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| Les Couguieux - the Postcard from Provence House before the fire |
The really weird thing is that the slideshow image on the Flickr "stop frame" of the slideshow on the blog is of workmen getting ready to work on the Julian's studio which is attached to their home.......
Art blogs and Artists
Drawing and sketching
- Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) wrote about Ingres at the Morgan and while I could have included this under art history or exhibitions I'm including it here because I want people to go look at the images of the drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres on Charley's blog. In fact if you are in any way interested in portraiture and drawing I highly recommend you take a look. Ingres the high priest of realism draws in a really lyrical way. He's a lot looser than many people might expect. The line is painterly. He uses lots of hatching. The underlying message is that you don't have to be tight, hyper-realistic and photographic to produce realism! (NB I discovered Ingre's drawings quite early on and developed my approach to drawing people based on his style. (seehttp://www.pastelsandpencils.com/people.html )
- A lovely post by James Gurney (Gurney Journey) about what happened after he was Caught looking!
- Debbi Kaspari (Drawing the Motmot) has been out sketching birds with the benefit of her watercolour pans - in an Altoids tin - see Binoculars…bugspray…sketchbook?. (re artists losing homes - Debbi is another artist who has survived the loss of a home - she was a tornado victim - see Nature is a Moody Muse)
- Laura (Laurelines) has been to Copenhagen - and has started posting her sketches - Copenhagen sketches - part 1
- Two more Autumn landscapes in The Art of the Landscape - and there will be three (maybe four) more this week.
- It was Georgia O'Keeffe's birthday on 15 November - she would have been 124. It reminded me of the project I did on her work back in 2007
- I was absolutely amazed when I saw this painting with paper - which celebrates an anniversary for Conqueror
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| Conqueror Paper - celebrating a decade in the land of a million hues |
Challenges
- The Daily Paintworks site has just posted The Paint your Toaster Challenge
E-commerce and spamming
- How to avoid being labelled a spammer was prompted by an email from somebody who follows one of my blogs. It reminded me of all the other times I've been spammed by artists - and I decided it was time for a review of how easy it is to get labelled a spammer. Thanks for all the positive and appreciative comments about this post.
- I also revamped one of my information websites so that it more clearly highlighted the rules of ecommerce - see E-commerce for Artists. I want to develop the sections related to shopping cart systems and payments systems and would be pleased to hear from artists who are happy with their set-up.
- Brian Sherwin contributed an article about pricing to Fine Art Views - Art Pricing: Is it time for the unwritten rules of art pricing to change?
markets change -- and I'm starting to wonder if one rule of selling art needs to change now more than ever due to the economy. That rule being... "You should keep all of your original art listed at a close price range and never deviate from it other than to raise prices overall.".
- Stapleton Kearns expressed Some rambling thoughts on inexpensive art last week. His post discusses selling paintings to friend and family, the question of discounts and an artist's attitude towards how he values his work.
If you are making paintings that sell at workingmans prices, say 300 dollars, I suggest you never give any of them away or discount them at all, except to the most impoverished of your close friends. I think there is a lot to lose by not valuing your own paintings. If you want others to value them, you should begin that yourself.
- Did you know that Andy Warhol accounted for one-sixth of contemporary art sales? I guess they;re only counting the ones in the sale rooms?) Anyway, this article A One Man Market discusses his role within the art market economy
Warhol is now the god of contemporary art. He is indeed, it is said, the “American Picasso” or, if you prefer, the art market’s one-man Dow Jones. In 2010 his work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for 17% of all contemporary auction sales.
Art Competitions
- John Moore Painting Prize 2012: Call For Entries - the prize is worth £25,000, the work will be displayed in an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial in the Autumn 2012 and the competition is open to painters living or professionally based in the UK
- Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2012: Call For Entries - was published round about the time Id' normally be announcing the winner - but there's to be no competition for 2011. The date and venue for the exhibition has changed for 2012.
- Royal Society of British Artists: Call for Entries - is the annual open exhibition for artists wanting to submit original drawings, paintings or sculpture. Entries are juried and it's essential to exhibit if you want to become a member of one of the oldest art societies in the UK
- Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery has won £60,000 Contemporary Art Society Annual Award 2011. This is the video about the museum and the proposal for a sculpture by Christina Mackie
The aim of the Annual Award is to support museums to commission new work that, once completed, will remain within the museum’s permanent collection.
Exhibitions in 2012
The announcements are starting to be made about the major art exhibitions in 2012. I'll be doing a reference post about this but I'm going to start adding them into this post each week. Not least as it provides me with a note of what I've found so far!
