Who made a mark in May 2014?

I'm still trying to develop a new way of doing "Who's made a mark". I'm now thinking along the lines of a once a month round-up complemented by more frequent posts of new things to look at via my Facebook Page. This seems to work better for me as it spaces out the effort involved.

That said I still need to work on timing - this was supposed to be published last Sunday - but I ran out of steam near the finish!  Which means it's about May and now the first few days of June as well!
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Art Blogs

Artists

• I can't start without noting that last month marked the passing of Robert Genn.  He was an artist whose writings have made a very great deal of difference to an awful lot of artists. His dog Dorothy died on May 13th and Robert Genn died just two weeks later on May 27th. It seems like they'll always be together riding around in his open top car looking for good spots for paintings.
• Robin Lee-Hall has been elected as the President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Her portraits are painted using egg tempera. 

Portraits by Robin Lee-Hall PRP

Botanical Art

Fiona Strickland Botanical Artist - Facebook Page

• Fans of Fiona Strickland's botanical art will want to know she has joined Facebook. This is her Facebook Page. 
• Congrats to Shevaun Doherty (Botanical Sketches and Other Stories) who won a Gold Medal at the second annual Botanical and Floral Art Exhibition at Dublin's Bloom in the Park 2014.

Shevaun Doherty - Gold Medal Winner for her Iris foetidissima on vellum

Drawing and Sketching

• Brilliant sketch by Jennifer Lawson who recently walked 500 miles across Spain in 35 days on the Camino de Santiago - one of the pilgrimage routes - and sketched en route and photographed and blogged via her iPhone.  She started at Jean-Pied-de-Port France at the base of the Pyreness on April 24th and finished at Santiago de Compostela
• You can read all about her journey during April and May on her blog - Jennifer Lawson carrying all her belongings on her back. Start at El Camino di Santiago—500 miles in 35 days. En route admire the sketches she left en route - "art abandonment"
• Her wonderful drawing of the Praza do Obradoiro in Santiago de Compostela is the one of the reasons why somebody invented accordion sketchbooks!

Add caption

• I've made a video - at long last - which represents a very quick insight into what happens when you decide to use your iPad Mini on the spur of the moment and how I hold my pencil when sketching!  See VIDEO: Sketching with coloured pencils #1 (for the extra pics and commentary) or Makingamark - Sketching with coloured pencils for just the video but bigger! Plus you get all the sounds of a garden in the country....

Painting & Plein Air

• Jacksons Art Blog has an interview with Haidee-Jo, Plein Air Painter of the Moment. That's Haidee-Jo Summers who's been at Patchings all week with bunting and fairy lights, meeting lots of people, booking lots of demos and enjoying the fact that her painting of a boat with a big red sail won THREE prizes - including The Artist Purchase Prize - chosen by Ken Howard! Read Oh My Goodness on her blog Haidee-Jo Summers

Haidee Jo Summers with her painting 'Sails up in harbour'

• I started to make some notes about Susan Abbott's plein air painting for this post - and they end up as a blog post on The Art of the Landscape instead - see Susan Abbott - sketching and painting plein air
• News from Matthew Inness at Underpaintings - of a change in site and operation - to a subscription service. I Don't Know Why You Say Good-Bye . . . I Say Hello! New Changes at Underpaintings Just stop and think for a minute about what would happen if everybody who has something interesting to say started to charge for it............ I'll be interested to see whether he gets the numbers to make it a worthwhile change. Speaking personally I support sites which share a large amount for free and only charge for very specific products. So I guess that means I won't be sending any more traffic to Underpaintings.
• James Gurney (Gurney Journey) wrote recently about Color temperature in the shadow out-of-doors - it's always nice to understand the science behind what you see.
• Who knew Eisenhower was a painter? Or that painting was his form of relaxation as he planned the D Day Landings? See Eisenhower painting done as he planned D-day landings to be sold

Printmaking

• Congrats to Sherrie York (Brush and Baren) for getting her ducks in to the Birds in Art competition exhibition - Birds in Art 2014!  Love the title!

"Shower With a Friend" © Sherrie York
reduction linocut, 15" x 15"

Art Books

• I started a set of posts about favourite art books (see Making a mark - Artists' Favourite Art Books in 2014 and Favourite art instruction books about subjects you draw and paint - but then the layouts for my book started arriving so I'm going to wait until my book is finished and gone to print!

Art Business and Marketing

Becoming an artist

The new BBC Arts Website

The BBC have a lot to do to do to up their game in terms of content and accessibility of the new BBC Arts website. Its aim is to enable much better access to both BBC Arts Programmes, additional material and the archive of programmes held by the BBC.

BBC Monitor Henry Moore November 1960
First transmitted in 1960, Huw Wheldon visits Henry Moore at his home in the run-up to a major exhibition of his work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
One of the archive programmes on offer via the new BBC Arts website

It introduced it with this post and video - Welcome to BBC Arts.

Welcome to the new BBC Arts website, a space which draws together arts coverage and comment from across the BBC - television, radio and online - and aims to put the best of British art and culture at your fingertips.

