The Louvre Museum in Paris

View of the Louvre Museum in Paris from a window on its upper floors

One of the museums I spent a lot of time in while in Paris was the Louvre Museum which is the most popular museum in the world.

The Louvre is physically huge, its collection is very extensive - and huge - and it's the most visited art museum in the world. It had 8.5 million visitors in 2008 and that figure is expected to increase to 10 million in the next five years.

Some statistics

The Louvre contains 35,000 works of art in eight departments; the permanent collections occupy more than 645,000 square feet of exhibition space............In the first five months of 2009, 167 works of art valued at €38.6 million, or about $50.9 million, entered the museum. This was in part made possible by the soaring number of visitors
New York Times - The Louvre

According to the Museum's Director, Henri Loyrette

If you want to see everything you must walk 14 kilometres
Henri Loyrette - New York Times - On a Mission to Loosen Up the Louvre

That's 8 miles! Consequently, there's absolutely no point in trying to get round all of it - it's just far too big and even walking around it all at top speed would take you a very long time. The trick is to be selective - and to know what you can find before you vsiit.

I've developed a new information site The Louvre - Resources for Art Lovers which helps to provide some guidance to what the museum covers and how to access what you might want to see a little bit more easily than you can on their new website - which is excellent in many ways but also buries important stuff!. I'm anticipating developing it quite a bit but it's now in a fit state to publish.

What to see

Initially I've just focused on paintings - and I've highlighted some of the collections. However there is a lot more to the Louvre than paintings. I think of it as being what you would get if you merged the British Museum and the National Gallery in London.

Louvre: crowds lining up to see the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo
all photos copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Sadly most people visit with a view to seeing a very few pieces - the famous ones. Hence you get huge crowds around items like the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo - a lot of them people in big groups doing the 'highlights'.

80 percent of the people only want to see the Mona Lisa

However it was interesting to find that another fine painting by Leonardo da Vinci lay just outside the Mona Lisa room - and hadn't drawn a crowd for the painting - but had a few people stopping to see how the artist who was producing a copy was getting on! I don't know what that says about most of the visitors...........

Interestingly the New York Times commented on this phenomena recently in At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. Which I found fascinating particularly since I was both snapping and looking!

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

I sketch in galleries in London - but then I know where to find the sketching stools. I haven't yet located them in the Louvre and I didn't see any in use either. So maybe they need to reintroduce the sketching stool and allow people to sketch as well as photograph and paint the art?

Get away from the main attractions and the main painting galleries are actually very pleasant places to view art - and not at all crowded. Over on the top floors of the Richelieu were people who were much more interested in the art. Good for getting to overhear some informed views!

What I did find on this visit was that I began to appreciate much more why some artists got tired of the very large history paintings which dominated French art for a long time. Which is helping me enormously with an excellent book - The Judgement of Paris by Ross King - that I'm currently reading - it's the story of the revolutionary decade prior to Impressionism and the way the French art scene behaved prior to the breakaway.

Louvre Museum Photography Policy

As I did for the Musee d'Orsay, in order to explain why I've got quite so many photographs of the interior of the museum and various works of art I'm going to highlight the photography policy.

They have a new Regulation regarding photography in the museum which is as follows

Still and video photography is permitted for private, noncommercial use only in the galleries housing the permanent collection. The use of flash or other means of artificial lighting is prohibited.

Photography and filming are not permitted in the temporary exhibition galleries. The same restrictions apply to the photographing or filming of technical installations and equipment.

composite of still life paintings in the Louvre
photos copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I decided to be quite focused while photographing work in the Louvre - which explains why I have been able to develop these dedicated Flickr sets to share with those unable to visit.

The wonders of digital photography and very big storage cards is I didn't think twice about photographing the work AND the label so I knew who was the artist and when it was painted. for me, there is nothing more irritating than visiting a museum, finding a painting which sticks in my head, having a photo of it but also having absolutely no idea who it is by!

• my Louvre set of photos on Flickr
• My Louvre set of still life paintings on Flickr (I've still got work to do to finish labelling all the images)
• My Louvre set of paintings and pastels by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779)

Access: You can find all you want to know about practical aspects of visiting in this section of my new site - The Louvre - practical information for the visitor. €9 will get you access to all parts for one day. If you've got children, it's worth noting all visitors under the age of 18 get in free. It also seems to have become very disability focused which is good!

