7th October 2012 (+1) - Who's made a mark this week?

The problem with being inquisitive is that you can get awfully distracted by information you come across - and so it was yesterday which is why this is a day late!  That and a website which developed a corrupted page this week which has led to endless correspondence.....

Panoramic View from the top of the hill in Greenwich Park, London
- complete with Equestrian Arena for the Olympics 2012
pen and ink and coloured pencils,
11" x 48" (3 double page spreads in Moleskine Sketchboook)
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The sketch at the top for those of you who haven't seen it before is my enormous 48" wide sketch of the Greenwich Park Panorama as seen from the Royal Park at Greenwich Park - sat right on top of the Prime Meridian - and looking across the Equestrian Arena which was still up when we Urban Sketchers London sketched there last month.

You can also see the double page spread sketches which went into the creation of this panorama on my Travels with a Sketchbook blog.  These contain links to the images on Flickr which are all annotated with notes for each building so you can see what you're looking at!

• Sailing ships and the City of London from Greenwich Park
• Greenwich Heritage, Canary Wharf and the O2 Dome

Art Blogs and Artists

Botanical Art

• It's very odd doing a review at a distance but this is my review of the American Society of Botanical Artists - 15th Annual Exhibition - which includes links to pictures of the exhibition, the artwork and artists' websites
• Congrats to Heeyoung Kim - who I met in London in April - who won the top prize.  She also has a very new blog about botanical art - Heeyoung Kim Botanical Art 
• This is an unusual post - would anybody like £4,950? Botanical Painting Diploma Course - 2013 Scholarship
• Rosie Sanders (Rosie Sanders - blog) - who specialises in enormous botanical art - has been visiting Provence - and writing about the Wild Flowers of Provence  and Provence Onions.
• Dianne Sutherland asks a question with a spin familiar to botanical artists - What to paint
• Some fantastic photographs of leaves on the National Geographic website 

Coloured Pencils and Pastels

• There's an article about the 2008 Threadneedle Prizewinner Patricia Cain's pastel drawings of construction sites and buildings in the October 2012 issue of Pastel Journal.
• The UKCPS Annual Exhibition 2012 opened in Nuneaton on Saturday.  However unlike previous years there are no images on the website or blog so I guess we have to wait and see.......

Drawing and Sketching

• Derwent's Love Pencils blog periodically had interviews with pencil artists.  Here are links to the last two interviews with Graham Bradshaw and equestrian artist Kelli Hamblet
• Interview: Graham Bradshaw
• Interview: Kelli Hamblet
• The Telegraph has a slideshow of works by an artist who works in ball point pen - see
  Vintage Vogue: ballpoint pen photorealistic portraits by James Mylne. This is a page of tips about ballpoint pen drawing plus a video.

Painting

• The Public Catalogue Foundation this week completes a 10 year project to photograph all the oil paintings in public art in the UK - that's 210,000 paintings by 46,000 artists.  Some 170,000 have already been uploaded on to the BBC's Your Paintings website.  Listen to a podcast about the process - Public art is photographed for all to enjoy online.  They're thinking about doing sculpture next!  This is the Your Paintings Blog
• I visited Hampton Court Palace (highly recommended!) last week - and the result of looking at a number of sixteenth century paintings was this post Timescale approaches in figurative paintings
• Sadie Valeri has a special blog for painters - Sadie Valeri.  Heer's a great blog post about Monochromatic Plein Air Painting in Lake County, California

Since October 2006 I have recorded every aspect of my artistic development on my blog. Here I invite you "behind the scenes" into my studio, where I share all of my materials, class notes, travel journals, and step-by step demonstrations of my paintings and drawings, including video demos.

