand
Pastel on paper 13" x 17"

 Drawing and Sketching

• One of the people I have followed regularly since I started blogging five years ago is Laura Frankstone (Laurelines).  Recently Kate/Cathy Johnson published her interview with Laura which forms part of her new book - Interview #5--meet Laura Frankstone of Laurelines!  It's an interesting reflection on one artist's journey in terms of their development as an artist, about keeping a sketchbook and journal and how that has carried over into blogging.  There are interviews with 28 artists in the book and this is just one of them.  You can follow the rest of what Cathy has to share on her blog Artists Journal Workshop
• Here's my sketches from my visit to the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery this month
• View from Portrait Restaurant, National Portrait Gallery
• Canaletto & His Rivals at the National Gallery
• The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour have a page on their website - RSW Member Sketchbook which features the sketchbooks of different members.  It's a nice idea and one which it would be nice to see on other art society websites 
• Shirley Levine (Paper and Threads) has Another Project which she needs help with.  I'm loving the paintings she's done so far.

Nature Drawing and Botanical

• Irene Brady writes the type of blog post which I really enjoy reading but which, sadly, I don't see enough on the Internet.  It's the journal of a real traveller going places I've never been before and recording lots of details about the place.  Irene Brady (Nature Drawing with Irene Brady) has been writing about her nature journalling trips to Costa Rica and the Amazon.  I like the mix of photos of flroa and faunaand extracts from her nature journals.
• To Costa Rica, Then The Amazon 12-15&16-2010
• To Costa Rica, -- Dec. 17&18, 2010
• Leaving Costa Rica ~ Dec. 19, 2010
• Darkest Peru at Last ~ Dec. 20-21, 2010
• How to Draw a Tree is a blog by Martin Stankewitz - particularly useful for those who want to get to grips with drawing trees. 

Painting landscapes

Paintings of Bali by Julian Merrow Smith

• I'm loving Julian Merrow Smith's (Postcard from Provence ) paintings of Bali.  It takes me back to my two visits to the island.  See my post Painting tropical landscapes in Bali and Julian and Ruth's blogs for more pictures. Plus it's great seeing lush green in the middle of winter!
• Bill Guffey paints a winter landscape plein air (video) is 2 hours of painting a winter landscape in the snow educed to eight minutes.  Do let me know if you have a video of you painting landscapes which might be suitable for The Art of the Landscape.
• Everybody go say "Hi" to Loriann (loriann signori's painting-a-day) who is recovering from surgery and doing memory landscapes and quoting Carlson! 

January 12th - Snow by Loriann Signori

9x6 pastel and watercolor on Uart

Painting - Challenges

• The Daily Paintworks people have issued a Daily Paintworks Challenge.  Carol Marine (Carol Marine's Painting a Day ) explains it in this blog post "Suspicious Spoon" & Challenge!  I think it might need a bit more explanation on the website too. 

Art Business and Art Marketing

• Abby Ryan (Ryan Studio) has made it onto Oprah - the Februaruy 2011 edition of the magazine - in the "Live Your Best Life - Women Who Make Beautiful Things" section - and the app.  See O, The Oprah Magazine 
• Etsy's Storque blog has been focusing on the "shop makeover".  Here are links to the various blog posts - good for those who'd like to professionalise their approach to ecommerce - wherever that may be. 
• Shop Makeover: Creating a Brand Identity for Your Shop
• Shop Makeover: Before and After With Photoshop
• Shop Makeover: Titles, Descriptions and Tags 
• Shop Makeover: Writing a Business Plan
• The latter comes from the Wonder Thinking blog and focuses on the The Wonder Thinking Business Plan-o-Rama workbook (download) on  Topics are covered in blog posts - they're very basic but a useful start for those who've never tried creating a business plan before.
  

  The Wonder Thinking Business Plan-o-Rama will include topics:
  1. Business Vision, Mission
  2. Products/Services
  3. Market Analysis, Competition
  4. Marketing Plan
  5. Future Plans

• Linda Blondheim (Linda Blondheim Art Journal) discusses the benefits of having a Business Mentor and reflects on cross-marketing in Talking it Over

Art Economy and Art Collectors

• Clicking on a Masterpiece The Wall Street Journal discusses whether collectors are now ready to buy million-dollar artworks online.