Sketching at the Louvre

You can see my sketches done while in the Louvre on my sketchbook blog - see A Day in the Musée du Louvre



Links:

• Louvre Museum website
• The Louvre - Resources for Art Lovers
• Wikipedia - Louvre

Shortlist for Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2009 announced

Images of the works shortlisted for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2009
copyright the artists / courtesy of Parker Harris

Six artists have been shortlisted for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2009. This competition is designed to encourage creative representational painting and promote the skill of draughtsmanship. It attracts prize money totalling £22,500.

I'm struck by how the six works although varied in style seem to fit together - indicating to me that there may have been more of a unity of vision and agreement among the judges this year. In big prize exhibitions I'm more used to seeing selections which tend to be quite diverse. They usually suggest to me, to put it bluntly, that that there may have been some trade-offs prior to works being narowed down to the final shortlist. However, I see a different 'big picture' this year.

I haven't been able to track down all the artists (see hyperlinks below), however my other initial impression is that the judges have maybe selected a younger set of artists than hitherto. Not emerging artists per se - more artists of the nineties. For example, Toby Wiggins has been around for a little while and has won prizes prior to this, I very much admired his work when he won the BP Travel Award in 2007 and his work was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.

I wish I'd got the sizes for the different works (I'm asking for them). When they are all diminished down to the same thumbnail it's difficult to know which works might be admired for their scale - whether large or small.

The six works and artists are:

• (top left) The secret place (oil on canvas, 183 x 168 cm) by Lisa Wright
• (top middle and right) Top knots ( oil on linen, 137 x 117 cm) by Anna Gardiner
  
• (top right) Bluebell Wood Twilight (oil on canvas, 115 x 125 cm) by Emma Howarth
• (bottom left) Suspended animation (oil on canvas, 84 x 84 cm) by Toby Wiggins
• (bottom middle) Natural Philosophy (oil on board, 91 x 71 cm) by Michael De Bono
• (bottom right) The ending of the day (oil on board, 84 x 61 cm) by Lorna Vahey
  

Prizes: The First Prize of £15,000, Young Artist Prize of £2,500 and Runner-Up Prizes will be announced and awarded by Angela Flowers at the Private View on Monday 16th November.

The judges this year were artists Mick Rooney RA, Daphne Todd OBE PPRP NEAC and Susan Wilson; Director of the Flowers Gallery, Angela Flowers and Andrew Wilton, visiting research fellow at Tate Britain.

Selected artists: Last month in 82 works selected for Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize I published the names of the artists chosen for the exhibition. The works were selected from 800 entries.

Details of the exhibition which opens in the City of London next week are below.

Links:

• Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2009 - Exhibition is at Painters’ Hall, 9 Little Trinity Lane, London EC4V 2AD from 13th to 30th November 2009. Open Monday to Saturday 10am to 4pm. Nearest tube:Mansion House. Admission Free. Email lps@parkerharris.co.uk or call 01372 462190 for more information
• Painter Stainers
  

Making A Mark is now on Facebook

I'm giving Facebook another whirl. Two years ago I was deterred by their governance arrangements and slack attitude to certain activities and haven't been back for a very long while.

However yesterday I fired it up and took another look around - at the new dashboard and other developments. I've decided to give it a try for at least two weeks (maybe longer) to see if it has any sort of positive benefits for me. I'm certainly not one for joining things simply because everybody else does - however I will try new things. However I only stay if they are things that add benefit!

Anyway - on to the new links and developments

My personal page on Facebook is Katherine Tyrrell (Making A Mark). You can only see this one if you login to Facebook and are friended by me (I think). Basically I friend people who comment on this blog and who I've grown to know through blogging (or they're friends from other parts of my life).

Making A Mark - as 'a website brand' - now has a fan page on Facebook in its own right (see right) - and this is public.

I'm not too sure what I'm doing with this as yet and I'd be very grateful for any tips from those who've already set up fan pages. Please tell me if I'm doing anything wrong! I'm sure others would also like any tips about how do a fan page.