- UK: Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude is the major exhibition at the National Gallery - in collboration with Tate Britain in Spring 2012. The exhibition will run from 14 March – 5 June 2012 in the Sainsbury Wing
‘Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude’ is the most in-depth examination to date of Turner’s experience of Claude’s art and includes oils, watercolours and sketchbooks. It also introduces visitors to the story of the Turner Bequest
- Italy: Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists will be on view at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 3 March to 15 July 2012 to mark 500 years since the death of Amerigo Vespucci and the ties between Venice and America. (I'd love to see this one!).
- Driven to Draw: Twentieth-century Drawings and Sketchbooks from the Royal Academy’s Collection - is a new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts until Feb 2012
- This is Sotheby's e-catalogue of the European paintings in an upcoming sale on 22 November.
- Tracy Hall (Watercolour Artist Diary) has three miniatures in the Annual Exhibition of the The Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers Society of Washington DC (MPSGS) at Strathmore Mansion, North Bethesda, MD, USA from November 21st - Dec 30th.
- The Annual Exhibition of the New English Art Club opens at the Mall Galleries on 25th November. It runs until 4th December at the Mall Galleries and is always a show worth visiting.
Regional Museums
- Ingres at the Morgan closes at the end of the month on 27 November. If you can't get to the Morgan you can enjoy an online exhibition of his drawings and an insight into the materials and emthods he used (with thanks to Charley Parker!)
- colour, stripes, planes and curves - the exhibition of abstract paintings by Bridget Riley at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge has been extended until 31 December. She's one of the few abstract painters that I really like. You can also see images of her current works on her dealer's website - Karsten Schubert
- George Shaw - who is widely expected to win this year's Turner Prize - exhibits his paintings of Tile Hill Estate along with art he made as a child in George Shaw: I Woz Ere in Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, until 11 March 2012. This is the article in the Guardian about the exhibition - The man's a hero. Give him a prize!
The gifted, profound and ultimately enigmatic modern painter George Shaw, a candidate for this year's Turner prize , returns home and exhibits his paintings of Tile Hill Estate It seems a miracle that art of such compassion and simplicity and innate talent got made in a Britain besotted with the superficial.
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| Norman Rockwell Rosie the Riveter (1943) Oil on canvas, 52 x 40 in. (132.1 x 101.6 cm) Image courtesy of The Saturday Evening Post Photography by Dwight Primiano |
- A new art museum opened on 11.11.11 (nothing like having a memorable date!) in Arkansas - the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art - thanks to Wal-Mart. It's the 'baby' of Alice Walton who is an art-enthusiast and who continues to serve as chair of the Board of Directors.
- This is a link to the permanent Collection (which includes Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter) and the list of announced works
- Los Angeles Times - Backed by Wal-Mart millions, a museum is born in Arkansas. This articles indicates that the museum has been created after " six years of planning and tens of millions in stealthy and sometimes controversial art acquisitions".
- The Art Newspaper - The collection that Walmart built
- The Telegraph provides a slideshow of some of the art in the new museum - it's ecelectic to say the least!
- see the section on Art Television to see a documentary about the Barnes Collection.
- There are suggestions that The Pushkin Museum of the Fine Arts in Moscow is exhibiting a Modigliani painting that at least one Russian art collector concluded is a fake. (The Art Newspaper). If you want to take a look at the rest of their paintings this is the link to their permanent collection of paintings.
- Did you know that the Tate has a blog - called (wait for it!) Tate Blog? No? I'm not surprised - it's hardly ever used which for a museum receiving tax payers money is a bit of a sin in my book. Blogs are excellent ways of publicising both the collection and the work of the museum to a wider public.
- By way of contrast The Tate Twitter team on @Tate http://twitter.com/tate are much more active and fun! Congratulations to them on topping 500,000 followers!
- The Tate Partnerships list on Tate's Twitter account is a good way of identifying what's going on in contemporary art at regional museums around the country.
- I was absolutely appalled recently to find out that the Government Art Collection isn’t entirely sure where everything is. Read this excellent article in The Art Newspaper The hunt for missing government art
- Jonathan Jones (Jonathan Jones Art Blog) in a blog post on The Guardian Love Leonardo? Then don't neglect the National Gallery's permanent collection makes the excellent point that people buy tickets for blockbuster exhibitions, visit and then leave the Museum - whereas there is an amazing about of blockbuster images in the main/permanent collection! He highlights five such paintings in the permanent collection of the National Gallery.
- Conservation versus restoration? The Art Newspaper has an article - Anger over Louvre’s plan to clean a Leonardo - about the planned restoration of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre.
