Looking back at what worked in the art world in 2020

This has to have been one of the most stressful years for artists ever - and yet within that we have seen some remarkable achievements by artists.

In this post I'm going to try and highlight some of what I saw and heard about in 2020 which helped artists keep going....

• Artists Support Pledge
• Portraits for NHS Heroes
• The Art Teachers who learned fast how to deliver art lessons online
• Art Marketing and Website Makeovers
• The Virtual Online Art Exhibitions and Tours
• The Virtual / Online Conferences for Artists
• Online Resources
• My Contribution

Let's all remember going forward that we are not at the end - even with approved vaccines - and it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal. 

So we need even more innovation and endeavour and hard work in 2021 - but if what I've seen in 2020 is anything to go by, there's lots of artists who are up for that!

Artist Support Pledge #artistsupportpledge

Artist Support Pledge - the gifted keep giving

Matthew Burrows started the Artist Support Pledge on on the 16th March 2020 in response to the COVID19 pandemic.

I wrote about it in The Artist Support Pledge in May 2020.  Some artists have been regularly selling small works online all through the pandemic. More than a few professional artists have told me they've had more sales and generated more income this year than in some 'normal' years in the past.

Matthew Burrows was awarded with 

• an MBE in the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours List - for services to the arts during the Covid-19 response

• Personality of the Year in the Apollo Awards 2020

The online selling platform helping artists make a living now has more than 69,000 followers, has produced 447,000 posts and generated around £70m in sales. Burrows, Apollo’s Personality of the Year, was subsequently made an MBE in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours – and his no-frills initiative has been hailed as a lifeline for artists struggling in the wake of Covid-19. Personality of the Year | Apollo Magazine (19 November 2020)

In 2021 I'm going to pledge to do one post a week which will highlight the artwork of at least five artists whose work is posted for sale for £200 or less with the #artistsupportpledge.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we all used other platforms to highlight the works of art that we liked - and continue to help those whose incomes have been decimated due to the lack of exhibitions.

Portraits for NHS Heroes #portraitsfornhsheroes

Royal Ulster Academy sets new standard for Online Annual Exhibitions

The Royal Ulster Academy's website has set a NEW standard for the online annual exhibition.

This is the VIRTUAL 139th Annual Exhibition of the Royal Ulster Academy. 

Virtual Arts Media are providing the virtual exhibition - as they did last year when they created a digital twin of the actual exhibition - with digital images of artwork positioned in precisely the same space of the virtual copy of the gallery. They explain what they do in What is a Virtual Exhibition and show the actual exhibition and digital twin side by side

For me it's 

• a much more convincing replica of an art exhibition and 
• seems to be much easier to navigate than some of the others I have seen. 
• if you click on an artwork while navigating around, it provides a new window with
• details about the artwork, 
• who created it
• the sale price
• how to buy it

For example, it also provides a:

• list of artists by surname - you click the name and it takes you straight to the artwork (very speedily!). I'd be consulting this in the real exhibition if I knew the artists!!
• an exhibition map - click on the room and it takes you straight to the room so that you can start viewing the work

It takes a little getting used to but if you're patient and work how it works it's a very rewarding experience

139th Annual Exhibition of the Royal Ulster Academy

Founded in 1879, the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts (RUA) is the largest and longest established body of practising visual artists in Northern Ireland. One of its founding principles is to organise, promote or join in organising and promoting in any fashion an Annual Exhibition of work by both members and non–members.

For information: This was the Call for Entries for this exhibition and submissions of work completed in the last two years were invited from visual artists aged 18+ working in any medium. 

For those who find navigating technology rather difficult here are some shortcuts to seeing the art.

Click the view/Buy menu option. This takes you to the categories of artwork

There are 263 artworks in total of which there are:

• 159 Paintings
• 29 Sculptures
• 20 Fine Art Prints
• 17 Drawings
• 7 ceramic and glass pieces
• 5 digital artworks
• 4 textiles

I have to say my overall impression is I am impressed by the quality of the artwork in the exhibition.

Ones which stood out for me included the following (and yes I can spot a plant painting at 50 feet!)

