Who's made a mark? #265

Hey ho up she rises @TCMargate pic.twitter.com/NIBmw9xO83

— Grayson Perry (@Alan_Measles) May 19, 2015

Art Competitions

Call for Entries

• The deadline for The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2015 - Call for Entries is 5pm, Monday 15th June 2014
• The deadline for the Jerwood Drawing Prize: Call for Entries is 5pm on 26 June 2015

Selected artists

• The BP Portrait Award 2015 has announced:
• the shortlist for the prizes - see Shortlist for £30,000 BP Portrait Award 2015 announced
• and the Selected Artists - BP Portrait Award 2015
• I did a calculation after the announcement and worked out that Brits lose out in BP Portrait Award 2015 
• The Judging Panel are currently visiting the Shortlist for the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award 2015 and their decision will be announced on 1 July 2015 at an event at Tate Modern.

Other art competitions

You can keep up to date with the major art competitions on my Page (see top menu) - Major UK Art Competitions

I've had it confirmed that:

• the Threadneedle Prize has changed dates and, as such, there will be no exhibition in 2015. Here's the announcement and online submission opens on 13 July 2015, 12 noon

The 2015 Threadneedle Prize exhibition, normally held in September/October each year, is moving to the beginning of February 2016. Online submission opens on 13 July 2015, 12 noon. This change in date will give The Threadneedle Prize even greater visibility. We also plan to tour a selection of the 2016 exhibition to Europe. More details will follow.

• the Derwent Art Prize is not being run this year but you can expect it to be back in 2016. The Call for Entries will go out in January 2016.

Art Exhibitions

Open in London

• You can see A major retrospective of Irish paintings and sculpture at the Mall Galleries until the end of the month.
• The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers exhibition is currently on at the Bankside Gallery - You can see the exhibition images online and the exhibition until  6 June 2015. Glynn Thomas's etchings of Cambridge are making me want to get the plastic out of the wallet! I've just had a major distraction clicking through various places I know well!

Open in the rest of the UK

• I will definitely be paying a visit to the Grayson Perry "Provincial Punk" exhibition at the Turner Contemporary at Margate on the East Coast of Kent with a "beach like Bondi" according to Perry! 
• ITV has got a good interview with him 
• Jonathan Jones however proves himself to be a pratt - who gives the exhibition 2 stars and writes rubbish like this Grayson Perry review – 'Like being trapped in a room full of trendy folk talking bollocks'. The 531 comments make for interesting reading! :)

The idea of ‘Provincial Punk’ is an oxymoron but it encapsulates creatively some sort of spirit in my work that still goes on to this day. It is a very creative force, a willingness to turn things over, to not accept the fashion and to have a bit of fun. It is a kind of teasing rebellion; it is not a violent revolution.”
Grayson Perry

• On the topic of Grayson Perry, there are now traffic jams in Wrabness as the world and his wife and kids turn up to try and see Grayson Perry's house for Essex in Wrabness - see BBC Grayson Perry house: Congestion problems in Wrabness and my blog post about the television programme Grayson Perry's Dream House - tonight on Channel 4 - which was really interesting both in terms of the structure and its content and the way people responded to it. I'm not surprised it's generating crowds - although I guess once the novelty has worn off it will become like Antony Gormley's 100 cast-iron, life-size figures of Another Place on the shifting sands at Crosby Beach.

Open in New York

• There are great pics of the makeover to create Frida Kahlo's garden at the New York Botanical Garden.

Closing soon

Plate 6: The After Party (2014) by Henry Hudson
varnished plasticene on board, 183cm x 245cm

• Hogarth and Henry Hudson is my review of an amazing exhibition of a Hogarthian series of 10 large artworks in varnished plasticine by Henry Hudson - showing until the end of the month at Sotheby's gallery in London. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Do go and see, if you can, at the Sotheby's Gallery.
• It's the last day of the Sargent Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery tomorrow
• The very good 25th anniversary exhibition by some of the artists in the Shirley Sherwood Collection at Jonathan Cooper's Park Walk Gallery in Chelsea closes on 30th May.

Already closed

These were the exhibitions which opened and closed in the last two months

• This was my Review: RWS 'Watercolour Etc' Exhibition at the Bankside Gallery
• The Bigger Picture Exhibition involved the participants in the BBC's Big Painting Challenge
• I visited the UKCPS Annual Exhibition 2015 for the first time in a while - as it came back to London and the Menier Gallery.
• This was my post speculating about Who will win the NEW £15,000 'Conversations Prize'? at the RP's Annual Exhibition and these were the Prizewinners at the 124th Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. 
• This was Daphne Todd at Messums

Opening next month

• The RA Summer Exhibition opens on 8th June and lasts until 16th August
• The Not the Royal Academy Exhibition opens on June 9th at the Llewlleyn Alexander Gallery at the Cut in Waterloo. This is the annual exhibition, inspired by the original Salon des Refuses, which features works originally rejected by the RA Summer Exhibition Selection panel.  
• I'm not quite sure where that leaves the accepted but not hung works - and I know one friend has one of these this year.....

The BP Portrait Award website looks a bit different this year

• The exhibition for the BP Portrait Award opens to the public on 18 June and continues until 20 September at the National Portrait Gallery. As usual I will be doing my normal extensive coverage on this blog og the prizewinners and the exhibition.
• The Annual Exhibition of the New England Art Club opens at the Mall Galleries on 17 June (for Private View) and then continues until Saturday 27th June (10am -5pm; closes 2pm on final day). You can see the Catalogue for the Exhibition online. This provides images of work in the exhibition and also details prices.
• Earlier in the month, the Mall Galleries will be hosting the Annual Exhibition of the Society of Women Artists (5-13 June).  You can see the names of the selected artists on their website
• The Society of Graphic Fine Art has an exhibition - 'Drawn Together' - at Bankside Gallery which runs from 30 June to 5 July.
• A new exhibition Watercolour: Elements of nature opens at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge on 16 June and continues until 27 September. Free admission.  At the same time there will be an exhibition of Ruskin's Turners.  I feel a journey up to Cambridge coming on....

