Art Talks Online & Webinars for Artists

I find I'm signing up for more and more ONLINE TALKS about art and artists. I've just signed up for two more! 

• Hokusai's late works: the block-ready drawings | British Museum (Friday 5th November 6pm) 
• Lucy Smith | Waterlilies, Waders and Watercolour: The Journey of a Botanical Artist | Kew Mutual Improvement Society (who use Eventbrite for ticket bookings) (Monday 8th November 6pm)

This post is about:

• What is a webinar
• Webinars for Artists
• Webinars by Art Societies - and Artists
• TIPS for signing up for an event - or hosting your own

What's in a Webinar?

Webinar is short for Web Seminar - and they started within the context of educational institutions and teaching / training / engaging with target audiences.

A webinar is

“a live online educational presentation during which participating viewers can submit questions and comments.”

It takes place at a set time on a specific date and they usually last an hour. Those speaking generally are experts in their field and/or the topic of the talk

Some are free and some require a small fee.

Some are recorded and those who have signed up for them - particularly if they have paid - can sometimes view online via another link for a short period of time. Which helps enormously if you want to hear the talk but have a commitment clash with the date and time.

Some pre-recorded webinars which are kept accessible can generate a lot of traffic for those host.
 

Webinars for Artists 

There are more and more webinars relevant to artists

• either in terms of art from a practical perspective
• or learning more about art history - popular with major art galleries and museums

The great thing is it really doesn't matter where you live - you can access from anywhere!

Here are some of the places which do live talks / webinars - typically via Zoom.

• Online Talks and Conversations | National Gallery
• Online Events | Tate - which include online courses
• Virtual Events | Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Online Events/Experiences | Art Fund
• Performing and Visual Arts Seminars Online | Eventbrite - Shame that they lump performing arts in with Visual Arts. However Eventbrite does have the advantage of also having location filters.
• Visual Artists Ireland - Online Events - used for professional development. They have a model "how Zoom works" page!

Interestingly there is no way of picking up on Online Events at the British Museum besides following via Facebook and keeping an eye out!

By and large, you can tell how much webinars have permeated the thinking of art galleries and museums by whether or their Events Menu has an "Online" option

• if you can filter events using "Online" they've been doing it for a while and probably have quite a good range of online events on offer
• If you search on their website for "online talks" and nothing comes up, then they are now switched on to the latest method of communicating with their target audiences - which means they have a learning curve to climb too....

They're also used for Virtual Open Days for various art educational courses

An upcoming example is the Courtauld's Graduate Diploma in the History of Art Virtual Open Day

Webinars by Art Societies - and Artists

Why don't more art societies do webinars?

Good question - why don't they? 

An introduction to Japanese Art on Making A Mark

One of the most popular of my themed projects related to Japanese art and artists - and Hokusai and Hiroshige in particular - and the impact this art had on later artists. 

This post highlights my past blog posts on these topics

The Making A Mark Japanese Art project

South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifū kaisei) By Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849)
also known as Red Fuji, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)
Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 9 5/8 x 14 in. (24.4 x 35.6 cm)

Introducing Japanese Art

Below are links to the various posts about Japanese art which have appeared on Making A Mark. 

The majority are associated with an art project I undertook in 2008 to research Japanese art and find out more about the main artists associated with ukiyo-e.

The Making A Mark project serves as an introduction to Japanese Art and ukiyo-e - the Japanese wood block print. 

A significant element of my interest related to the compositional devices used in japanese art - and how these went on to influence western art in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

I created the blog posts from various resources I found online - and I also created a website to record the links as I progressed with the project. 

Each of the links below is explained in the short descriptions

The influence of Japanese Art - a long detailed post!

• There's something about Japanese Art which draws me in. I'm not sure quite what it is however I'm very sure that learning more about it will help me with the development of my own drawings and artwork. It had a significant impact on the artists who I studied last year so I feel that being open to its influence can only be beneficial. 
• I'm going to look first at resources and then at how I might usefully frame my approach to this project.
• These include:
• books about Japanese art
• profiles of individual artists
• Context for the development of ukiyo-e
• Compositional devices learned from Japan
• Formats derived from Japan
• Subject matter
• Making connections - between Japanese art and other artists, notably Van Gogh, Whistler, Degas and Cassatt

The concepts and characteristics of ukiyo-e

This week, I'm going to try and summarise what seem to be the subjects and characteristics of the Japanese wood block print - ukiyo-e. I'm going to move from overview through to detail as I work through this project so I'm starting with the big picture.

