The World in London Photography Exhibition

I love the Olympic games.  It's such an exciting time for all the sports and for me, for all the visual excitement of the opening and closing ceremonies, the special sports architecture, and the cultural exhibitions and celebrations. I found a photography project online that may interest you. Here's the link and the description is below!  Enjoy! 

About this Project

London boasts one of the most diverse populations in the world. The World in London presents portraits of Londoners by British and international photographers taken from 2009 – 2012. Each portrait shows a person or people from one of the 204 nations taking part in the London 2012 Games, accompanied by individual stories.

The World in London is a celebration of Londoners and demonstrates photography’s ability to capture the human form in interesting and distinct ways. The project is organised by The Photographers’ Gallery and forms part of the London 2012 Festival, the finale of the Cultural Olympiad.

Camera Practice!

Most of us use a camera in our artwork. Some of us carry a camera to capture reference photos. Some of us use a camera to make a record of our artworks. Some of us capture and upload our images to a website to present our work to potential galleries. For some of us photography is the very medium of  our creativity.
These days, using a camera can be confusing. Even the more basic 'point and click' cameras, as soon as you take yourself off the 'automatic' setting, require you to know something about aperture (how open or closed the lens is), focal length (the distance from the center of the lens to the point where an object can be seen clearly), shutter speed (how long the lens is open to expose the sensor to the image and light), and sensitivity (ISO setting--formerly called ASA setting). Short of taking a camera course, it's hard to know what effect will be achieved by changing settings.
As usual, the internet has a rescue plan! There's a website...! How often do I write that?!! Actually, there is more than one website, but this one is free and it's easy to use. It's called Camera Sim: SLR Photography Demystified. When you get into it, you'll see the image I've copied here. Below it are sliding bars and radio buttons that let you fiddle with the aperture and see what changing an F-stop from, say, F4 to F 22 will do to the depth of focus ('depth of field') in that image. You can make that background fuzzy and you can make it clear. You can change the ISO setting and see what happens. You can zoom in and out; adjust the focal length; change priority settings, play with the shutter speed and the lighting and even pretend you're shooting with or without a tripod. It's a place to play and learn. Again, here's the web address ('url'): http://camerasim.com/camera-simulator/  

Marketing Your Art

Everyone tells us that if we want to sell our art we have to get out there and market it. Most artists I know would rather clean bathrooms than market themselves. Others of us, however, are doing an extraordinary job of it. I happened to bump into a YouTube video of just such an artist, a man with an amazing imagination for marketing. 

Matt LeBlanc is an abstract artist from Dieppe, New Brunswick, Canada. He has a background in advertising and talent and imagination for using social networking--Facebook and Twitter--for marketing himself.

He has made several YouTube videos but this one he made especially to compete for an Excellence Award in Marketing offered by the Moncton, NB Chamber of Commerce.

Here's the link to his video.

And here's his website!

And of course, the library has art marketing books for you. Here are a couple of our more recently published ones:

How to Make Money as an Artist: The 7 Winning Strategies of Successful Fine Artists by Sean Moor

Selling Art without Galleries: Toward Making a Living from your Art by Daniel Grant

Nature as Medium: Eco-Art: Environmental Art: Land Art

Since the 1980's various artists, sculptors and painters mostly, have been communing with the land. Many use elements of nature such as stone, sticks, leaves, and flowers as their medium and regard the ephemeral nature of such art as part of its integrity. Others engage in architectural dialogs with the land, some with environmental issues in mind. Here are some resources for your creative dalliance...

Articles
"Earth Artists: Using Nature in Art to Raise Environmental Awareness". Eco Hearth: Come Home to the Earth



Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists by John K. Grande, 2004. State University of New York. (This book is in the Tomball Library collection.)