• Mater Natura by Jennifer Trouton - which superimposed plants on the body part they help. The series of nine watercolours were made whilst on an artist residency at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University , Suzhou, China and awarded the Watercolour prize at this Year’s Royal Ulster Academy exhibition at the Ulster museum. 
• but where are you REALLY from? by Lynn Kennedy - tackling an issue which maybe passes people by in a land where your origins are so often rooted in religion. Her social commentary includes an impressive painting in the National Gallery of Ireland
• Pulveli by Anushiya Sundaralingam - an interesting monochome paintings of a tangle of plants. The artist is originally from Sri Lamka but now lives and works in Belfast. 
• September Dundrum Bay by Hamish Moyle - a large landscape painting of rural Northern Ireland. A bit of a "feel good" painting for many I suspect.  He seems to have a pretty solid track record of selling paintings of wild flowers in their habitat despite his anti-social website with no proper navigation menu!
• Tea in the time of Coronavirus by Amanda Croft (although a tad overpriced) - which featured in the Belfast Telegraph!
• Fishing Nets by Helen Kerr - which is a batik and stitch textile artwork

Interestingly one of the paintings in the exhibition seems to have been generated by the Sky Portrait Artist of the Week session with Akram Khan - see Akram Khan, dancer and choreographer. by Laura Cronin and see what you think!

"Hold Still" moves offline and onto billboards around the UK

Back in September I wrote about the "Hold Still" digital exhibition on NPG website. Since then the digital exhibition has had over 4.8 million page views to date.

Hold Still is an ambitious community project, launched in May 2020, to create a unique collective portrait of the UK during lockdown.

Today the National Portrait Gallery announced that a Community Exhibition can now be seen on billboards around the country. 

From today, the final selection of portraits, unveiled in a digital exhibition in September, will be:

• exhibited for a period of four weeks on billboard and poster sites across the country, including at bus stops, in high streets and outside train stations. 
• Groups of works will be shown on posters in cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and London. 

• Many of the portraits will also be displayed individually in the entrant’s hometown with locations ranging from Belfast, Liverpool and Southampton to more rural areas such as Blaenau Ffestiniog (Gwynedd), Delabole (Cornwall), Marston Moretaine (Bedfordshire), Knypersle (Staffordshire Moorlands) Oban (Argyll) and Thorpe Audlin (West Yorkshire). 
• Some of the portraits will also feature on community screens in over 1,500 Co-op stores across the UK.
  
• One of the portraits ‘Melanie, March 2020’, taken by Johannah Churchill, has been recreated as a hand-painted mural in Manchester city centre.

All one hundred works will also be on display at Hold Still Exhibition at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire from 23 October until the 6 December 2020.

The exhibition has been led by the Duchess of Cambridge as Patron of the National Portrait Gallery. Today The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited Waterloo in south London to mark the launch of the UK-wide Hold Still community exhibition and viewed the final one hundred Hold Still portraits displayed on billboards outside Waterloo station, one of 112 community exhibition sites in 80 towns, cities and areas across the UK. 

The Hold Still community exhibition sites are in the following towns, cities and areas across the UK. Some locations have more than one community exhibition site.

• A - Aberystwyth, Arundel, Alrewas (National Memorial Arboretum), Ashford (Kent), 
• B - Baldock, Balham, Belfast, Bethnal Green, Bingley, Birmingham, Bishop's Stortford, Bootle, Borehamwood, Bournemouth, Bradford, Bredbury Romiley, Brighton, Bristol,  Brockley, Burgess Hill, Burnt Oak
• C - Cambridge, Cardiff, Carshalton, Cheltenham, Cockenzie And Port Seton, Croydon, Cumnock
• D - Dulwich
• E - Eaglescliffe, East Ham, Eastbourne, Edgware, Edinburgh
• F - Fareham, Finsbury Park, Folkestone, Forest Hill
• G - Gidea Park, Glasgow South, Gosport, Gravesend
• H - Harringay, Hemel Hempstead, Hitchin, Hyde
• K - Kensington
• L - Lancing, Lewes, Litherland, Liverpool
• M - Manchester, Marylebone, 
• N - Norwood, Notting Hill
• O - Oxford
• P - Peterborough Rural, Poole, Preston, Purley, Putney
• R - Ramsgate, Reading, Roehampton, Rotherham
• S - Sale, Southampton, Southfields, St Ives, Stenhousemuir, Stoke On Trent, Sutton
• T - Teddington, Tottenham, 
• W - Walthamstow, Wanstead, Waterloo, Westminster (National Portrait Gallery), Wimbledon, Wokingham

About the Exhibition

Hold Still invited people of all ages from across the UK to submit a photographic portrait, which they had taken during lockdown, in a six-week period during May and June. A panel of judges, including the Duchess of Cambridge and National Portrait Gallery Director, Nicholas Cullinan, selected the final 100 portraits from 31,598 submissions.