• This is an attempt an overview of the subject matter.
• Then I'm going to use the western conventions of elements and principles of composition to organise new information so that hopefully it makes more sense to me within a more familiar context.

The elements of ukiyo-e 

• This post aims to provide an overview of the different elements of design used in a Japanese wood block print - ukiyo-e. (For an explanation of the elements of design see this post Composition - The Elements of Design)

Principles of design and composition and ukiyo-e 

• My intention was to do an overview about the principles informing the design of Japanese art and prints - but I'm overwhelmed and becoming aware of how absorbing this project might become! My new aim is to set down some initial impressions - and I'll revisit this topic again towards the end of this project.
• I'm also trying to relate a Japanese way of making pictures to western concepts of what's important in terms of Principles of Design (as discussed in the last project) Again this is more about me finding a way to understand what's going on initially rather than saying the western way of looking at things is best. As we'll see as this project progresses, there's an awful lot of western art which adopted conventions which originated in the East.

A fish for Good Friday

• I came across this fish in a book I bought last Friday. It's called Japonisme - Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West, Lionel Lambourne, Phaidon Press. Lionel Lambourne OBE is the former Head of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1986-1993) and a curator.

The Visual Translation of Japan in Late 19th-Century Paris

• Japonism is the term used for the influence of Japanese art in the west. This post is part of my Japanese Art project and is a combination of my own initial research on this topic and notes I made at a seminar I attended at the National Gallery in February called Gained in Translation: The Visual Translation of Japan in Late 19th-Century Paris - given by Karly Allen.
• Whistler, Tissot, Monet, Manet and Degas were all buying up Japanese prints. Comparisons were made with the great artists of the western traditions of printing eg Durer. Europeans were 'discovering' Japanese art - which of course already existed even if the western world didn't know about it! Many of the artists developed very significant collections of Japanese Art

 Japanese Art and ukiyo-e: How do you make a wood block print?

• This blog post is part of my project on Japanese Art (see other posts) and is concerned with how Japanese wood block prints associated with ukiyo-e were made. It contains an overview of what they are and how the prints were made and provides links to further information.

Japanese Art - drawing the Chokushi Mon in Kew Gardens #1

• We visited the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew this week and I attempted to draw the Japanese Gateway (the Chokushi-Mon) while at the same time trying to remember all the things I'd been learning as part of my Japanese Art Project. This post is about I designed my sketch and the things I now need to do to translate it into a more formal drawing.

The Art of Hiroshige

• Throughout my Japanese Art project, I've become more and more aware that Hiroshige produced some really stunning woodblock prints and excelled at landscapes. So for my last post of April I'm going to focus on Ando Hiroshige aka Utagawa Hiroshige.

Later posts on the topic of Japanese Art

Hokusai, Van Gogh and the iris paintings (2009)

I've been studying an expert - Vincent Van Gogh - who, in turn took pointers from another expert - the Japanese artist Hokusai. This post comments on their various approaches to iris paintings.

Exhibition review: Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy of Arts (2009)

• This is the third of a series of exhibitions dedicated to Japanese Artists and Printmakers to be held at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints (2012) 

• This is an Asian Art Museum video about Great Japanese Prints by ukiyo-e printmakers Hokusai and Hiroshige

OASC for Metropolitan Museum of Art Images (2014)

• This includes who to locate the the ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai

Refreshed Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art at the V&A reopens (November 2015) 

• the Victoria & Albert Museum has one of the foremost and comprehensive collections of Japanese Arts in the world.

Tomorrow I'll reproduce one of the websites I produced which is no longer online.

Resources for Art Lovers - Hockney, Turner and Hokusai

A Turneresque sunset
coloured pencil, 4" x 4"
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Yesterday I published the latest in a series of sites I'm developing for specific artists I've studied or will be studying this year. These are:

• David Hockney - Resources for Art Lovers
• JMW Turner - Resources for Art Lovers
  

(Update Jan 2026: Links to former Resources for Art Lovers sites I created have been converted to Internet Archive/Wayback Machine ones as these no longer exist)

I comment on these below - together with comments about a couple of tasks involved with setting up a new lens

• Each new lens requires a mini picture. This needs to be clearly associated with the subject of the lens but also recognisable when small - and hence distinctive within the lensroll. I've started doing my own mini versions of something distinctive about individual artists and I've included new icon images for four lenses in this post.
• At the end of this post, I've included a tip about the use of tags for all those people who are developing their own squidoo lenses.
  