The reason I set up the fan page is to try and have a site which collates information about news and new items from the various sites I've developed. Currently this is a bit of a problem for me as I've now got well over a hundred sites related to 'Making A Mark' and the resources for artists and art lovers that I've developed - and I need somewhere that acts as a feed.

Do please add yourself as a fan if you're interested. (However, you have to be a member of Facebook to 'connect' with this page.)

A new way of reading my blogs - For those of you on Facebook, you can now also find both Making A Mark and Making A Mark Reviews on networked blogs which is the an application which has been developed for Facebook for importing blog feeds. This means that you can choose to follow one or the other (or both) of these blogs and pick up the feeds from the blog tab on both sites. It's still going to be the shortened feed just the same as it is in emails or feedreaders. (For those of you who don't know why I have a short feed, it's because I have to deal with major theft problems every time I publish a full feed!)

Help please - If you're already using networked.blogs on Facebook I'd be grateful to know what you think of it and its pros and cons for artists (particularly in relation to marketing their art) - see Call for reviews - NetworkedBlogs on Facebook

Any other views about Facebook? Please feel free to comment below as to what you like and don't like. Like I said - this is an experiment for me - I still need to be persuaded..........

MAM Poll (Nov. 2009): What makes a good art teacher?

This month the Making A Mark poll tries to identify what makes somebody a good art teacher.

What are the characteristics of a good art teacher?

Peter Monkman - art teacher and winner of the BP Portrait Prize 2009
photo copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I guess most of us have had a teacher who at some point in our lives has a made a very real difference to who we re today.

The question I'm posing this month is what are the attributes of a good art teacher? What makes them somebody who can make a real difference to how their students develop and the art they make?

Do you think one or more of the following factors might be important? This month's poll allows for multiple responses - please try and work out which are most important.

• active artist; produces good art
  
• very knowledgeable (eg art history / specific media)
  
• good at demonstrations / explaining techniques
• tightly focused classes (beginners; masterclass etc)
• adapts teaching to student's learning style
• enthusiastic/passionate about art
• strong belief: everybody can make art/draw/paint
• promotes originality/creativity (not just copying)
• promotes learning and self-evaluation
• sets appropriate / challenging goals
• encouraging - provides constructive feedback
• effective communicator

How do I vote in the poll - and where is it?

If you'd like to participate in the poll you can vote for more than one response in this month's poll which is in the right hand column - just above the Blogger Followers widget.

Most of the people responding to this poll will have very different experiences of art teaching - from those who have only been in art class at school a very long time ago to people who have recently graduated with degrees in fine art. However that doesn't matter in the least. What's important is what YOU think makes a good art teacher.

Do please feel free to comment on:

• anything important that I've left out and/or
  
• your own personal experience of how important any specific aspect is
  

When commenting it would be helpful if you would identify whether you're a past or present student of art and/or whether you are an art teacher or tutor.

Deadline for responses: The poll closes early on 30th November. The analysis of results will be posted later the same day.

1st November 2009 - Who's made a mark this week?

Many congratulations to Urban Sketchers - which is celebrating its first birthday today - see Our 1st anniversary, and looking forward to many more

barcelona - casa batllo (Gaudi's House) by Lapin

Here's some of the vital statistics from the last year for Urban Sketchers

• 100 correspondents.
• More than 3,500 blog posts with drawings from 56 different countries.
• More than 3,000 blog subscribers.
• More than 2,000 members on sister flickr group
• Nearly 20,000 drawings on flickr.

Also some major news

Looking ahead to the coming year, we're taking the steps to formalize Urban Sketchers as a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the artistic, storytelling and educational value of location drawing. I know, that sounds serious. But I'm sure it's going to be an exciting new adventure for USk. As a nonprofit, we plan to raise money to give grants and scholarships to artists. We also aim to publish a book and organize an international meetup every one or two years — so start saving for that trip!
Our 1st anniversary, and looking forward to many more

Next some news for all those artists who enter art competitions hoping that something will come of it............