• I've only just found the Facebook Community Page about Representational Painting - there's some lovely artwork posted there.
• This last week I learned about Reverse Glass Painting also known as Verre Églomisé or Hinterglas painting.  Here's the result:
• Verre Églomisé - an introduction - has an excellent and very helpful YouTube video about Verre Églomisé by Yanny Petters who is a botanical artist in Ireland.
• Reverse Glass Painting demonstrates how this method of paintings is not all portraits and icons and displays has a wonderful Verre Églomisé Landscape by Jan van der Heyden which is in the Rijksmuseum Collection
• I got so interested I created Verre Églomisé - Reverse Glass Painting which is a website compendium of all the links I found providing information about this interesting way of painting

Art Business & Marketing

• A video for artists who want to know how to make art pay - this is a video with Katherine Moreling an artist who has been working for 9 years. I found it very accessible and she has a lot of useful tips for those wanting to progress with their art and develop a career as a full-time artist

Katherine Moreling's Three Tips for Artists

• apply to something every single week

• just keep going - you need staying power

• be nice to yourself

• Some very wise advice for artists wanting to make a living from their art - Make a living is a RECOMMENDED read from Artquest
• Mailchimp revelas the Average Unique Open, Click, Bounce, and Abuse Complaint Rates by highlighting the Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry By Industry - and only 17.5% of emails in the Art Business get opened. As one who deletes an awful lot of mail without opening it I can well understand why - artists and galleries are very bad at titling and the first line I can see in gmail.  The only ones about exhibitions I open - apart from those from the major galleries - are those which have been tagged with a label for those who sent the email to the right address!  If you want to know which one that is you'll have to read "For Information"
• This is the website of Art Fair Insiders.  Here's some examples of content
• This is the list of their blog posts
• This is a very good example of why sharing information is such a good idea -
  Minnesota Art Shows - Beware has a very good outcome!
• This is the radio version - Art Fair Radio - with podcasts such as
  Jody DePew McLeane & Ted Gall-Winning all the Prizes

tune in for all the news and insider tips about the nation's top juried art fairs and craft shows. The Art Fair Success Show is hosted by Connie Mettler, publisher of ArtFairCalendar.com

• Etsy is gearing up for major sales and is ready to show you how - see Holiday Boot Camp 2012 — Get Ready!

Art Competitions

• These are the ING Discerning Eye 2012 - Selected Artists.  I checked out that the "Invited Artists" are in addition to those in the list/
• Threadneedle Prize 2012 - the announcement of the winner is due this week at an Awards Dinner on Wednesday - which I'm attending.
• These are the Threadneedle Prize 2012 - Shortlisted Artists - one of whom will be handed a cheque for £30,000 on Wednesday night
• This is my Review: Threadneedle Prize Exhibition 2012.  While not everybody is in agreement, the general consensus is that it's a much better exhibition than last year's.
• ...and this is my alternative shortlist - the Making a Mark Select Six plus my prediction as to the winner of the Visitors Choice award
• Turner prize 2012 – review by Laura Cumming at Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
• Wildlife Artists will want to watch out for my annual blog post about the two Wildlife Artist of the Year competitions - which I'll be posting next week.

Art Exhibitions

Art Exhibitions UK

• A Rothko painting has been defaced by a Russian artist at Tate Modern.  The painting is one of the Seagram murals painted by Rothko in 1958 for Manhattan's Four Seasons restaurant - but never installed.  They now have their own dedicated room at Tate Modern

The defaced Rothko painting at Tate Modern

• A new exhibition Snow Country: Woodcuts of the Japanese has opened at the Fitzwilliam Museum Gallery in Cambridge
• The public have voted on which of David Nash's works they like best and Kew Gardens has announced which are the favourite David Nash sculptures at Kew sculpture - and it appears the public do rather like round shapes.  The top three Nash works are:
  Black Sphere (2004, Charred Oak)
  Mizunara Bowl (1994, Mizunara Oak)
  Cairn Column (2012, Charred Oak)

Art Societies

• This is a very funny drawing/painting - Grayson Perry's Establishment Figures: who's who?  There's been a lot of guessing about who's who at the RA - and whther or not it inclues other art establishment figures.  It need to be remembered that it took the RA a very long time to see the value and worth of Grayson Perry's work - because he is primarily a ceramicist.  Payback time?  I can't work out whether the suggestion that Rolf Harris is in there somewhere is a double bluff!
• This is the website for the Watercolour Society of Ireland

Art History

• Nicholas Serota on Stanley Spencer - Nicholas Serota looks at the paintings by Stanley Spencer across the uK. Spencer is one of my favourite artists - and this is a slideshow of his paintings.  I love his pastoral landscapes best - such as The Cottages at burghclere and Southwold, Suffolk and his flower paintings and gardens.