Focussed on three core themes – Helpers and Heroes, Your New Normal and Acts of Kindness – the images selected present a unique record of our shared and individual experiences during this extraordinary period of history, conveying humour and grief, creativity and kindness, tragedy and hope.

The exhibition is supported by the Co-op, which launched ‘Co-operate’ in April to help connect vulnerable people to local and national support initiatives and has recently provided emergency relief funding to 4,500 community causes. 

"Hold Still" digital exhibition on NPG website

Earlier this year, HRH Duchess of Cambridge - who has been the Patron of the National Portrait Gallery since 2012 - asked everybody to send images for the Hold Still Exhibition - to reflect what life was like during lockdown

Today a digital exhibition of the 100 portrait photographs selected from the 31,598 entries have been unveiled on the National Portrait Gallery website

the images present a unique record of our shared and individual experiences during this extraordinary period of history, conveying humour and grief, creativity and kindness, tragedy and hope.

Images #1-3 of the 100 selected for the digital exhibition "Hold Still"

Hold Still: Three Core Themes

There are three core themes to the exhibition

• Helpers and Heroes, 
• Your New Normal and 
• Acts of Kindness.

Click here to view the images individually - and do take the time to read the narratives alongside each. Sometimes they are not what they seem.

View them all together in the video (below) released today by the National Portrait Gallery.

The final 100 present a unique and highly personal record of this extraordinary period in our history. From virtual birthday parties, handmade rainbows and community clapping to brave NHS staff, resilient keyworkers and people dealing with illness, isolation and loss. The images convey humour and grief, creativity and kindness, tragedy and hope - expressing and exploring both our shared and individual experiences.

Please note this exhibition includes text and images recording people’s recent experiences, which some visitors might find upsetting. If you have been affected by any of the issues reflected in the exhibition, and feel you need support, please click here for some suggested sources of support.

How the exhibition came about

The call for entries for the exhibition was launched by The Duchess of Cambridge and the Gallery back in May

Hold Still invited people of all ages, from across the UK to submit a photographic portrait which they had taken during lockdown. The project aimed to capture and document the spirit, the mood, the hopes, the fears and the feelings of the nation as we continued to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.

More images of lockdown in 2020

Judging Panel

The Judges

The Hold Still judging panel included: 

• The Duchess of Cambridge - who is a keen photographer and is a Patron of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Photographic Society
• Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery - who's grown a beard for the occasion!
• Lemn Sissay MBE, writer and poet - who some will remember sat for a Portrait in the Final of Sky Portrait Artist of the Year 2020 - in the National Portrait Gallery
• Ruth May, Chief Nursing Officer for England and 
• Maryam Wahid, photographer.

The criteria used for assessment of the images by the panel focused on the emotions and experiences they convey rather than on their photographic quality or technical expertise.

You can 

• hear about the selection process (in what is currently a really badly edited video version of a Zoom meeting! It NEEDS SORTING!)
• review the Director's Choice - personally I'd have been more interested in the Duchess's choice!

The Exhibition

A selection of the photographs featured in the digital exhibition will also be shown in towns and cities across the UK later in the year.


Note: International law firm Taylor Wessing are supporting the Hold Still project in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery. They are long-term supporters of the Gallery and have sponsored the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize for the past 12 years.

New VIRTUAL Exhibition of Portraits for NHS Heroes

One of the things I discovered this week when investigating the scope to produce online exhibitions was that there is now an online exhibition of portraits of NHS Heroes by 15 artists who all members of the Contemporary British Portrait Painters (CBPP)

Still of the Video of the exhibition 
GO TO https://thenetgallery.com/portraits-for-nhs-heroes/ TO SEE THE REAL THING

Tom Croft - the portrait painter who initiated the Portraits of NHS Heroes Initiative - partnered with The Net Gallery to create a VIRTUAL Exhibition showcasing portraits of NHS staff, created during the current crisis.

The virtual exhibition does two great things

• first it celebrates frontline workers through portraiture and 
• second it will help raise funds for NHS Charities Together, to help support to the ongoing COVID-19 relief effort.

The Covid-19 Urgent Appeal was launched by NHS Charities Together to acknowledge and support NHS staff, volunteers and volunteers impacted by Covid-19 across the country. The money raised is funding grants to help NHS charities support NHS staff, volunteers and patients in ways above and beyond what NHS funding can ordinarily provide, including wellbeing support and costs associated with travel, parking, accommodation and volunteer expenses. It also provides somewhere comfortable so staff and volunteers can take a break, use of electronic-tablets so patients, staff and volunteers can stay in contact with loved ones, and counselling support to protect mental health and help staff and volunteers process what they are dealing with.

