6th November 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

Autumn Sunrise by Loriann Signori,
10 x 10 pastel on watercolor

This week I'm featuring Autumn at the beginning of this post - starting with Loriann Signori's wonderful Autumn Sunrise!  I really like people who paint subject matter appropriate to the season.  It always seems to help give me a fresh eye on the world around me.

• On The Art of the Landscape blog, I've started posting reader's images of their paintings of Autumn Landscape.  So far I've got two posted (see links below) and one coming up next week.  I was trying to get round to posting one of my own today - but maybe tomorrow!  Do let me know if you've drawn or painted a good Autumn landscape
• Limousin, France - Reader's Autumn Landscapes #1 by Nigel Fletcher  (Painting in the Limousin)
• Dale Hollow State Park - Reader's Autumn Landscape #2 by Bill Guffey
• Ronelle van Wyk (African Tapestry) has two super posts about the:
• colours and foliage of November #1
• colours and foliage of November #2
• I loved Duane Keiser's play on how the angle of light changes in the Autumn and creates some fabulous colour changes in Fall Light

Autumn sunlight near Verinas by Nigel Fletcher

Artists and Art Blogs



Drawing and sketching

• It's good to see Debbie Kaspari (Drawing the Motmot) back in action - the artist emerges.  
• Debbie's drawings of birds are in Tim Wootton's book about Drawing and Painting Birds.  Tim (Tim Wootton Wildlife Artist) recently won one of the big prizes at the Society of Wildlife Artists Annual Exhibition
• Oona Leganovic (Play in Progress), who lives in Berlin, creates a list in Traveling Things of what arrives back home after a trip away sketching - and what got lost along the way! 
• I liked Tia's approach to her October Sketchbook Update - collage of sketches for October
• Sketchbook blogs and artists which are new to me - but worth noting - this week included:
• Drawing Book from Spain by Alvaro Carnicero who is a street artist who also sketches
• http://sketchnotearmy.com/ - I just love the really creative way this lot make notes!
• This is just weird - but also interesting Line Topography Update by Mike Creighton who is an artist and a programmer.  Figures....

Coloured pencils and pastels

• Ester Roi's (Ester Roi Fine Art) wonderful artwork features on the packaging for the new 150 Prismacolor Pencil set - see My Artwork on the New Prismacolor Set.  It has huge impact!

• The List of Winners - Wall Photos - for the CPM 2012 CALENDAR Contest can now be found at the website www.coloredpencilmag.com Colored Pencil Magazine 

Landscape art

• Loriann Signori (Loriann Signori's weeky postings) wrote a blog post about the importance of sky colour and illustrated it very effectively with the image at the top of this post and this quote

The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth a crystal-like ether, in the other a liquid gold.Thomas Cole

• Stapleton Kearns (Stapleton Kearns) illustrated what you can do to a painting sent for critique when fooling with other people's art.  I wish he'd do more posts like this!
• The Telegraph highlighted Landscape Art: 10 works that changed our views

Printmaking

• Sherrie York (Brush and Baren) has got a series of posts which show a linocut print as a work in progress - which I never tire of looking at - and at the same time she's highlighting problems with the process - she's got "paper fuzzies"!

Art Business and Marketing

• I updated How to Write an Artist's Statement by including a link to the ArtyBollocks site.  Well once I'd tried it I knew it had to go straight into the humour section!  (This is the only website I've ever created which has its very own humour section - but then we all know how having to write an artist statement stresses people out so it seemed like a good idea!)  
• Donating art has been attracting comments
• Nicole Caulfield wrote last month about The Ins and Outs of Donating Artwork
• Alyson Stanfield (Art Biz Blog) has now added Donating Limits 
• Read and inwardly digest The 8 worst fonts in the world before you next create a flyer, an invite or redesign a website 
• The Enterprise Centre for Creative Arts (ECCA) runs Enterprise Week for Creative Artists (14-18 November) in London.  Check out their site in general - they have lots of great courses for emerging artists and those who have a knowledge gap to fill.
• Does anybody else besides me make a big thing out of buying a new artist's calendar each year?  See The Artist's Calendar - for 2012

Art Economy and Art Collectors

• I don't whether to be pleased or not that I spotted an article on Art info about a battle over resale royalties involving Gagosian which now appears to have been withdrawn.  It was a good story - pity we can't see it!
• The Art Newspaper offered two different perspectives on the German master forgers aka "the nice family of counterfeiters"
• German's Master forgers - this includes a selection of the fake works
• Sympathy grows for alleged forgers

Die Welt says that the “likeable” Beltracchi deserves our applause for his masterly forgeries, while an opinion piece in Die Zeit calls for an exhibition of the fakes.

