20th February 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

I was rather preoccupied last week with an exhibition and an AGM which is why I haven't as yet got to see what I hope will be one of the major exhibitions of the year - the Watercolour Exhibition at Tate Britain.  Not being able to wait, I've already bought my exhibition catalogue so I know what all the works are and who's in and who's not.

Rachel Pedder-Smith
Bean Painting: Specimens from the Leguminosae family 2004
Kew © Rachel Pedder-Smith

One of the images which jumped out at me and I'm really looking forward to seeing is Rachel Pedder Smith's fascinating painting of beans.  Who says botanical art is boring!  Do click the link in her name to see more of her work.

Those coming up to London in April to visit the Annual Exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists would do well to pay a visit to Watercolour as it has a strong botanical art section with works by the greats of botanical art (Ehret, Bauer, Sydney Parkinson, Margaret Mee)

Sheila Hancock also started a series on BBC1 tonight - all about watercolour.  This is the iPlayer link to an hour's worth of Sheila Hancock Brushes Up: The Art of Watercolours.  You can also see Sheila looking at Turner's Blue Rigi and his travelling paintbox in a video on the page about the exhibition.

Art Blogs


Botanical Art

• I've had a bit of a focus on Georg Ehret of late.  He's the German botanical artist who did a lot of work at Kew Gardens in the golden age of botanical art.  His main claim to fame is that he worked with Linnaeus and helped to develop the Linnaean style of botanical illustration.
• Georg Ehret's sketchbooks - botanical illustration highlights the botanical sketchbooks dating back to the eighteenth century which can be seen in the the Images of Nature exhibition at the Natural History Museum.
• plus I published a new information site which I've been working on for a little while - see Georg Dionysius Ehret - Resources for Botanical Art Lovers
• Thank you to everbody who suggested a title in response to In need of a title - again! Many thanks to Paula (Mindful Drawing) who came up the title which appealed most to me - Rosette.

Drawing and sketching

• "A Postcard from my Walk" project:
• A Postcard from Casa Colina is the very first postcard I've received for our  - Desiree Habicht in southern California.  There are other great postcards on the blog - we're averaging one every other day!
• You can see the Postcard from my Walk which I posted to Desiree in California at the end of January on A Postcard from My Walk blog.  It’s not what people were expecting!
• I like sketching people working and their places of work - this is Setting up Pure Gold at the Mall Galleries. I was partway through when they started to erect a sign just to the left of where I was sitting........
• Sketching Constable in the V&A is my sketch of one of Constable’s paintings – plus a link to images of one of Constable’s sketchbooks and his plein air oil sketches. 

My sketch of Constable's "Boatbuilding near Flatford Mill"
11" x 16", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

 Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• CPSA Explore This! and juror's statement - now online is about the Annual Online Exhibition of the Colored Pencil Society of America which seeks to explore the scope of coloured pencil.  I'd like to see more about what people found out in the process of their exploration.  Do tell me if you come across any good blog posts about this which share process and conclusions.
• Richard McKinley (The Pastel Pointers Blog) has a couple of good posts about 
• pastel pencils Making a Point in Pastel
• Pastel Pointers | The Effects of Alcohol - in relation to the impact of mixing alcohol on pastel on different surfaces 
• Good news from Loriann Signori - for those who had been concerned - the sky, bacteria and pastels

Landscapes

• Nice to know who's reading your posts! I did a post about Paintmap on The Art of the Landscape 
• and Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) got interested and has also done a post about Paintmap.  However he's done a much more in-depth review than me! :)

Painters and Painting

• Susan Abbott (A Painter's Year) has been teaching a workshop and painting the Bahamas! 
• Less is more - people looking at art like solving puzzles according to Robert Genn - see The peekaboo principle
• I loved the story behind this post by Belinda del Pesco (it involves a cat!) - Watercolor: Flower Chewer (& close ups of Degas' drawings)
• Deborah Elmquist (Deborah Elmquist, Classical Realist, Fine Art) has been writing about "how to begin a painting" and the different approaches employed by Richard Schmid
• How to begin a painting
• Beginnings-A First Look
• Beginnings-No Toner and Beginnings-No Toner Results highlights how this might be more appropriate for high key paintings
• Beginnings-Richard Schmid includes a summary of "The Line and Mass Block in"
• Beginnings-More Richard Schmid covers the "Transparent (oil) Monochrome Block-In" and "The Transparent Monochrome As a Finished Painting"
• Beginnings-More of Richard Schmid covers more advanced methods - the "full colour block in" and "the selective start"

Printmaking

Two posts about printmaking techniques

• First Sherrie York (Brush and Baren) writes about her technique of Reduction printing: It's about what remains
• Then Shana James (Art - Ideas and Imagination) writes about non-toxic printmaking in Non Toxic Etching – Dragging myself into the 21st Century

Street Art

• Banksy doesn't have a blog so I have to keep up with him via articles in the papers 
• see Banksy goes to Hollywood? Works mark runup to Oscars.  it would appear he's in Hollywood for the Oscars.  Various "banksy" type images have started to appear and are being uploaded to Banksy's own official website.  To my mind, it looks as if some might have extra tweeks by fans.  Lascivious Mickey has since bitten the dust!
• Plus there's also Banksy's take on The Simpsons!  Now that should set the fur flying!
  