The exhibition comprises 15 portraits of NHS staff. Some are painted in their normal work clothes. Others are painted in what they wore while treating and caring for Covid patients

The portraits were scanned and printed using a high res printer and then installed in the interior of the Fitzrovia Chapel in London, the former chapel of Middlesex Hospital and then both were scanned and the exhibition was constructed.

Each portrait has two circles bottom left and bottom right

• bottom left provides the name of the worker and a quotation from them
• bottom right provides a pop-out of the portrait with the title of the portrait and the name of the artist 

This is what you see when you click on the right hand circle below each portrait

There are also circles on the floor which allow you to navigate where you want to "stand" to view the paintings. Use you mouse to scan left and right.

This is what Tom said on his page about the initiative

So who should be immortalised today? Who should line the walls of galleries and have future generations look back on as the people who really made a difference and stepped up, in our latest darkest hour. The people who put self interest and self preservation to one side and literally risked their lives knowingly on a daily basis for our well being. The NHS workers. Absolutely.

So I posted a video on Instagram saying I would like to paint a free portrait to the first NHS Key Worker to contact me. I also suggested that other portrait artists might like to offer one too. Artists were asked to post their portraits under the hashtag #portraitsfornhsheroes so everyone could be seen online in a virtual exhibition. Then at the end of the pandemic, when restrictions are lifted and mass gatherings are allowed again, we could have a wonderful exhibition to celebrate and say thank you, to the heroes of the NHS. Hopefully this part will happen in time…

You can follow #portraitsfornhsheroes on Instagram - and see more portraits of NHS Heroes. There are now over 12,000 posts which carry this hashtag.  See some of them below

My top seven from The Figurative Art Fair

In the age of Coronavirus, the online art fair becomes the norm.

The Figurative Art Fair

Thus we have a new online art fair in The Figurative Art Fair - which is currently online on the Mall Galleries website.

It comprises

• 248 works for sale 
• by around 100 elected members of the country’s leading national art societies, including:
• The Pastel Society (PS)
• Royal Society of British Artists (RBA)
• Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI)
• Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP)
• New English Art Club (NEAC)
• Royal Society of Marine Artists (RSMA)
• Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA)
• Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI)

In the decade of “The Triumphant Return of Figurative Art” (The New York Times, 2015), and at a time of isolation, the societies have come together to celebrate figurative art, contemporary artists, and the spirit of artistic collaboration in their first-ever “figurative” art fair, outside of gallery walls, exclusively online.

All works are for sale and all works are also available for despatch immediately - with FREE delivery!

It's interesting how some artwork I started out to like - and then the photograph was not up to standard and I switched off straight away.  It really highlights why excellent photography is required if you're going to exhibit online. I hasten to add that most have excellent photographs.

Works which caught my eye include the following.

Quince by Charlotte Sorapore

Oil on gesso panel (framed) 35 x 29 cm

This is the one I liked the best - in part because of a really excellent photograph which revealed the wonderful surface of the painting and the mark-making. The light and the optical mixing are also wonderful. A skilled painting of a very simple subject

I'd buy it if I could afford it.

Quince by Charlotte Sorapore

Shallows by Ruth Stage 

Egg tempera (framed) 73 x 83 cm

I'm a big fan of Ruth Stage's egg tempera painting. I wanted to include two but restricted myself to one.  She has a happy knack of abstracting the real and layering up her paintings with paint and marks that make it intensely interesting such that you want to keep on looking at the surface and not just what it represents.

Shallows by Ruth Stage

Leaning Hawthorns by Sarah Bee

Acrylic on gesso primed mount board (framed) 68 x 68 cm

This is a typical Sarah Bee - acrylic underpainting of old and twisted trees and then developed on top through the use of pastel. Each one always looks fresh.

Bonfire at Akeld by Frances Bell

Oil on board (unframed) 36 x 56 cm

Frances works with a very muted and cool palette - and yet always seems to find light within her subject matter

Bonfire at Akeld by Frances Bell

Moment of Majesty, Mt Elijah above Ano Boularii, Sundown by Toby Wiggins

Oil on canvas (framed) 96 x 144 cm

This is big - and reminds me a lot of paintings of New Mexico by both Georgia O'Keeffe (see Georgia O'Keeffe's landscapes of northern New Mexico) and Lydia Baumann (see Painting Georgia O'Keeffe Country). Desert landscapes as a subject are hugely under-rated.