Art Competitions

• The exhibition for the 2011 ING Discerning Eye Competition opens on Thursday at the Mall Galleries.  It's always a really interesting exhibition to attend - and I'm looking forward to seeing what John's chosen!

Art Exhibitions National Galleries

• David Hockney's "Fresh Flowers: Drawings on the iPhone and iPad" at the Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen's Park, Toronto until 1 January 2012 This is the first major exhibition by Hockney in Canada in 20 years, it focuses on his new love of digital art on the iPhone and iPad. rom.on.ca

Other Galleries

• The Milwaukee Art Museum has an exhibition of Impressionism on Paper - until 8 January 2012.  I'd love to be able to see it.  Such a pity the website doesn't have any images to offer....

The exhibition makes its premiere in Milwaukee, presenting more than one hundred drawings, watercolors, and pastels by many of the greatest artists in the history of Western European art—Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec.

Art Societies

• The dates have been published in the Call for Entries: Pastel Society 112th Annual Exhibition - but it's very tight - and not the same as last year!

Artist Bloggers

The only artists I feature on this blog, whose work is not in exhibitions in major galleries, people I know personally or those who have art blogs or enter their work in the open exhibitions by art competitions or national art societies.  See "For Information" in the side column to drop me a line.

Silver Sands by Elizabeth McCrindle

• Aberfeldy Gallery opens its Christmas Exhibition this coming Saturday 5th November and work by Elizabeth McCrindle (A Scottish Artist) is included in the exhibition (see Aberfeldy Christmas Exhibition opens 5th November.......)
  
• Felicity House PS has work in the Bournemouth Arts Club Annual Exhibition which opened on Friday and continues until 21st November at The Peacock Gallery, Upton Country Park, Poole, Dorset, BH17 7BJ.  Do have a look at Felicity's website  (click the link in her name) - it has some absolutely delightful work on it.

Art Museums

• It's very interesting reading articles in the New York Times about the development of contemporary art museums in the UK - see Contemporary Art and Question Marks in Britain.  I wish some of the British press did likewise - but it tends to be a bit sporadic!

Art Education

• Why the quality of the tutor matters - see Glasgow's tuner connection

Art Supplies

• Winsor and Newton have this interesting page - The Winsor and Newton Mediums Finder - which identifies mediums you need to use.  Tell it what you're working with and what you want to do and it tells you what you need to use!  Simple!  How come nobody thought of this before?

Books

• I updated all my "art book" sites and worked on creating a few new ones!  Makingamark's Top Ten Art Books in October 2011 references updates of:
• The Best NEW Art Books - there's an awful lot of new drawing books this month
• 2011: NEW drawing books
• 2011: NEW painting books 
• 2012: NEW drawing books
• as well as my regular monthly update of  Makingamark's Top 10 Fine Art Books.
• Martin Stankewitz offered a perspective on the new blurb arrangements for making ebooks 
• Elements of painting with crayons By John Russell - a very old book available on Google Books

Opinion Poll

• On Monday I published Do you sign and date your artwork? (Poll results) - the result of last month's Making A Mark Poll
• On Tuesday we started this month's POLL: What proportion of your art time do you spend on marketing?  It's very interesting so far!

Internet, webware and blogging

• Jeanette Jobson last week asked Help or hindrance. What does your blog do for you? and quite a few of us posted our views.  What do you think?
• For the font geeks (that'll be me and some of you) - and a few more besides who really ought to know a bit more about fonts - an interesting post about the 8 worst fonts in the world.  
• My Google Reader - which is how I read most blog posts - got a new "fresh" look this week.  Have you got it yet?  All I can say is thank goodness the page rank widget still works!
• Tina Mammoser made it out of one dead laptop and into a new studio laptop with almost all her files intact!  Looks like Mac hard drives never die!

and finally......

An exhibition with a difference - check out this exhibition in Australia - Sculpture by the Sea 2011 - the Bondi exhibition is now open until 20th November 2011.  This link provides you with a slideshow of 30 of the exhibits

See the spectacular Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk transformed into a 2km long temporary sculpture park featuring over 100 sculptures by artists from Australia and across the world.