I'm also extending my congratulations to Sheila Wallis (age 37) who won this year’s £25,000 Threadneedle Prize, for her nude self-portrait. She's decided to give up her job working for the NHS in order to concentrate on painting. Sheila has been a support worker for adults with learning disabilities for nearly 12 years, but since winning the Prize she has decided to take her art more seriously. So the first she's getting a studio and moving to Guildford to rent one. In fact she's moving house and quitting her job on same day!!! She is about to have an exhibition in Basingstoke (New Contemporaries Saturday 21st November to Thursday 17th December 2009) and has spent October doing workshops for the Big Draw at Watts Gallery in Compton, where she is Artist in Residence.

“I don’t do things by halves. Winning The Threadneedle Prize has given me the financial opportunity to get a studio and a website. I’m excited for the future.”

Plus I've had an email from Kate Clarke who won first prize in the UKCPS Annual exhibition 2009. She's also been changing her set-up but this time online. She's used her prize money to have two new and separate websites created (kate-clarke.com for portraiture - which is due to go live in November - and katydiddesigns.co.uk for all her illustration work). She also sent me a link to a stopframe animation of how she creates her work - which is well worth taking a look at.

It's all GO when you're a successful artist!

Art Blogs

• I'm very pleased to be able to highlight a new blog to you - written by no other than Vincent Van Gogh! The Van Gogh Blog has been set up to coincide with the exhibitions about Van Gogh's letters (it comes to the Royal Academy in January) - here's what the Van Gogh Museum has to say about the Van Gigh Letters exhibition and the Van Gogh Letters project.
• You can see more sketches by Lapin on his blog Les Calepins de Lapin and more of his drawings on his illustration website and follow him on Twitter
  
• The Virtual Paint out Blog was in Belfast, Northern Ireland - October 2009 this month world
• Tina Mammoser (the Cycling Artist) wrote to tell me about her a new Flickr Group she's just started - the Self Portrait Thursday Sketch Group. The idea is you're never without a subject for daily sketching is you do a self-portrait! Any kind of self-portrait sketch is welcomed - even nudes - so it's an 18+ group on Flickr. Each week people post their self portrait image.
• Daily Paintworks seems to have undergone another roster change in terms of the 12 artists it features - however Carol Marine is still coming up with new and delicious perspectives on apples in her very attractive still life paintings

More sketching from France (plus photos and videos of work by famous artists

This week, when I had time away from writing reams of stuff protesting about planning nonsense, I learned how to make movies! Which is why this week I've started posting links to videos for the first time (some would say it's taken me a long time - and they'd be right!). So here's this week's posts covering all the posts about Paris - except for a couple about the Louvre which will be posted next week. Then we're off to Giverny and Rouen!

Montmartre
from the Musée d'Orsay roof terrace
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• Making A Mark
• The Musée d'Orsay
• Video: Vincent van Gogh at the Musée d'Orsay
• Video: Claude Monet at the Musée d'Orsay
• Travels with a Sketchbook......in Paris
  
• A day in the Musee d'Orsay - tips on sketching
• Dining out in Paris - Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Joan was also sketching in Paris at about the same time - see Watercolors by Joan

Plus Laura (Laurelines) has posted Brittany sketches, part five!

Art competitions

• The Art Calendar 2010 Self-Portrait Cover Contest - deadline for entry is 23:59 on December 11, 2009, Eastern Standard Time.

Art education / art videos

• Botanical artists and botanical art lovers may be interested in my Botanical Art Bookshop Review - Kew Gardens - with pictures of the bookshelves - including botanical art instruction books
• I've only just found Robert Genn's How to beat painter's block which was posted while I was in France.
  
• Last week, PanPastels posted a video of Deborah Secor doing a landscape painting using PanPastels on Vimeo. I've not been able to review all of this as yet as I've been very busy and it seems to be just short of half an hour long.
  

Art Exhibitions and Art Galleries

• The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology has emerged from its revamp - and The Guardian has a slideshow of what it now looks like and a comment on what looks to me like major reconstruction. You can find out more about what happened to the museum here. The transformed museum reopens to the public next Saturday.

The Ashmolean has always had one of the finest collections of any institution, an eclectic cabinet of curiosities of the very highest quality: Cromwell's death mask; Guy Fawkes's lantern; medieval Islamic tapestries; Michelangelo drawings; blue-and-white Iranian pottery; neolithic skulls. After a £61m building project, the world's first public museum is now also one of the most modern and accessible.

