7th August 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

I'm very pleased to highly the Annual Summer Exhibition of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) which I unaccountably forgot to highlight in last week's post.  I've provided the details below.

However I particularly wanted to feature the work of one particular RE member HJ Jackson as I own one of his linocut prints.

He's a member of the RE and has been exhibiting with the Society since 1961 - that's 50 years of exhibiting with the Society!  He'a also a member of the Society of Wood Engravers

HJ Jackson is also just two years off 60 years of printmaking!  He lost access to a printing press when he left art school and ever since then has been burnishing all his prints by hand using a tobacco tin.

Below is a video of an interview with HJ Jackson at the Norwich Art Fair - talking about he works the process of producing a linocut from reference to print.

It's succinct and extremely informative and is recommended viewing by me (the pictures are static but the audio is fascinating!)

Art blogs

It's maybe worth making the point that I always take a look at the art blogs of those who leave comments on this blog or sign up to follow me on Twitter.

Quite a few people who get highlighted in this post on a Sunday first come to my attention in this fashion.  However I hasten to add that if I'm interested I do look back over the blog to see what the standard has been like over time!

However please don't be like one artist who recently followed me who listed a website that didn't work properly and mentioned a blog for recent artwork which the website did not link to!

drawing and sketching

• Urban Sketchers made it on to the Flickr Blog - see Urban Sketchers.  Congrats to petescully, tiastudio, marin71, and gerard michel whose sketches and photos were highlighted in the post
• Two really nice posts by Lynne Chapman (An Illustrator's Life for Me!) about the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon - Lisbon Sketching Symposium and More Symposium Pics
• Meanwhile Pete Scully was also in London prior to leaving for Lisbon. Lots of posts on his blogPete Scully
• I met up with Liz Steel and Borromini on her way home from Lisbon at Tate Modern - see Sketching with Liz Steel and Borromini after I spent a little time Sketching People on the steps of St Paul's
• Andrea Joseph (Andrea Joseph's Sketchblog) is learning how to draw.  Yes - I blinked twice at that notion too - but do read I get away for the explanation 
• One of my new Twitter followers twitterstream (hello Daniel Cruit!), suggested I check out Edward Kinsella's sketchblog - so I did - and I suggest you do also.

coloured pencils and pastels

• Cathy Johnson has done a test of which of the white watercolour pencils are the most opaque - a very useful image for those who prefer watercolour pencils.  Here's another version on dark paper
• Artist Ingrid Calame on how she draws in coloured pencil on Mylar - this Guardian article is two years old but I found it after researching the artist whose work is included in a BBC slideshow about the Edinburgh Art Festival

painting

• Jan Blencowe (Jan Blencowe The Poetic Landscape) has been on a Maine Painting trip - which she posted about in four parts - together with some very nice paintings and some good stories!
• The Maine Painting Trip, part 1
• The Maine Painting Trip, part 2
• The Maine Painting Trip, part 3
• The Maine Painting Trip, part 4
• Ruth Andre (A Painting Day) primarily paints horses.  I do like bloggers who have a short interesting story to go with the images they post. 
• Vivien Blackburn has been drawing a cat and explaining the process in How to draw a cat: Ginger cat in coloured pencil

photography

• Flickr has had its 6,000,000,000th upload!  I merely account for slightly less than 10,000 of those
• My new photography blog Makingamark - a daily photo is off and running and I'm beginning to get into my stride as I revisit my photos - which of itself is a jolly good reason for doing it!  I've adopted an alphabetical approach as it gives me a structure and focus that means I cannot wander - except I spent most of this week coming up with thoughts for a huge number of letters of the alphabet.  Not got Z sorted yet! 

portraiture

• it looks like there's going to be a big portrait party in Brussels in September

Art Business and Marketing

• Excellent post by Stapleton Kearns (Stapleton Kearns) about Time management for artists
• The Etsy Success Newsletter / Etsy Blog Seller Handbook had two useful posts (see below). Plus here's a reminder for those who haven't read it before of The Etsy Seller Handbook: All Our How-To's About Selling 
• The Quick-Start Guide to Selling on Etsy 
• Etsy Success: Shop Stats Insights
• I like Tina Mammoser's (The Cycling Artist) new approach to marketing her art.  Name your price
• Did you know that Cafe Press is doing away with CDs as of July 30th?  From Cathy Johnson's blog
• Artists, Is Your Income Feast or Famine?
• The Washington Post highlighted a new TV show indicating how easy it is to buy original art for the home Ask a Designer: Homeowners can find original art without busting the budget

“Sometimes instead of buying from a showroom,” she says, “you can buy directly from the artist at a better price."

Art Economy

• The blogs and newspapers have been curiously quiet about the implications of the latest falls on the stock market and their impact on the art market.  I'm going to watching for comment.  I kind of think wiping out $3 trillion dollars from the global stock markets has to mean something.
• Before the staggering market falls at the end of the week got going, Ed Winkelman had already usefully summarised a number of articles commenting on the art market and the implications for art galleries in Galleries 3.0 || Open Thread

"There are challenges ahead for galleries. Especially smaller and newer ones. " - Edward Winkleman

Art Competitions
Juried shows
Last week I listed the recent observations by Stapleton Kearns on jurying exhibitions of art societies. This week here are some more recent comments about juried shows

• This is Robert Genn's (The Painter's Keys) response - and those of his readers to a query about juried shows which won't accept artists without a fine art degree - Getting a Leg Up.  It includes an obsevration by me about UK juried exhibitions

I've found certain shows very political inasmuch as they won't consider artists without art degrees. Do you have any suggestions for non-degreed artists regarding shows and artist resumes, etc.?

