Sunday, March 31, 2013

31st March 2013 - Who's made a mark this week?

Meet MakingAMark!

She's an Easter lamb (literally) being born at 21.20 on Easter Sunday in the Netherlands.

Her breed is a very old and rare Dutch Native Sheep Breed called 'Drenthen Moor Sheep' and her colour type is known as 'spotted blue fox'.

You can read more about Lamb #12 MakingAMark  on Titia Geertman's website about her Lambing Season 2013.

I have to say I've known that a lamb might possibly be named after my online name for a while - but I've still got a big beaming smile all over my face as I type!

Nothing to do with art I know - but I'd wanted a lamb for the feature pic for this post but hadn't quite reckoned on it being one called MakingAMark!!

Variations on a theme of "Who's made a mark this week?"

I've been experimenting during March with different ways of doing a "round-up" post on Sunday.  Thanks for all your feedback which was very helpful. I'll probably continue to experiment for a bit until I find the right balance.

So we had
  • 10 things about art this week #1 - which was promising BUT supposed to be short! Hah! FAILED!  I like the idea but need to work on the execution!
  • Last Sunday, I wrote the first of a NEW series of monthly posts highlighting Art Exhibitions in London: March - May 2013.  If you know someone coming to London you might want to share it with them.  I think this is a 'keeper' as a "once a month" post - but in order to reduce the effort I think I may well in future create a page and then update this as exhibitions change - with the post being a one liner with some highlights of exhibitions to watch out for.

Artists and Art Blogs


Drawing and sketching 

Other posts or announcements related to drawing and sketching include:
Painting
Portraiture

Somebody has created a Facebook Page for all the BP Portrait Award refusals.  There's some very salutary advice from David Eichenberg whose work was not selected this year and it can be found at 28 March.
"The beauty of the BP Award is not the the awards IMO. It is the close network that you become part of once you are in the show. I have made a lot of friends both from within the show as well as from association with the show. It is important that everyone also remember to not base what you create around the show. Meaning do not wait for this show to be your end all. Never try to guess what the jurors are looking for either. Get out their and paint paint paint and enter and compete as much as possible. I would also like to share a really important bit of advice. If you are entering shows like the BP Award make sure you have some good representation or it will all be for naught. Who knows you might just get in and win an award or win the whole thing. Winning the whole thing sounds good right? Although if you do not have the reps or right people to capitalize on it, ouch!!!
Sculpture / Installation / Conceptual art
  • Here's another animal - but this time it's a sculpture! The White Horse by Mark Wallinger is a scaled-down version of a proposed 50m-high (164ft) sculpture he plans to build for the Ebssfleet Landmark Project  in Kent which would be twice the height of the Antony Gormley's Angel of the North.  This smaller version has been commissioned by the British Council Collection, and will be looking down The Mall for the next two years.
"The White Horse of Whitehall" according to some of the newspapers
life-sized marble and resin sculpture of a horse
by Mark Wallinger
Located outside the British Council and next to Admiralty Arch.
My very first Labyrinth - #63 at Embankment Tube
Who painted this?

We have a bit of a backlog of posts for "Who painted this?" so I've posted them in the order they were published
Artists Communicating (on Radio, Television and Video)

Keep an eye on my Facebook Page for links to good pieces about artists on radio (usually Blog Talk Radio),  television (usually BBC iPlayer) or video.  These were recent highlights

BBC iPlayer
Blogtalkradio
Happy Birthday AMO Art Chat! Our first show in March of 2012 we had 716 listeners. In a year's time we grew to average over 8300 listeners a show. Total number of listens to our show as of yesterday--101,015.

Art Education
Art Supplies
Art Competitions
Art Exhibitions

Major Exhibitions in London
Major Exhibitions in the USA

Das große Rasenstück / The Large Piece of Turf (1503)
by Albrecht Dürer
Watercolour and body colour, heightened with white body colour
Collection - Albertina in Vienna
Albrecht Dürer had it all: the eye of a Raphael, the brains of a Leonardo, the looks of a cleaned-up Kurt Cobain. He produced the earliest known self-portrait drawing in European art when he was 13, and some of the first stand-alone landscapes.
Art Societies
Open Studios
Art Galleries and Museums
  • On 1 July 2013 the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open on Mondays and will be open seven days a week for the first time since 1971.  To be honest I'm simply amazed that it has had the luxury of not opening seven days a week all this time!
Art History
  • The Art Newspaper - How and why taste changes by David Ekserdjian, Professor of history of art and film at the University of Leicester. He asserts that while an artist’s popularity can wax and wane, there are very few genuine rediscoveries  
  • The Financial Times focuses this weekend on Houses Built for Art Collections - it puts a whole new spin on building an art studio in the garden......
Art Economy and Art Collectors
Opinion Poll

This month's Making A Mark opinion Poll has been about Which are the best artist-quality oil paints?  I'll be reporting on the results next week.

Techies
  • RIP Google Reader is Mashable's post about Google's decision to terminate Google Reader on 1st July 2013.  Swiftly followed by Hey Google, We Still Love Reader.  Interestingly although there were wails when the death knell sounded only 7k have signed the petition to save it - suggesting that people found other RSS readers maybe did the job better!  I'm very happy with newsblur - but wish it had a search capacity!
    • This is the ReplaceReader.com site which is where people are voting for where they're taking their feeds.  Basically there are two feedreaders slogging it out - Feedly and Newsblur and everyone else is nowhere
    • I've transferred to Newsblur - which works well apart from the lack of a search facility.  I'm discovering which of you now have dead feeds for the first time!
    • This is The Old Reader which will work as an alternative for some of those who like this sort of design - it's grown by a factor of 15!
  • If you've got a shivering side column, try clicking either the "more" link or the "Home" link in the Blogger "Followers" widget as either tends to stop it.  Personally I think it's a dastardly scheme by Google to get you to insert their new Google+ Followers widget instead!
  • You can now take a photo of your sketch or artwork on your iPhone and mail it anywhere in the world as a postcard!  See the Bypost app for more details
  • Something is very wrong with Feedburner stats at the moment and I'm hoping it's not ultimately going to go the same way as Google Reader as many are predicting.  I do wish Google would stop buying up firms and then killing them off!
and finally

This is the view you can get of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence on the Google Art project

1 comment:

  1. Wonderful full post, Katherine. I really don't know how you manage it all, but your blog is an amazingly rich resource for anyone interested in art.

    On the Google reader question, I converted to Reeder a week or so ago and am quite enjoying using it. But may just test drive your recommendation as well.

    And thank you for the reminder about the RWS exhibition. Now in my diary for next week.

    ReplyDelete

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