Art Competitions and Art Society exhibitions

• Here's my summary of How to enter the Pastel Society's 112th Annual Exhibition - plus, for those who've not seen them before, links to my posts about and photos of The Pastel Society Annual Exhibitions in previous years
• There's not one but Two opportunities to be Wildlife Artist of the Year 2011!  But you need to get your entry for one of them in by tomorrow! 
• The Margaret Flockton Award commemorates the contribution Margaret Flockton made to Australian scientific botanical illustration.   Entries for the 2011 Award close on 4th February.  You can see prizewinners and highly commended if you click the link.  You can also get a much better look of them on Flickr in the RPBG's Margaret Flockton Set.
• This is my post about the Annual Exhibitions of Scottish Art Societies.  I wonder which of you got have got your work accepted?  
• If you wanted to get your work into the annual open exhibition of the Royal Watercolour Society you're too late!  However here's some information to digest before you get a chance again next year - Watercolourists: Call For Entries 2011

Art Exhibitions 

•  Major Art Exhibitions in London in 2011 has proved to be a very popular post.  
• It was quite amazing after I'd finished listing everything out to realise my stunning good fortune to have all this art on my doorstep!  
• If you know somebody who is visiting London who likes art you can email this post to them - use the link at the bottom of the post
• This will be a major exhibition in London next year to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee - The Queen: Art and Image.  In the meantime it's touring the UK and will be visiting Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff. 
• Anish Kapoor: Turning the World Upside Down in Kensington Gardens a Royal Parks video - which has Anish Kapoor explaining his sculptures and how they fit into the park and also how they are animated by the skyscape.
• Reviews of the  Norman Rockwell's America at the Dulwich Picture Gallery  include: 
• Norman Rockwell's America – review - Norman Rockwell idealised America and America idolised him in return – but this stunning survey reveals a deep knowledge of art at the heart of his work, writes Laura Cumming
• while Peter Preston reflects on what has changed since the cheerful escapism of Rockwell's day in a comment piece in the Observer today The norms of Norman Rockwell

Art Galleries and Museums

There are two new Directors of Art Museums in London.  Artinfo covered both appointments in articles:

• London's Wallace Collection, Known for Old Masters and a Notorious Hirst Show, Appoints a New Director -  Christoph Vogtherr is apparently a traditional curator.  One of his areas of specialism is Watteau - and guess whose drawings will be the feature exhibition at the Wallce this year!
• The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London has been plagued by financial problems and it would appear lost confidence in its former Director and Chair, both of whom resigned last summer. It would appear that the new Director has some considerable, practical and relevant experience - always a good reason for making an appointment -see Art Dealer Gregor Muir Named Director of London's Troubled ICA.  Jonathan Jones (The Guardian - Jonathan Jones on Art) is of the view that the new Director can restore the ICA to its former glory - see What Gregor Muir can do for the ICA.  He predicts a return to exhibitions involving big names and global art which is hot!  (That's another way of saying 'increasing the visitors and the income')

Art History

• the BBC has remastered Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" for HD and will begin broadcasting on 9th February .  The landmark series was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and traces the development of western art and philosophy.  You can get a taster of the first episode on YouTube
• Stapleton Kearns (Stapleton Kearns) has started a new blog project - 100 paintings artists should know (in the opinion of Stapleton Kearns!).  Here are the posts so far.  I must confess I haven't quite got the hang of how his sequence of titles are working although I've listed in the order posted.  he's started with the Italian Renaissance and is already up to painting #14.
• 100 paintings that painters should know. 1-3
•  Paintings artists should know 2
• 100 Paintings artists should know
• 100 paintings an artist should know episode 4
• For those who love John Constable, you can see a documentary programme - broken up into sections about - by Andrew Graham Dixon on the website of the latter - see John Constable documentary - view online
• I've been studying portraiture of late and earlier this week posted How to identify favourite portrait painters.  Who are your favourite portrait painters of all time?  