Art Business and Marketing

• This post - POLL: Which "Print on Demand" site do you like the best? (Update #1) - is the result of the poll on my information site 
• I love posts by Joanne Mattera (Joanne Mattera Art Blog)- she thinks the same way I do when it comes to business.  Here's a salutary tale from her - A Contract I Didn't Sign which points up the importance of taking a long hard look at the small print and the need to ask questions 
• Art and Greetings Cards has proved to be a very popular post.  
• Not surprising once you realise that it's a business worth $1.5 billion each year.   How many of us have thought we could produce better cards than the ones we see in the shops?
• Alyson Stanfield suggested on Friday that we should create a Greeting Card Service for Your Subscribers
• Empty Easel had two very useful articles last week 
• How to Protect Images of Your Artwork From Being Stolen Online by Dan
• Plus a really useful and well-illustrated article last week all about How to Safely and Securely Package Your Artwork for Shipping.  The article was by Susan Holland  
• Alyson Stanfield (ArtBiz Blog) had 16 Ideas for Repurposing Your Artist Statement

Art Competitions, Art Societies and Juried Exhibitions

• The exhibition checklist was the post I wrote on Tuesday after I'd done my latest submission to a juried open exhibition on Monday. Thanks for all the very positive comments.  I'm going to be producing some pdf files for download in the feature
• "Pure Gold": an exhibition celebrating 50 years of the FBA opened at the Mall Galleries - this is my review post

Sterling Fellows by Jeanette Jobson

charcoal and white pastel

19" x 25"

• Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life) has been having a very justifiable rant about criteria used for judging work entered for a juried exhibition - the art of judgement and judgement of art

Art Galleries/Museums & Art Exhibitions

• Watercolour opened at Tate Britain this week.  
• I've already got the catalogue and it demonstrates a huge diversity of work - but I'm getting a bit apprehensive about how it's hung based on Jackie Wellschlager's review in the Financial Times.  
• I must confess I could not understand their choice of works by Turner or their exclusion of some very fine contemporary painters in watercolour.  The inclusion of an acrylic in a show about watercolour is to my mind an abomination!
• This is the Tate Blog post about the exhibition - do read the comments - they make fascinating reading!  One cannot help being left with the impression that Tate Britain might possibly do better leaving contemporary art to Tate Modern!
• The Frick in New York has a new exhibition about Rembrandt.
• “Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and Lugt Collections” is on view through May 15 at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, (212) 288-0700, frick.org.
• The New York Times has a slideshow of images from the Frick exhibition.  I love the pen and wash sketch of Saskia in her bed and we wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to see “Self-Portrait – Frowning” in a contemporary exhibition of portraiture.  This is the NYT's review of the exhibition Pride of Place, Better than Ever
• Picasso - Guitars 1912-1914 has opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.  It runs until June 6th 2011.  The NY Yimes also has a slideshow of images from Picasso  exhibition

Art Supplies
Liz Dulley has done a Review: Inktense Blocks on Derwent’s LovePencils blog.  These are a new product and look a bit like hard pastels but are water-soluble.  Liz explains how this format makes them very flexible.

Colour

• A fair few people have been writing about a recent discovery about why the yellow in Van Gogh's paintings is turning brown.  I've always known that the work of any artist who had used Chrome Yellow was very unlikely to have preserved the true colour.  Indeed it has a reputation for turning black never mind brown!  I couldn't quite work out what all the fuss was about from initial reports.  However here's a couple of the articles which clearly explain the problem as it relates to Van Gogh - apparently the problem is the chemical reaction caused by adding white paint:
• The Guardian - Van Gogh doomed his sunflowers by adding white pigments to yellow paint
• Lines and Colors: Van Gogh's Yellows turning brown
• and Analytical Chemistry is the place where you can read the findings - Degradation Process of Lead Chromate in Paintings by Vincent van Gogh Studied by Means of Synchrotron X-ray Spectromicroscopy and Related Methods. 1. Artificially Aged Model Samples

•  Michael Chesley Johnson (Plein Air Painter's Blog) has written about Value and Temperature

The eye sees warm colors as brighter than they are and cool colors, darker than they are.  

Copyright

• Jeff Koons Turns the Table on Copyright Law By Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman highlights problems with copyright law and why Jeff Koons gets sued and can sue for breaches of copyright

Opinion Poll

• POLL: Which "Print on Demand" site do you like the best? (Update #1) - has as the title suggests been updated.  There's a very clear preference for one site - born out by the traffic it generates.

Websites, webware and blogging

• This post - Disable Copying Of Images In Your Blog?   on Build a Better Blog - tells you how you can disable copying of your images on a Blogger blog. [ UPDATE:  However (thanks to Nithya) I now know that it renders any blog with lots of links a totally frustrating experience!  I suggest this is only used where you only want people to look and never ever to click eg to that 'for sale' destination! ]

What this technique does is disable right click and "copy" or "save as" when a viewer puts the cursor on your image. When the viewer right clicks, a message pops up instead - I crafted mine to read "No Copying Please!"

• Has the internet lost the plot? Some market commentators are beginning to be concerned that there's a second dot.com bubble in the offing. It arises from notions that Twitter is said to be worth $10 billion (despite the fact it's yet to turn a profit which makes such a valuation wholly notional in my book) and Facebook is worth more than Ford! 
• Feedburner has highlighted that their Recent change to the email service resulting in more deliveries ending up in spam or bulk folders

and finally........

Prince William and Kate Middleton has upped their street cred!  They now both appear as punks in a graffiti mural on an official street art wall in Southwark.

Although I can't help feeling that being an official wall makes it a little less edgy!