27th February 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

A review of Travels with a Sketchbook in The Times newspaper

Well this has been quite a week!

Two of my works accepted
into SBA 2011

On Tuesday I heard that I'd had three works accepted into the Annual Exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists - see Artwork accepted into "The World of Plants".

Then on Thursday I was asked whether I could contribute some images to an article about Travels with a Sketchbook in The Times newspaper (as in the newspaper from which every other newspaper called The Times took its name!).

Thanks to everybody who commented on The Times would like to feature my blog!  I'd just like you all to know that sometimes it is worthwhile opening that email that looks like it could possibly be spam!

See above for the coverage.  Traffic shot up six fold on Friday and was nearly five times higher than usual yesterday.  As it was predominantly new readers hopefully some will come back to see some more.  :)

P.S.  Watch out for my article on Ten reasons to sketch with coloured pencils on Derwent's LovePencils blog on Tuesday 1st March 2011.

Art Blogs

Ontario Plein Air Art Society's blog took a stab at getting a debate going this week Of Art and “Art”– A discussion of what is and isn’t- but it hasn't got any takers to date.  It's a good post - why not take a look.

Drawing and sketching

• From Saturday 12 March - 18 April, the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney will host a free afternoon Sketchabout. You can meet other sketch artists and chat to our Volunteer Guides about the sights in the Garden.  See Garden Sketchabout for more details

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• Ranjini Venkatachari (Ranjini Vi's Colored Pencil Diary) has been experimenting and has adapted a printmaking technique to drawing with coloured pencils - see Relief paintings with Linoleum
• Casey Klahn (The Colorist) has a great post and an ace piece of art on Write This Down And Put It In Italics - plus some interesting comments
  

Aperture Bright by Casey Klahn
11" x 14", Charcoal & Pastel

Landscape

Three posts on The Art of the Landscape this week

• the first is an iconic Japanese landscape Winter Landscape: Kinryusan Temple at Asakusa by Ando Hiroshige
• next up is The Great British Landscape - Watercolour competition being run by the Sunday Telegraph.
• today's post is another in the places to paint series Places to paint: Riva degli Schiavoni 

Elsewhere this is what I found this week

• Philip Koch (Philip Koch Paintings) wrote today about Cutting Edge Art v.s. Stodgy Landscapes.  Phillip writes interesting posts which are worth reading - and the art's pretty good too!
  
• three posts by Robin Purcell (Robin Purcell, watercolors in the plein air tradition) with wonderful watercolour paintings of Californian landscapes in Robin's take on American Impressionism.  You can view slideshows of his paintings on Picasa - well worth taking a look
• "Sacred Grove" Accepted into 144th AWS Exhibit, earning my AWS Signature Membership
• California Art Club's 100th Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition April 3rd - 24th
• Two new Mount Diablo Paintings
• a useful post About Painting Trees by reference to bonsai shapes and paintings by past masters
  

Painters and Painting

• Martin Gayford writes for Bloomberg about the role of Doug Dawson as regular model for Lucian Freud in Nude With Dog: Freud Model Still Posing, 2 1/2 Years Later.  Apparently Freud - who is now 88 - has not yet put a dent in his reputation for being a slow painter.
• Stapleton Kearns (Stapleton Kearns) highlights "Licking" and divisionist color.  It's the equivalent of what I call optical hatching when sketching.

Learn to put a note down and pull your brush away. The more times your brush hits a note, the weaker it gets. You cannot worry the paint on your canvas into a picture. 

• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) has reviewed 100 faces (Karin Jurick)

Wildlife Art

• A Red Wolf Demo from start to finish by Armand Cabrera (Art and Influence)

Art Business and Marketing

• This is the list of FREE Art Marketing Action Podcasts from Alyson B. Stanfield and ArtBizCoach.com - on iTunes

Art and the Economy / Art Collectors

• The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article about the nature of what went on between Leo Castelli and the artists he represented and the collectors - in Leo Castelli's Cache Of Art-History Gold.  Castelli's family donated the records of his gallery, which he founded in 1957 and ran until his death in 1999, to the Washington-based Archives of American Art in 2007 - and they are now organised!

Art Competitions and Art Societies

• The Pastel Journal blog highlights the Winners of the 12th Annual Pastel 100 Competition

Future Exhibitions

• The Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists opens at the Mall Galleries this week - I'm hoping I get to walk again this week and can visit this.  Lo and behold - we at last have an art society which has woken up to the fact it's possible to have a website which actually shows us the art being exhibited before the exhibition even opens!  I predict this will result in increased sales.

Sample of works on display on the website of the Royal Society of British Artists

• RHS London Orchid & Botanical Art Show 19th & 20th March at the RHS Horticultural Halls, Greycoat Street in Victoria.  This is where they award RHS Gold medals to botanical art!  Almost always guaranteed to include work by overseas artists as well as UK botanical artists.  There's a rigorous process to get this far and all the work is always good.