- A 1960 painting of Piccadilly Circus, London by LS Lowry has been sold at auction by Christies to a private buyer for £5.6 million. This matches the world record for prices achieved by this artists's art. This is a link to other paintings by LS Lowry sold at the auction
- Back in April of this year the BBC had an item about Sir Ian McKellen challenges Tate over Lowry works - the nub of which was about the failure of Tate Britain to display the 23 Lowrys (7 paintings and 16 drawings) in its collection. He's also written about this on his website - Looking for Lowry. Maybe this recent sale at Christies might make the Tate think again?
"Why should it matter that the Tate Gallery in London (with its 23 Lowrys) has chosen not to display any of them for many years? His popularity needs no official endorsement from the Tate but it is a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others."Art Education
Sir Ian McKellen
Technical
- Tina Mammoser (The Cycling Artist) has made a lightbox - see Light art - prototype and Stoked! First Light Box done
- Accessart provides an article about Good teaching practice: sketchbooks
- Julie Ford Oliver (Art Talk) has a handy, portable, value and color checker. You can have one too! She often hands out useful tips when writing about her paintings and shares the lessons she teaches at the Artists Guild.
- The London Graphic Centre has the same old URL http://www.londongraphics.co.uk/ but a brand new design for its website
- Jackson's Art Blog - Materials to make your own Christmas Cards is highlighting the supplies they carry if you want to make Your Own Christmas Cards. It's a very good overview of the sort of supplies you'd need. However it struck me half way through that maybe you'd be doing this because you wanted to be creative or innovative about your marketing rather than because you wanted to save money!
- I've taken advantage of the current Artists & Illustrators offer and ordered the 24 pan set of Talens Van Gogh Watercolours which are a bargain price. However the customer experience is at risk of becoming a blog post - I'll wait and see how they respond to my email querying where is the confirmation of my order and payment!
Catch up on the BBC programmes about art on iPlayer
- Art of America: Looking for Paradise - Last Monday Andrew Graham-Dixon began a new series looking at the art of America and how it developed. The second episode in this series Art of America: Modern Dreams will be broadcast tomorrow evening on Monday 21st November, 21:00 on BBC Four which focuses on urban America and how it influenced its art.
- Storyville - 2011-2012-7. The Billion Dollar Art Heist - about what happened to the Barnes Collection
First transmitted in 1999, this documentary profiles American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, who died at the age of 44 in a car accident. At the time of his death in 1956, Jackson Pollock was the most celebrated artist in America.
[For American readers who have access to iPlayer - this the link to the BBC's current series of programmes about America - "A collection of programmes from the BBC archives exploring art, technology, politics and society in the United States of America" with links to all the programmes broadcast so far. It includes repeats of classic programmes from the archives.]
London 2012: Arts Council England and the BBC create digital arts media service - there was an announcement this week that an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme runs from May to October 2012. It will allow arts content on to the four main digital media platforms of personal computer, mobile, tablet and connected TV. I think somewhere along the way somebody forgot to write the "plain english" version of this proposal. What's going to happen that is different and how it will it affect the ordinary person? Who knows!
Books
For those thinking of writing a book, Unbound is another site for all aspiring authors to ponder on. This time it's about testing the waters and generating the funding. Here's how it works. Seems like an excellent idea to me. Those who are involved with what seems to be a "just out of beta" website have different approaches to pitching for funds. The past master is Stephen Fry (in his alter ego).
Techies: Internet, webware, blogging etc
- Tips on how to create an effective clean-looking website from Copyblogger - Amish web design
- Blogger in Draft now has a Google+ page
- You can create a social portrait of yourself. I'm not about to try - however i'm sure some people will come up with amazing ones!
- What Grade Does Your Art Website Deserve? is an article on ArtsyShark which recommends Website Grader
- You may have heard of Klout - here's some reasons for pondering on if you're thinking of getting a Klout profile Why I deleted my Klout profile
It looks as if there is a new world record holder for the longest and largest surface area 3D painting. Here's a picture of Joe Hill's work - and more 3D street art around the world - in pictures
Oh, Katherine, I am so sorry to hear about Julian Merrow's home and loss. Thankfully they are OK. I can only advise them to look forward. I am trying to think of the new empty house as a blank canvas and have some joy in filling it with love, art and friends. Thanks for thinking of us.
ReplyDeleteIts terrible news, very sad, thankfully they are all safe. we have been vicariously enjoying their home through Sarah's paintings.
ReplyDeletemmm Jackson's were nearly the subject of a blog post for me!
ReplyDeleteThe last 2 orders I had from them showed 'in stock'
A week later when the order arrived (not impressively fast) there was a note enclosed that half the stuff I wanted (and was waiting for) was in fact out of stock.
Twice.
So I shop elsewhere.
I have to say that thought they carry less lines, Ken Bromley phone if there is any delay or problem at all, giving you chance to cancel or accept the delay. Their orders arrive next day or the day after.