We will showcase performance of all types.....Here you will be able to find live streams of performances and events or enjoy them on demand later.

The BBC launched the new site of 14th May. It gets:

• 10 out of 10 for the idea - this is the new way to access television when access need not be governed by schedules
• 5 out of 10 for effort - they've started and are up and running - in a way similar to getting the roof on and the windows in. The basic structure is there but there's a long way to go before it's delivering what it's promising
• 3 out of 10 for functionality. That's because it doesn't work at all well at present and much is inaccessible or very difficult to find!  

You can

• sign up for the latest news on arts programmes and events via the BBC Arts newsletter
• Follow on Twitter for the latest updates from BBC Arts @bbcarts
• Follow the RSS feed - http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/0/rss.xml
• Check out the A-Z Archive of Arts Programmes on the BBC via the feed for Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts - although a lot of these are not yet available online (I'm thinking it would be a much better feed if they indicated when they might be available online!)
• Find out what is actually available to view now:
• on BBC 1
• on BBC Arts on BBC iPlayer - On the top line menu on an iPad, the category menu presents in the middle. You would be forgiven for not knowing that the Art Category is off screen all the way to the left - so you have to start scrolling
• on BBC Arts on BBC iPlayer - Highlights 
• on BBC Arts on BBC iPlayer - Recent Programmes 
• on BBC Arts on BBC iPlayer - A-Z (barely functions at present on my iMac ie this link presents a white screen. You also have to scroll all the way to the right of the highlights to find the listing via my Mini iPad.  

Form has not followed function - and the design needs radical improvement

The focus is all on "the arts" and fails to recognise that people have specialised interests e.g. art, literature or music. There's no link or categorisation which allows ready access to your particular interest - and that needs addressing very fast as they begun to put more material online.

The main problem is the navigation of the site and what's available is absolutely tortuous - no matter what improvements the BBC might think they have made recently.  The fact of the matter is it's very difficult to join up all the dots and find your way around to what's on offer easily.  They really need to address this

Frankly I don't think they've given any thought at all to how the design will function as they begin to put more of the archive online and need to make content available with much less scrolling. The BBC needs to rediscover the importance of the link to take you fast through several layers of content!

[UPDATE: Plus one of the main problems is there is no access to their forward programming of arts programmes coming up - which is always useful for those who like to plan ahead.  Just try finding a link to tonight's BBC2 programme "The Summer Exhibition:  BBC Arts at the Royal Academy" - it's absolutely nowhere to be seen!)

(PS If you think it's easy just try starting from the main BBC page and finding all the links identified above!)

Winifred Nicholson at Dulwich Picture Gallery

The new exhibition at the Dulwich Art Gallery has an awfully long title Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920 – 1931.  I'm not a fan of long titles - but that's by the by.

There's also a story to the exhibition - about how painters influence one another, but frankly the interest of that for me always lies in the impact of that influence and consequential output rather than the explanation.

However there is a very good reason to go and see the exhibition.....

Flyer for the new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Visit Dulwich Picture Gallery (before 21 September) and see this exhibition and find out about the paintings of Winifred Nicholson (Tate) who is an undoubted colourist. It's certainly no accident that it's her painting on the flyer and poster for the exhibition.

Winifred Nicholson saw colour, wrote about colour, was interested in paint colours, experimented with arrangements of colour (using flowers) and she painted colour.  I'm afraid three of the other artists large saw and thought in muted shades of brown and green - and I simply don't find that very interesting. It's almost as if they can't see colour.

Flower Table: Pots (1927) by Winifred Nicholson

(left) Cyclamen and Primula (1922) and (right) Polyanthus and Cineraria (1921)
by Winifred Nicholson

Brushwork used in Anenomes (1924)
by Winifred Nicholson

In between times she provided an influence for the work of Ben Nicholson and was also influenced by him and gave birth to and raised his three children - until their divorce caused by Nicholson becoming embroiled with Barbara Hepworth who he later married.

Father and son (Ben Nicholson with their first son Jake 1927) by Winifred Nicholson

I can't help feeling she's been an under-rated artist because her subject matter was largely domestic or related to the places where she lived.

Frankly if you're a fan of the later work of Ben Nicholson (Tate) , I'm not sure that the exhibition as a whole is going to be of so much interest unless you like getting to find out about the whole person and the influences on their development.  His paintings between 1920-1931 - the period covered by the show - are quite unlike his later work. In fact I found myself thinking his still life paintings reminded me of a style that looked like "early Mary Fedden" - but without the colour.  In fact "without the colour" would be quite a good way of describing many of Nicholson's paintings in the show. I didn't get any sort of sense that he enjoyed painting them - and I'm afraid I cringed at his repeated paintings of horses. I didn't quite know what to make of his work during this period and I certainly didn't see how the transition  to his later work came about.  Indeed it's knowing about his relationship with Hepworth which makes sense of the developments in his later work.