Wikipedia article on Land Art (This has the names of a number of other artists as well as a discussion of the philosophy behind the art)


Artists
Alfio Bonanno (Don't be deterred by the Finnish--just click on his projects!)
Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit (Click on their 'catalogue' to see artworks)

Patrick Dougherty (Click on the link below his book to enter the site)
Andy Goldsworthy
Tomball Library has a copy of his DVD Rivers and Tides: Working with Time. The camera follows this gentle Scottish sculptor as he discusses his creative process. His rock walls that wind through the landscape, leaf chains that float on meandering waters, and ice sculptures that glow in the sunlight are but a few of the natural media he has used.
David Nash
Michael Singer
Nils-Udo
Bob Verschueren

Mesmerizing Japanese cell phone ad

I try to post every kind of art I find that I think someone in the Tomball Art League will be attracted to. When I saw this fantastic video posted on Facebook, I immediately thought of Bob Trivers and his inspirations in wood.


This is an art piece with fascination.


It is introduced this way. "This beautiful ad was done by Drill Inc, a Japanese advertising agency, and it features a wooden ball rolling down the homemade marimba in the midst of Kyushu, Japan’s woodlands. Simply awesome."

And it is. Here is the website. I hope you love it.

Google Art Project

Warning: This website may devour hours of your life.

Opportunity: This website is a glorious passtime.

If you’ve used Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ll be familiar with that lovely feature that lets you tour down a street and see 360 degree views as you turn around.  In the Google Art Project, you will use the same technology to tour the inside of seventeen famous art museums.

You can walk along the halls of the Museo Reine Sofia in Madrid and notice the Juan Gris paintings on the walls. You can amble virtually from gallery to gallery in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia . You can stop to look at a ultra-high resolution image of Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Museum in Florence or zoom in to check out Van Gogh’s brushstrokes on Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The website even lets you create your own art collection. Capture full-size images of paintings or close-up details, add your own notes to your image, and come back to them over and over. 

But you might set an alarm before you begin, if you have anything else you need to do! 

Literary Love: 12 Books of Art and Architecture

Here's a website with images of art and architecture created with books as the medium. A perfect match, says this librarian...

To the left is the art of Mike Smiley, shown on the website.

StumbleUpon

Some days I stare at my monitor and wonder where I might find a glorious art site to inspire me. Then I remember my free subscription to StumbleUpon. It seldom disappoints and often entertains and inspires. Here's how it works. When people discover an interesting site, they recommend it to StumbleUpon. When you sign up for StumbleUpon you list your interests (arts, photography, gardening, science, politics, etc.) and StumbleUpon sends you those recommended sites periodically or you can search them whenever you want. Here's the link so you can explore it yourself.

The Painter's Keys

The Painter's Keys website is a rich international online art community based in western Canada that includes a directory of participating artists, letters written by painter Robert Genn, musings in response to those letters by other artists, an archive, art quotations, international listings of art studios (in case you want to travel), and an online art gallery. See http://www.painterskeys.com/about.php for a better description than I can give.

You can subscribe to artist Robert Genn’s [free] twice-weekly thoughtful letters about living the life of an artist so they will appear in your own email account. Recent posts have been about Selection and Rejection, The Anticipation Response (how the release of the feel-good hormone dopamine helps our creative response to our work), and Art and Grief--how the recent loss of a loved one affects our ability to create art. Check the right sidebar on the homepage to sign up.

A Digital Book of YOUR Sketches?

On the web are a number of reputable companies that create photo albums and books. Typically, you upload your photo images into their software program, lay out your album pages, add text and ornamentation, and they print and bind the album and send it to you. For a fee, of course.



As part of the Digital Photography class I teach at the library I introduce my students to a number of these sites. The other day, when I showed them the blurb.com site, the company was displaying this wonderful book by Norman Shureman composed of his sketches. You like this idea?
By the way, the library has three scanners, in case you might need one for this or another project!

Art Competitions, Shows, and Juried Exhibitions

http://www.artshow.com/juriedshows/

This artshow website features art competitions, art shows, and juried exhibitions across the world, across the country, and across Texas. I'm posting this now because some of the deadlines are coming up soon. There are five long pages to choose from, featuring every medium from paint to ceramics to fiber arts.

Two upcoming shows in our area will happen in Nachogdoches and in Richardson. The Nachogdoches show is the Texas national 2011 Art Show and Exhibition. The Richardson show is 19th annual Colored Pencil Society of America juried show.

The Painter's Post

"The Painter's Post: A Daily Aggregration that Artists and Other Creative People may find Useful." As the title suggests this is international news, weather, and sports about art. http://painterspost.com/