Art Supplies

• I've been focusing on my end of year polls relating to pastels and pencils this month.  Here are the posts about soft and hard pastels 
• Which is your favourite make of hard pastels? (2010 Poll Results)
• The NEW 2011 Pastels Opinion Polls
• I added a section about PanPastels into my information site Pastels - Resources for Artists this week and discovered that this brand of pastels also has a blog! Enter Paint Draw Blend Exploring the World of PanPastel Colors for Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media Art.
• Stapleton Kearns on the topic of Cleaning brushes

Art Education 

 
Workshop and Class

• Deborah Secor (Deborah Secor: Today's Art Class) has an excellent post about elements of composition (which I read thanks to Casey Klahn) which provides a neat synopsis of design elements and also highlights - for easch design element - blogs where people demonstrate a good use of that particular aspect of design. 
• She continues her online sharing in her art class by also covering the importance of "value"  
• Class 3— Jan. 27 – The Value of Value
• this is The Value of Value class results in Deborah Secor: Today's Art Class
• this is her current class schedule  

Art Apps

• Mitchell Albala has got a new app related to his book about landscape painting.
  Landscape Painting — There’s an App for That!  However I found it left me down a dead end when I got into one of the sections and I couldn't get out.

Book Reviews

Two book reviews by Martin Stankewitz (How to draw a tree) - about books which tell you how to draw trees

• Draw trees by Norman Battershill – cheap and good
• How to draw a tree – a book by Gregory Brown

Colour

• James Gurney's (Gurney Journey) got a talent for blog post titles - this one grabbed my attention Van Gogh’s Color Schemes Served as Pie Charts.  The topic is also great for showing you the balance of colours in a painting. 
• I loved the simplicity of just focusing on one colour - What’s your favourite Red? is by Gillian Holding (Life and Art) 

Copyright 

• The Google Public Policy Blog recently addressed issues to do with Making Copyright Work Better Online.  I'll comment on this in a future post but here's the guts of the changes being made.  The four key items which Google has undertaken to do to reduce piracy and copyright infringement are as follows:
• act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours.
  
• prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete.
• improve the AdSense anti-piracy review
• experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. 
• In Google search and search engine spam, (on The Official Google Blog) Matt Cutts has announced that new developments are getting even better at detecting spammy content.  Those of us who have problems with content being stolen from blogs should feel a bit happier that things are moving in the right direction.

Opinion Poll

• The results of the January Making A Mark Poll were published yesterday in Are you a left handed artist? (Poll Results).  I'm not sure whether the very nigh number of people voting was because of lots of new visitors to this blog in January, the accessibility of the questions and answers or what.  However 31% of 262 people said they were left handed artists.  
• There's a slightly different version of the poll on  new "resources for artists" site - Are Left Handed People more likely to be Artists?  
• After the poll and the research, I've come to the conclusion that rather a lot of artists are said to be left-handed with very little evidence to support this.

Websites, webware and blogging

• This is a techie post which a lot of people seem to have found very helpful - Techie: 9 Reasons Why the Title is Important
• James Gurney has written an interesting and thoughtful piece about "Hyperlink Placement" in relation to were you put your links in a blog post - in-text, at the end or both. 
• Do you create a blog of the best blog posts from the last year?  Gayle Mason does - read The Second Volume of Fur in the Paint and find out why and the benefits of doing so.
• Here's the list of apps in the Best Artistic App category for the 2010 'Best App Ever Awards'.

• 

  Cosmo Catnapping #11 (on 11.01.11)
  drawn using Sketchbook Pro and a mouse!

  The ones I've previously downloaded - all available via iTunes - are:
• Sketchbook Pro - which won the iPad division    (I have downloaded onto both iPad and iMac and am impressed!  I now need a tablet!).  This is my post about it - and my very first sketch with it - done using a mouse!  Sketchbook Pro - bargain price in new Mac Apps store
• ArtRage for iPad came third.
• Brushes got an Honourable Mention in the iPhone category.

and finally......

Do you ever have one of those phases where everything goes wrong - one after the other?

After being Out to Lunch, no sooner had I researched, located and had a new microwave and cooker delivered for those that broke down within half an hour of one another (!!!) - but my car failed to start. It's now gone to the garage to be tested with the old microwave sat in the back! I just dread the times when the same thing happens as I'm getting ready for an exhibition.........  

What's been your worst ever experience in terms of sequential mini-disasters?