• Joanne Mattera (Joanne Mattera Art Blog) comments this week on the jury process she has recently been involved in - Maketing Mondays: What the Juror Saw.  She provides some interesting observations about her perspective on the process - such as the one below.

What constitutes a No? For me it’s work that looks derivative (if Sean Scully has already done it, you don’t have to), conceptually undeveloped (what, exactly am I looking at and why?), formally unresolved (it doesn’t “work”) or technically inadequate (incompetent execution).

• This is Sylvia White's (Art Advice) recent comment about A Juror's Dilemma

Art Exhibitions

I've given up following Art Knowledge News on Twitter.  The site has become extremely tedious through a combination of incessant tweets and tweets/posts about exhibitions which finished a long time ago.  This is just one recent example - there's lots more.

Yale Center Exhibition Examines Hoax on Prominent 18th Century British Artists http://t.co/yxElQgU

I really don't know what happened to this site - it used to be good - but it is no longer. National art museums / galleries

• The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein Edinburgh played a dramatic part in the Renaissance, with rebellions, wars, reformation zealots and glamorous queens. This exhibition of superb paintings  is at the Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh until 15 January 
• My post Elizabeth Blackadder - a retrospective is about the new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery. 
• At the National Portrait Gallery in London Picturing History: A portrait set of early kings and queens 19 July - 4 December 2011
• "Forests, Rocks, Torrents" at the National Gallery, London is at the National gallery until 18th September

Regional / commercial art galleries

• The BBC provides a slideshow In picture - the Edinburgh Art festival.  
• Here's Adrian Searle's review in the Guardian Jake or Dinos Chapman - review - he gave them just three stars!  Having heard some tales about their characters and behaviour in real life (ie outside an art gallery) I think this will be their first and last mention on this blog.

What unites them is that it is all in the worst possible taste.

Art societies

• The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers have their Annual Summer Exhibition at the Bankside Gallery - which I popped into this week (but need to go back to for a proper look).  The exhibition continues until 21st August.  The Bankside Gallery is right next door to Tate Modern on the south bank.
• this is the list of UKCPS Annual Exhibition 2011 - Selected Artists - complete with links to artists' websites and a couple of images demonstrating that coloured pencil need not be conventional

Art Bloggers

• Sarah Wimperis - Contemporary Impressionism at Beside the Wave Gallery, Falmouth opened yesterday Saturday.  Plus here's the gallery blog on the topic of the exhibition Wimperis, Hoskin and Helford.  It's very weird looking at pictures in an exhibition when you were stood or sat next to the artist when they were being painted in Provence!  I think we packed up on our plein air trip to the lavender fields some time after 8pm at the end of June.

Provence Potager by Sarah Wimperis - available from Beside the Wave Gallery

Lavender Shadows by Sarah Wimperis - available from Beside the Wave Gallery

• Rosemary (watercolour painter) and Bob Connelly (photographer) (Live Cheap and Make Art USA) wrote to let me know that their Decatur Exhibit is 1 month away.  "Travel Art: Italy and Beyond"  opens  September 2 at the Madden Arts Center and Anne Lloyd Gallery in Decatur, IL

Art Books

After a break of a couple of months I've resumed the updates for my two websites which keep abreast of

• the top art books in the previous month Makingamark's Top Ten Art Books in July 2011
• the best new art books in the previous 30 days - or in the case of this month - the last 90 days - see The Best NEW Art Books.
•   The runaway success of this summer is art blogger/tutor Cathy Johnson's Artist's Journal Workshop: Creating Your Life in Words and Pictures 

Art Crime

• Two articles in The Guardian about art crime 
• Stealing the Mona Lisa or how being stolen made the Mona Lisa's day!  Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre 100 years ago this month.
• The great Goya robbery – from National Gallery to Dr No's lair - Here's the story of what happened - it's an entertaining story which led to a change in the law so that paintings in national collections could not be "borrowed".
• The above article was written by Sandy Nairne, who when one of the Directors of the Tate had to negotiate for the return for two stolen Turners

Art Education

Tips and techniques

• Pastel Pointers | Using Camera Technology, Part 1 artistsnetwork.com/the-pastel-jou…
• here are some small painting tips - about edges and tones - from Daniel Cruit.  He's a 19-year-old Floridian art student, currently a freshman Illustration major at Ringling College of Art and Design- and seems to talk sense!

Copyright

• I'm planning a blog post about the changes to copyright law proposed for the UK.  In the meantime, here's The Telegraph on different perspectives on Copyright reform - round up of reactions 

Opinion Polls

• On Monday I launched the Poll for August - which is for the fourth year running is the ANNUAL POLL: What's the MAIN way you have sold art in the last 12 months?. It's getting lots of responses.  Please make sure you share with all those artists you know who are selling their art.   The more responses we get the better the analysis of what works and what doesn't.

Internet and webware

• These are Lori McNee's Lessons I Learned When My Blog Got Hacked
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for August 1  covers mobile content 

and finally......

This is a really weird sculpture.  A sculpture of a Giant Women has taken up residence in a lake in Hamburg for 10 days - or is that 'taking a bath'  Giant Woman Sculpture Makes Waves in German Lake

A giant sculpture by Oliver Voss, 'Die Badende' (The Bather), lies in the Binnenalster lake in Hamburg, Germany. The sculpture is made of styrofoam and steel and measures 4 metres high by 30 metres long.