Moment of Majesty, Mt Elijah above Ano Boularii, Sundown by Toby Wiggins

Alcazar Gardens (Seville) by David Curtis (sold)

Oil(framed) 38 x 38 cm

This reminds me of when I visited the Alcazar Gardens and did a pastel painting plein air.

However this is an oil painting. I want to see the brush strokes in every plein air oil painting - and in this one I can. When I look at the enlarged painting it's as if it's in front of me.

I note it has sold and I'm far from surprised.

Social Distancing on the Trent by Chris Myers 

Watercolour (framed) 54 x 102 cm

The title of this one made me smile - because it provides a record of a particular time - and yet it was painted last year. A neat example of how a change of title suddenly makes a painting very relevant and contemporary.

Social Distancing on the Trent by Chris Myers

Society of Botanical Artists - first online virtual exhibition

Today Plantae 2020 should have opened at the Mall Galleries. Instead the SBA's annual open exhibition opened ONLINE. 

• That's 426 artworks by 221 artists!
• It's probably the biggest ever exhibition of botanical art - even if it is online 
• It will probably get the biggest audience of any botanical art exhibition ever!

I've written very many times about the annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists on this blog (see this page for links to the reviews) - until I started my website Botanical Art and Artists and switched to writing about botanical art exhibitions on its news blog.

However every exhibition I've written about has been one I've seen in person and photographed and reviewed.

This year - for the very first time - Plantae 2020 the annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists can only be viewed online

However it can also be viewed three ways! You can

• View by Artwork - it starts a slideshow of all the 426 images in the exhibiton (+ music!)
• View by Thumbnails - you can choose which artwork you want to look at. There are 11 pages of thumbnails on my screen. This is what one page of thumbnails looks like.
• View by Artist - you can see all the entries by one artist.

I'll be reviewing the exhibition on Friday - on my Botanical Art News blog - and looking at the artists who got selected for the exhibition tomorrow.

If you enjoy botanical art, you might like to take a look - and maybe come back for more.

COVID-19 & ART #8: Video Binge - Raphael in Rome

A major exhibition about Raphael opened at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome four days before the Italian lockdown began.

Raphael of Urbino (March 28 or April 6, 1483 – April 6, 1520)

Raffaello opened on 5th March and was due to run until 2nd June 2020. It marks the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance artist’s death and includes important loan.

A monographic exhibition with over two hundred masterpieces among paintings, drawings and comparative works, dedicated to Raffaello on the 500th anniversary of his death, which took place in Rome on April 6, 1520 at the age of just 37 years old.

The exhibition, which finds inspiration particularly in the Raffaello's fundamental Roman period which consecrated him as an artist of incomparable and legendary greatness, tells his whole complex and articulated creative path with richness of detail through a vast corpus of works, for the first time exposed all together.

Self portrait (crop) by Raphael 1499
Ashmolean Museum

Very many loans from premier art galleries around Europe and North America contributed paintings and drawings by Raphael on loan to the exhibition. These included:

Italy

• the National Galleries of Ancient Art, 
• the National Art Gallery of Bologna, 
• the Museum and the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, 
• the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, 
• the Brescia Museums Foundation

Outside Italy

• the Vatican Museums, 
• the Louvre, 
• the National Gallery of London, 
• the Prado Museum, 
• the National Gallery of Art in Washington, 
• the Albertina in Vienna, 
• the British Museum, 
• the Royal Collection, 
• the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, 
• the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille.

Videos about Raphael and of the exhibition

Major efforts have been made by the museum, via its YouTube channel,to ensure people can see the exhibition online.

Below are some videos about the exhibition. They're in Italian - but the first has English subtitles.

Raffaello Principe delle arti (Raphael Prince of the arts)

Una passeggiata in mostra (A walk in the exhibition)

This video - of a walk through the exhibition -  has been watched by nearly half a million viewers in the last few days! (see Take a virtual tour of once-in-a-lifetime Raphael show in Rome that closed after four days due to coronavirus)



According to Wikipedia and its sources

Raphael painted several of his works on wood support (Madonna of the Pinks) but he also used canvas (Sistine Madonna) and he was known to employ drying oils such as linseed or walnut oils. His palette was rich and he used almost all of the then available pigments such as ultramarine, lead-tin-yellow, carmine, vermilion, madder lake, verdigris and ochres. In several of his paintings (Ansidei Madonna) he even employed the rare brazilwood lake, metallic powdered gold and even less known metallic powdered bismuth.