Three paintings of Northrigg Hill in Cumberland
by Winifred Nicholson, Kit Wood and Ben Nicholson

I'm afraid I didn't come away from the exhibition overly impressed with Kit Wood's painting. Maybe the variation in styles between the paintings was in part responsible for that - he came across to me as somebody who hadn't yet found his way.  Although I understand it's more likely that it's because of his addiction to opium.  It also struck me that he was painting what the others painted - perhaps because he was staying with them at the time - but it seemed to me more than that.

Alfred Wallis's paintings were championed by Ben Nicholson for their simplicity and they are certainly fascinating to look at. I can understand why he valued them however it would be wrong to to describe them as simple.

(left) a painting of the sea by Winifred Nicholson(right) a painting of a schooner with ice bergs by Alfred Wallis - the icebergs alternate with the sails

I guess I came away thinking I'd have rather seen an exhibition devoted to the life and work on Winifred Nicholson in which Ben Nicholson had a walk on part and the other three were nowhere to be seen!

What I did do was buy a very nice publication by Kettles Yard called 'Winifred Nicholson - Music of Colour'.

Exhibition Reviews by:

• The Telegraph - gives it 3 stars and definitely worth a read. He and I saw the exhibition in pretty much the same way.
• The Independent - also champions Wininfred
• Financial Times (of the same exhibition at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge)
• The New York Times (ditto)

BBC - Your Paintings has each of the painters:

• Winifred Nicholson
• Ben Nicholson
• Christopher (Kit) Wood
• Alfred Wallis

Summer Exhibition 2014 at the Royal Academy of Arts

I visited the 246th Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts today. Below you'll find a photoessay about exhibition plus two sections about

• facts about the Summer Exhibition 2014
• changes in the Summer Exhibition

I'll be doing another couple of posts - about artwork I liked and who won the Prizes - with the big one being announced on Saturday night.

I wasn't blown away by any of the rooms or pieces in the show - although there's a lot to like - however I still puzzle as to how or why some pieces get in! Overall it's both well hung and 'hangs together' better than some other shows

Some facts about the 246th Summer Exhibition

Entries and artworks

• 12,000 people entered works for the exhibition via the open entry; 
• 1,262 artworks are listed in the catalogue
• works from this year's selection from the open entry were initially selected from digital images

Summer Exhibition Committee

The Summer Exhibition Committee for 2014 includes the following Royal Academicians: Hughie O’Donoghue (coordinator) - who have the tour this morning. Plus Eileen Cooper, Gus Cummins, Richard MacCormac, John Maine, Chris Orr, Cornelia Parker, Eric Parry and Emma Stibbon.

Summer Exhibition - Venue | Opening dates and times

The Summer Exhibition can be seen in the Main Galleries of the RA's home at Burlington House, in Piccadilly. It opens to the public on Monday 9th June and finishes on 17th August 2014. The exhibition is open

• daily 10am – 6pm daily (last admission 5.30pm) 
• with a late night opening on Fridays until 10pm (last admission 9.30pm)

Tickets are available daily at the RA or by visiting www.royalacademy.org.uk. Admission prices include the List of Works giving details on every exhibit in the show. Adult ticket £13.50 (without Gift Aid donation £12); concessions available; under 12s go free. Friends of the RA go free.
 

Art for sale

• the majority of art is for sale
• the top price I've spotted (to date) is £600,000 for Last Train by new academician Ron Arad RA. (Check out his website - I was left wondering how come it had taken the RA so long to invite him to become a member!)
• the most sales come from the Print Room - very popular with visitors as it offers the opportunity to buy art without a mortgage!

Gallery II - one of the Print Rooms
curated by Chris Orr RA and Emma Stibbon RA

Gallery I - one of the Print Rooms
curated by Chris Orr RA and Emma Stibbon RA

New Academicians

• there are more new Royal Academicians this year than ever before. 
• most of the new RAs have never exhibited at the RA before
• all art submitted by the RA has to be hung - so in effect the look and feel of the exhibition is dictated by the work submitted by the RAs

The Art Everywhere Longlist 2014

You currently have a chance to vote on The Art Everywhere Long List 2014 - on Facebook or via an email listing your favourites to arteverywhere@artfund.org before 21st June.

Art Everywhere returns for 2014 to flood our streets with great artworks for a summer long outdoor show voted for by you. Across the UK, tens of thousands of posters from roadside billboards and underground stations, to bus shelters, motorway services, national rail networks, shopping centres, airports and more will see the nation’s favourite British art for 6 whole weeks.

The campaign to get art on to the streets was very popular last year and I see no reason why it shouldn't have the same impact this year.

What you need to do

• To find out more about the individual artworks you just need to click on them
• To vote you just 'like' the picture on Facebook.

I shall be unashamedly and periodically punting my favourite paintings on my Facebook Fan Page!

Their Facebook Fan Page is https://www.facebook.com/arteverywhereuk

The Art Everywhere project is organised by the people who own the advertising hoardings and they work in co-operation with the Art Fund, Tate, creative agency 101, Posterscope, Vizeum, Easyart and Facebook

(PS I'm currently trying to finish "Who made a mark in May" - but it's competing with work for the book!)