The exhibition includes works by great masters of the medium from its origins to the 20th century, with portrait miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, flower drawings by Pierre Joseph Redouté, as well as a series of stunning landscape watercolours by John Constable, Peter de Wint, John Sell Cotman, Samuel Palmer, J. M. Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and Paul Nash.

Announced for later in the year

The National Portrait Gallery announced a new exhibition will be opening in September - see Simon Schama's The Face of Britain - and selfies

Art Books

• Paul Riley and the magic of watercolour flowers - For those who'd like a different perspective on how paint flowers - this is about a new book, video and exhibition - about the magic of watercolour flowers - by one of my old tutors.

Art Business

• I announced the launch of my new website Art Business - for Artists. I've got more still to do on Art Business for Artists and it's being developed section by section. This month I've been highlighting:
• How to Write an Artist's statement
• How to Write an Artist's CV, Resume or Biography
• I've now added in a new section about Selling Art - and have got the first pages up - of which more anon. 

Art Materials

• Artists and Illustrators has a great article - 7 steps to better pastels - I've been wanting to read for a long time. It's all about how Pastel Society member Sarah Bee uses acrylics, charcoal and gesso can help you get the most out of your pastel art

Botanical Art

• My new website about Botanical Art and Artists has been up for just over a month - and it's changed quite a lot since I first published it
• It now also has a news blog and this post explains how I will use in future to highlight news from botanical artists as well as changes to the website

A news blog for Botanical Art and Artists - featuring news from Botanical Artists
as well as changes to the website

• Last week I also created a new page about Blogging about SBA Diploma Assignments - which has been very well received by ex-students.  This post details which artists have had their past blog posts highlighted alongside the relevant assignment
• For the record, these are the blog posts about last month's annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists

• Review: 30th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists
• Prizewinners at the Society of Botanical Artists' Annual Exhibition 2015
• Society of Botanical Art: Certificates of Botanical Merit 2015

Drawing and Sketching

During April and May London Urban Sketchers visited:

• Kew Gardens - Palm Houses and Pagodas on a sunny sketching day at Kew Gardens
• Silvertown
• Urban Sketchers go to Silvertown
• Urban Sketchers go to Silvertown (part 2)
• St Pauls and the Thames - see St Paul's and the Thames - we've got to do it again!

The next sketchcrawl is Let's Draw Hampstead - 13th June 2015.  

This is the Urban Sketchers London Facebook Group.

Obituaries

• We said goodbye to Sargy Mann 1937 - 2015

Odds and sods

Here are a variety of posts which I can't think of a heading for!

• This was the Advice on Painting from John Singer Sargent
• People are still Drawing and Sketching - Every Day in May - although I've found my drawing has switched to drawing my cat Cosmo.

Cosmo - drawn using pastel sticks in Sketchbook Pro app on my Mini iPad.

• Celebrate a visual artist on the next £20 note - interesting responses to this post on Facebook - but I fail to see why some of the suggestions for female contenders have quite the weight of male visual artists who might be in the running.  Anyway - at the end of the day it will all depend on who gets nominated!
• The Royal Academy of Arts is getting a multi-million pound major overhaul with the help of a Heritage Lottery Grant - A major overhaul for the Royal Academy of Arts campus - and I got to do a Press View with Alan Yentob and a TV crew from the BBC.

Techie stuff 

Photographing artwork

• How to photograph your artwork is a very good article in Artists & Illustrators about photographing artwork which goes beyond the normal stuff that gets written. So far it's been shared 24.5k times!

 Videoing artwork

• In Tested for you: Periscope (iOS app)  Ilaria Rosselli del Turco describes how she experimented with a new app for videoing artists while they work. It was good but looks as if it needs quite a bit of thinking and working out to get it to work well during a live broadcast

Google and websites

• First off - the really important change - which relates to how Google now ranks websites when viewed on mobile devices.  In April - just before the change to the algorithm - I asked Are your sites mobile friendly - or are you facing Mobilegeddon?. Since then Google has been sending out messages - via Google Webmaster Tools - to all those webmasters who need to lick theur sites into shape.
• Last week Google Webmaster Tools morphed into Search Console - see this post for more details from Google Announcing Google Search Console - the new Webmaster Tools

Statcounter Analysis and Review of Search Traffic by Browser

•  Surprisingly Google now generates less than 75% of search stats- see this post by Statcounter  Yahoo gains further US search share in January.  Remember when we thought the world would forever be dominated by Microsoft and Internet Explorer?

Responsive websites

• It was especially good to see an art society taking the rise of mobile browsing and the need for responsive templates seriously.  Brand new website raises design standard for art societies was my post about the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour's new website .

I'm still trying to update websites and I'm still trying to fit in a proper break. It's not working too well so far.

and finally......

As I indicated in 14 good years my cat Cosmo, who starred in Sketching 365, is coming to the end of his life. It's day by day at the moment - with every day after the end of this month being a bonus. Early this week he was really down and today he's been (relatively speaking) quite perkie - and I'm up and down with him also....

If I disappear for a while you'll know why.

Cosmo asleep - drawn using a pen and ink app on my iPad Mini