Art Education

Degree Education

• The very odd scenario about hugely expensive academic art textbooks with no pictures in Ontario (See Art History - a set text book with no pictures!) continued - OCAD / Pearson Art Textbook Update - and I managed to broaden the content for the debate on this topic
• Brent Ashley (Brent Ashley) - the parent who triggered the viral internet interest in very expensive textbooks - followed up one of my comments about legislation relating to the USA and highlighted that there are  Open Textbooks in California (ie textbooks which must comply with Creative Commons legislation)

Workshops and classes

• Patricia Cain and her husband Sam Cartman are doing a joint workshop which sounds fascinating - The Artists Studio at The House for an Art Lover which was designed by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It's the first of these courses and is part of the Creative Mackintosh Festival in Glasgow.  There's lots more events to choose from as well.

This three day course will acknowledge the importance of the relationship between Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald by exploring the concept of the artwork as a skilfully made object - where the form and materials are fused - as part of a single whole.

Tips and techniques

Landscapes by Marla Baggetta

• Marla Baggetta (Painting and Pastels) has a checklist which she uses to see if she has finished a work - see Finishing and Eating Some Crow.  Judging by her landscapes it seems to work pretty well!
• James Gurney highlights how to use Flags and Cutters for controlling light
• Marion Boddy-Evans, About.com Guide highlights 5 Ways to Ruin an Art Paint Brush
• Stapleton Kearns writes about a Diagonally receding perspective in a landscape

Art Materials

• Dianne Sutherland (Dianne Sutherland) has written some very valuable Notes on Painting Watercolour on Vellum
• Do you like to see what other people use for art materials? I noticed Sadie Valeri - whose paintings I love - has two useful pages online about:
• Drawing Materials
• Painting Materials
• Every so often I see where we are upto on the availability of the best sketching chair ever built - and this is The Best Sketching Chair - An Update

Art Studios

• This is a blog post about My 14th Residency in Edward Hopper's Cape Cod Studio by Philip Koch (Philip Koch Paintings)
• Jackie Simmonds (Jackie Simmonds Artyfacts) writes from fresh experience of Organising an Open Studio

Art Television

It's quite unnerving seeing the late great Robert Hughes speaking to me from a TV screen - but it's wonderful to watch this rerun of The Shock if the New.

• Last week we got up to The View from the Edge - still available on iPlayer if you're very quick.  
• The seventh episode is on BBC4 at 11pm -The Shock of the New - Culture as Nature TONIGHT! Examining the art that referred to the man-made world which fed off culture itself. 

Colour

• For those who want to know the fashion colours for Spring 2013 -- according to Pantone, based on New York fashion Week - plus the swatch card

Techies

• Want to know how to scan your art? Mindy Lighthipe has just published an e-book on the topic - Scan YOUR Art - The New e-Book is here! To get a a taste for how she writes about technology for artists read Creating Greeting Cards from your Art: Part 3- Enter the Computer Age
• Do you worry about computer passwords? I do.  I don't save a single one, have got different ones for different sites and through a process of making myself enter them every time I visit have learned all the important ones.  I confess the rest are written down - and I find an A4 alphabetic book works best!
• Anyway for those who aren't worried take a look at this from The Guardian - Online passwords: keep it complicated
• This is the website of one of the sites he recommends - Lastpass
• I asked the question How do you send large images of your artwork?

and finally......

This is a slightly 'offpiste' reference - but I thought you might like to see the most profitable colours - associated with Fortune 500 companies - see Profitable colours: the full spectrum of Fortune 500 companies

Is there an association between colour and profit?  My view would be that it's more than likely!