1 July 2012 - Who's made a mark this week?

Angus McEwan RSW RWS (Angus McEwan, Scottish Artist) has won the ‘International Prize “Marche d’Acqua” Fabriano Watercolour 2012’ with his painting Taking the Strain 

Taking the Strain 2
watercolour on handmade Fabriano, 77 x 56.5cm (Unframed)

© Angus McEwan

"... for extraordinary technical skill, for the masterful use of light and colour, for the excellent ability to understand and value the paper produced specifically for award from paper masters of the paper museum. 

This is a biennial and really international exhibition.  The Paper and Watermark Museum conceived the idea and collborates with InArte and Ava (Venetian Watercolour Association) to select international artists to show in the exhibition

The artists participating in the exhibition are 51 from all over the globe (15 different Countries) of which 21 are young emerging artists, selected by the ‘Accademie di Belle Arti Italiane’ and International Art Schools and Accademy for their creativity.

The jurors were international:

• England's David Paskett, President of the British Royal Watercolour Society, 
• the Spaniard Pedro Cano, one of 60 artists invited by the Vatican on July 4 last year, to pay homage to Benedict XVI for the 60th anniversary of his ordination
• Lynn Sures, a professor of the prestigious Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC, 
• John Carabelli, president of the Italian watercolor, 
• Angelo and Toni Gorlini Vedù, internationally renowned artists.

Plus the artists came from 15 nations with Italy having 35% and the remainder coming from the USA, England, Scotland, Belgium, Spain, France, Finland, Japan, Egypt, South Korea, Portugal, China, Jordan and Syria.

You can see the exhibition in the new gallery at the Paper and Watermark Museum until August 26th and finally - a travelling exhibition is due to visit South Korea, Portugal, USA, Spain and Italy between September 2012 and the end of 2013.

Artists and Art blogs

This is a brilliant interview Five Minutes With: Grayson Perry.  My admiration for this man is on an exponential curve at the moment.


Drawing and Sketching

• Instructors are limbering up for their workshops in the Dominican Republic for the Urban Sketchers Symposium.  Liz Steel is posting her preparations for her trip on her blog Liz and Borromini and you can read more in the Contributors page on the Symposium portal
• Albrecht Rissler (Albrecht Rissler Drawing Landscape) is in Majorca teaching a workshop and is still drawing the trees which he has been drawing for years - New drawings of the olive tree near Orient/Mallorca.  Do take a look at the other posts on his blog - he is a fabulous sketcher.
• I posted Lunch in the Portrait Restaurant - which stalled halfway through when I recognised somebody who I often see on television in the background of my sketch!

Lunch at the Portrait Restaurant - June 2012

11" x 16" pen and sepia ink in Moleskine sketchbook

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• Ann Kullberg has put her 13th Annual Members Show online
• Richard McKinley (Pastel Pointers) has a fascinating post about 5 Sketching Techniques with Glass and Dry Markers
• Nicole Caulfield (Nicole Caulfield) has found a new theme for her coloured pencil artwork involving food.  She's taking orders!

Citrus Squared
8" x 8" Colored Pencil on Pastelbord
© Nicole Caulfield

Landscapes

• Bill Guffy's Virtual Paintout for July is in Thailand

Painting

• Sophie Ploeg: The Dark Side  is about painting black lace and using black paint.  Sophie also reference this site The Color Black | Artists’ Pigments for Black Paint on facebook 
• David Teter (Avid Art) talks about the process he used to develop the painting which has been juried into the National Watercolor Society's 2012 Annual Exhibition here in San Pedro
  

Printmaking 

• This is a post by Brian Holden (my printmaking journey) about his Collagraph and acetate drypoint workshop in Kenora Ontario

Street Art

• The Guardian provides an excellent slideshow of new pieces by some of the world's top street artists  - including Sheperd Fairey - which can now be seen at the London Pleasure Gardens 

Art Business

• Alyson Stanfield (ArtBizBlog) asks Why Does One Artist Sell Better Than Another? and the answers are very interesting
• This is an interesting article in The Art newspaper which questions whether the pressure from art fairs for artists to produce more work is sustainable in the long run.  See Fair or foul: more art fairs and bigger brand galleries, but is the model sustainable?