Art Exhibitions and art fairs

• Paul Gauguin -  the major exhibition “Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” has moved from Tate Modern to Washington and opens at the National Gallery of Art today.   This is the New York Times review The Self-Invented Artist

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques 

workshops

• The International University of Andalucia in southern Spain is hosting an urban sketching workshop May 3-6 in Málaga.
• The Portuguese capital of Lisbon will be the host city of the 2nd International Urban Sketching Symposium this summer. Mark your calendars for July 21-23, 2011.  This is the Symposium blog which provides more details.  The registration fee is 200 euros.

tips and techniques

• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) reveals What's in my bag on Boing Boing.  Soooooo organised!  I always manage to leave one vital bit of kit behind even though it never gets unpacked!
• Armand Cabrera (Art and Influence) discusses Shapes and the Importance of Edges 
• Katherine Kean (Katherine Kean Fine Art) discusses Webcams: A Tool for Artists?.  I can certainly endorse their use as a tool - particularly from the perspective of checking how the light behaves over the course of a day BEFORE you get there.  Which is the explanation for how I came to be in St mark's Square in Venice at 7am on a Sunday morning in May! :)

Art History

• National Gallery, London:
• An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters - opens on Thursday 3 March and runs until 30 May 2011, Admission free

With 12 paintings never before seen in the UK, this exhibition introduces visitors to the American artist George Bellows and his artist friends, the Ashcan Painters: William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan and their teacher Robert Henri. The Ashcan School was formed at the beginning of the 20th century. American painters, principally in New York City and Philadelphia, began to develop a uniquely American view on the beauty, violence and velocity of the modern world.

• Jan Gossaert's Renaissance  opened last week.  This is the review in the The Guardian

• Natural History Museum - new "Images of Nature" Gallery - the current exhibition focuses on artwork from the past of flora and fauna
• The Wall Street Journal tells how a Rothko room was created - An Interior of Spiritual and Artistic Subtlety

Art Studios

• Casey Klahn's Studio Dreams

Art Videos

• Lots of thumbs up for my post about how the Vatican's exceptional interactive film allows you to View Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel artwork online
• Those who watched the video of  Pouring a Painting became as mesmirised as me.  I loved the speculation as to how it works and what the nature of the paint is. 
• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) has been having a video week.  The highlight is Painting Rainbows. You can watch the video on YouTube and find out how it was done by reading Making of Painting Rainbows

Book reviews 

Painted Memories by Alison Horridge

• Alison Horridge (Scribbles Adagio) has produced a book of her childhood memories of St Andrews in Scotland in the 1960s.  Painted Memories is available on Blurb.  The picture on the right is of the page where Alison is told she's moving 'down under' to Australia.
• Neil Hollingsworth (Paintings in Oil) has also created a Blurb book about his own paintings .  Read all about the process in My First Book and Prints for Sale 
• Blurb allows you to preview books - make sure to use the full screen option - it's so much better!

Colour

• Michael Chesley Johnson on the topic of Chalky Color and Secondart colors
• James Gurney has a Book Trailer Contest for Color and Light - similar to the one he ran for Imaginative Realism.  The deadline is 1st May 2011.

Opinion Poll

• This month's opinion poll has now closed and there will be a new one along on Tuesday.
  

Websites, webware and blogging

• Thanks to Alyson Stanfield for highlighting the issue about how Facebooks now interferes with who sees what - and this article on Disruptive Conversations about How Facebook Now Removes Friends and Pages From Your NewsFeed - And How To Fix It - I didn't know and I've now fixed mine! 
• Anybody thinking about starting an art magazine would do well to read Seth Godin's post about Apple's 30% tax on all subscriptions via Apple - 30%, the long tail and a future of serialized content
• Google changed its algorithm last week - but it seems to be targeted at driving out the low value content which has been clogging the internet 
• Google on the topic : Finding more high-quality sites in search
• Plus the New York Times' comment Seeking to Weed Out Drivel, Google Adjusts Search Engine
  
• A quick aside:  How often do I come across artists who have not used their art to create a background on Twitter?  All the time!  Failing to use the background to market your work is missing out on an opportunity to convey the type of artist you are.

and finally........

They do say that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Which would explain why Xavier Oakley (Xavier's Art Blog)- son of Julie Oakley (Julie Oakley Sketchblog) - has now got a Blue Peter badge after being shortlisted - out of 35,000 no less - to the top 100 of his age-group for his entry to the Blue Peter competition to design the logo for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

More information (plus what you get if you actually win a Blue Peter Badge!) in an Award-winning designer.  I've met Xavier and am happy to predict this young man will go far! Old art bloggers will remember Xavier as one of the stars of One Mile from Home Julie's blogging/walking project in 2006-7.