I hope those who are interested enjoy the new lenses.

David Hockney - Resources for Art Lovers

As a number of people will be aware I rather like David Hockney and have posted about him, his portraits, his exhibitions and his sketchbooks on this blog a few times.

The new site provides the holy grail - otherwise known as the link to his authorised website which I spent years looking for on the internet! There exists a small group of Hockneyphiles - of which i'm a member - who swop links to good sites about Hockney when we find one and these are included too (but please do check to see if I've left any out inadvertently).

The icon for this one was kick started by the graphic format used for the title of for his book about his early years. I just couldn't work out how to do a mirror reflection of the letters so did this instead!

J.M.W Turner - Resources for Art Lovers

This is an artist I'm aiming to study later this year - although he'll probably crop up earlier in relation to both the composition and colour projects. It includes enough links to be published but will be acquiring more as the year progresses.

I'm rather pleased with my rather loose Turneresque sunset (see top) and am quite taken with the idea of trying a few more! I think Turner's style is going to work very well with my preference for optical mixing. It also works rather well as an exemplification of some of the elements and principles of design!

Hokusai and Japanese Art - Resources for Art Lovers

As I indicated in one of my weekly posts, I published two lenses in December which relate to the next project on Japanese Art, Ukiyo-e and Japonisme.

• Japanese Art and Artists - Resources for Art Lovers
• Hokusai - Resources for Art Lovers
  

However, as of yesterday, I finally managed to get rid of their squid icon images and they acquired their own images for their iconic pictures and so have now been added into my Group Lens as well - Artists in History - Resources for Art Lovers.

I've used the Giant Wave for the Hokusai lens and another of his works - a view of Mount Fuji - for the Japanese Art lens.

Crops of images of the 'Great Wave' and one of the views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai
4" x 4", coloured pencil
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I think the thing which I find interesting about the icons as tinypics is that it really reveals which are strong images - in design and composition terms - and which 'lose' the viewer irrespective of the quality of the work used. Of course, this is a lesson which can be equally applied to artwork

A tip for those developing Squidoo lenses (Update - Squidoo is no more, no longer relevant)

My main reason for using and publishing squidoo lens is so that I have a safe and organised way to store all my links to topics I'm interested in. And everytime I have a computer which fails I'm thankful that I now am able to store information outside my computer. So I'd be using this webware even if it didn't publish to the world at large!

However I also like sharing information and it's always seemed pretty silly to me to collect information for future use if you don't then share it around with those who are interested if there is an easy way of doing this. Which there is and therefor it's what I do - and why you see the links to the squidoo lenses in the right hand column of this blog.

The importance of 'tags'

One of the interesting tasks when publishing a lens is to think about which 'tags' to use so that others interested in a topic can find a lens.

Tags work in much the same way as categories or labels on blogs - tags are one of the things which help to get your lens found by people interested in the topic. Search engines like them as they effectively act as key words - so long as they match content and are a way of the search engines finding the sites most likely to satisfy the search queries. See these two posts for why labels are important when using Blogger

• Why it's a good idea to use labels in Blogger
• New Blogger Update #3: labels in Blogger
  

In Squidoo, you can have up to 40 tags for each lens.

At the outset I try to think of all the ways I'd describe the topics covered in the lens and include what seem to be the more important ones as tags. Periodically I then do a review of all search terms used in the previous 30 days by people who have visited the lens and compare these to the tags in use and revise as required. You'll find that the traffic screen in the admin section for each lens provides the data about how many people use which terms.

• To find your tags: check the right hand column in 'edit' mode and then click on the 'edit' icon next to the tags
• To review the statistics and traffic for different search terms - click on 'check my statistics' in the toolbox or access via the dashboard - and then review the traffic menu. Stats for the last 7 days are shown automatically. Use the drop down menu to change the number of days of visits you are viewing.