Art Economy

• The state of the economy - and the banks - means that Wary Buyers Still Pour Money Into Contemporary Art according to the NY Times
• Phil Miller (@PhilipJEMiller) Arts Correspondent of The Herald newspaper, Scotland  alerted me to research by Creative Scotland which provides a comprehensive picture of the contribution of the Arts and Creative Industries to the wider Scottish economy.

Art Competitions

• I will be posting about the BP Travel Award but am currently waiting to hear back from Jo Fraser who was last year's winner and exhibited her work this year.
• If you were thinking of entering the Sunday Times Watercolour competition you're too late - the deadline was last week.

Art Exhibitions

Art Exhibitions in London

• The Edward Munch Exhibition has opened at Tate Modern.  This is the Guardian review
  Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye
• David Nash at Kew - A Natural Gallery at The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew This is:
• my Review: David Nash at Kew - A Natural Gallery
• my video of the works - David Nash at Kew -  I saw when we visited Kew Gardens last week.  I learned how to do annotations this week!
• plus this is a video of Working on site: David Nash in the Wood Quarry at Kew
• My review of an exhibition at the Mall Galleries 'Built" : recording and responding to the construction process.  It had a splendid mind-stretching symposium last Tuesday.
• This is a good review of the BP Portrait Award 2012 in The Independent.
• This article in the Evening Standard - London 2012 Festival: galleries - lists the exhibitions which form part of the Cultural Olympiad
• From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism – Paintings from the Clark opens at the Royal Academy on 7 July

Art Exhibitions in the USA

• Lucien Freud: Portraits has opened at The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth in Texas.  The exhibition continues until October 28 and Fort Worth will be the only U.S. venue. 
• You will never ever get another chance to see an exhibition like this - it attracted huge numbers in London with more than 200,000 tickets sold to see the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
• Podcasts of the lectures associated with the exhibition will be available on this link are available here, two weeks after presentation date.
• I met the Curator of the Fort Worth exhibition at the NPG when the exhibition opened there.  This is am article about the interview he secured with Lucien Freud and his visit to his studio - How Michael Auping Landed a Once-in-a-Lifetime Interview With The Reclusive Lucian Freud

Art Societies

• This is the list of people juried into the Annual Exhibition of the National Watercolour Society

Art Television and Art Videos

• You will have noticed that more and more videos are appearing in my posts - you can blame it on the new camera.
• A documentary "Freud's Naked Truths," will be broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel on 3rd July.
• This is a BBC comment on Broadcasters 'spending less on arts', says Ofcom

Colour

• A useful site to check colour which is definitely web visible (ie browser-safe HTML color ) is the Visibone Web-Safe Color Table: Hex Codes

Copyright

• I came across an article last week that was published in March on The Art Newspaper.  It provides an interesting summary of What you can and cannot copyright

Opinion Poll

• There's been a lively discussion in the comments section of my post about the poll results - Poll Results - Size Matters! for the June Making A Mark poll which asked POLL: How do you decide the size of your artwork?

Techies

• Today Apple closed down their old syncing service today and removed the iDisk and MobileMe Gallery apps from the App Store.  Artists who have previously had their website with Apple MobileMe have had to transfer their websites to new sites and the URLs for their websites have changed as a result. One such artist is Karin Jurick (A Painting Today) who explains in Linking to my Website and can now be found on http://www.karinjurick.com/
• I lost my mobile phone on Friday - So if you've got my mobile number you can't now contact me! However I can now confirm that Lookout works.  I was able to 
• locate it precisely (and it had "walked" from where I lost it - I got sent a Google Map with the precise location)
• locked it
• wiped the data from the phone
• I just need to work out now whether the bloke who phoned me on Friday night to say he had it is actually genuine and really wants to return it to or whether I now need to report it as stolen.  If you're reading this please take the phone to Brentford Police Station and I will collect it from there and send you a reward.
• Recommendations for a new mobile phone which work for artists who use the internet and take pics and videos are welcome.  I'm thinking of moving from Android to iPhone.

and finally.....

I came upon this website entirely by accident - and I don't ever remember seeing it talked about before.  I give you The Google Cultural Insititute.

• This is the site which includes the Google Art Project
• but it also includes another google site I'd never heard of The World Wonders Site