• Bigger Trees near Warter has gone on display at Tate Britain in the David Hockney Room. I guess a sure sign that you've definitely made it is when you get a room in a national museum before you die! Here's Jonathan Jones on David Hockney: not just bigger, but better and David Hockney himself in an interview with the Guardian on David Hockney: portrait of the old master in connection with David Hockney, 1960-1968: A Marriage of Styles which opens at Nottingham Contemporary on 14 November
• The Annual Exhibition of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters opened this week at the Mall Galleries and is on until Sun 8 November 2009, 10am - 5pm (closes 1pm on final day). I'm hoping to get to see it next week.
• 62 pieces of work by 25 members artists of the Botanical Artists of Canada, are to be displayed in BAC's biennial juried Exhibition November 4 to 15, 2009, The theme of the show this year is on the theme of Trees: From Root to Crown and the exhibition can be seen at the Todmorden Mills Heritage Museum and Art Centre Papermill Gallery, 67 Pottery Road in Toronto, Ontario. (Gallery hours are Wednesday to Friday: 12 Noon to 4:30 pm, and Saturday and Sunday from Noon to 4:00 pm.). The show is for members of the society, is completely organized by volunteers, and paid for by BAC's members, without any outside sponsorship. I'm hoping to feature the prizewinners when the awards are announced. Two guest artists include Dick Rauh, President of the American Society of Botanical Artists, who is due to speak at the Opening Reception on November 7.

Making A Mark Opinion Poll

• MAM Poll (October) Results - What has influenced your style of art? was posted yesterday. The main influence on your style of art is YOU!

Websites and blogging

There's been lots of news recently on the computer, internet, websites and blogging front. Here's a summary

• You can download Microsoft's Windows 7 Upgrade Adviser if you want to scan your PC for potential issues with your hardware, devices, and installed programs. It also recommends what to do before you upgrade. I'm sure you've been reading odd article about this. I read one (now a lost link!) which suggested that a clean install was the way to go. Anybody else got views or seen good articles?
• Google Social Search is new in Google Labs - here's a comment from PCWorld Magazine Google Social Search Unveiled Sans Facebook
• I don't know how long it's been around because I only noticed it this week(!) but Blogger's got a new post editor. This is An overview of the new post editor. I tried it and didn't like the clunky way it inserts images. Since mine are image intensive psts I've gone back to the old post editor. All I want is a greatly increased window for writing posts and I'd be happy!
• if you like to keep up with who are the post popular tech Twitterers try taking a look at Twitter Users Most Followed by the Web 2.0 Summit Crowd
• Here's a couple of links to articles from the Guardian's technology pages about an important new development Internet regulator Icann approves web addresses in multiple languages and Web addresses to get non-Latin characters (do read the bit about the potential for scamming)
• Facebook wins $711m in spam lawsuit - but will they ever get it? The culprit has to pay off the multimillion pounds awarded against him for doing the same thing on MySpace.
• Making A Mark is massive - and takes longer to load than most blogs. I hope you all think it's worth it. Google has suggestions for how find out how I can make my blog load faster. Alternatively you can try measuring your sitespeed. My blog takes four seconds to load. How about you?
  

The speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it. Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog load faster and attract more users.........
For optimal blog load speed, we recommend using Google/Blogger widgets, JavaScipt and links. However, if you need to use third party JavaScipt and links, your blog will load much faster if you put all JavaScript at the bottom of your blog. If you have third party JavaScript and links in your sidebar, put them in at the bottom of the sidebar.
How can I make my blog load faster?

and finally.......

I started making some twitter lists yesterday - and got a little carried away! However I'm finding that it's already making checking up on what I've missed and what people are up to sooooooooo MUCH easier. These are my lists - and I'm very happy to be listed!

• art-education
• sketching
• art-business
• drawing-illustration
• botanical-art
• art-societies
• art-bloggers
• authors-i-like
• art-materials-supplies
• arts-journalists
• art-museums-and-galleries
• website-blog-tips
• widgets-for-artists

Meanwhile Tim Berners Lee has ventured on to Twitter and managed to acquire 10,000 followers in just FOUR days!