|
Free Updates
Navigation
Categories
| November, 2009 (6) |
| October, 2009 (21) |
| September, 2009 (21) |
| August, 2009 (21) |
| July, 2009 (21) |
| June, 2009 (18) |
| May, 2009 (23) |
| April, 2009 (23) |
| March, 2009 (22) |
| February, 2009 (20) |
| January, 2009 (18) |
| December, 2008 (17) |
| November, 2008 (12) |
| October, 2008 (17) |
| September, 2008 (9) |
| August, 2008 (11) |
| July, 2008 (13) |
| June, 2008 (14) |
| May, 2008 (15) |
| April, 2008 (16) |
| March, 2008 (16) |
| February, 2008 (20) |
| January, 2008 (19) |
| December, 2007 (16) |
| November, 2007 (17) |
| October, 2007 (21) |
| September, 2007 (12) |
| August, 2007 (13) |
| July, 2007 (8) |
| June, 2007 (13) |
| May, 2007 (15) |
| April, 2007 (4) |
Search
Blogroll
|
 Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Art (maybe) good enough to eat
Art News Blog pointed us in the direction of Pizza Hut's art competition. Never thought I'd say those things in the same sentence. At the site, Pizzaboxidea.com, artists can upload their pizza box image, and each month one is picked to win $1,000. The winning designs won't necessarily be printed up, but there is already a Flickr group dedicated to the images. (The whole concept reminds me quite a bit of MyStarbucksIdea.com. Who needs consultants when the general public is more than willing to give you ideas for free?)
By Grace Dobush | Cool Web sites | Random Thoughts
4/29/2008 2:20:42 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) 
|
|
Monday, April 28, 2008
Should art museum admission be free?
This article in London's Sunday Times begs that question, making the argument that scrapping the ticket system lowers the museum's standards of quality. Apparently, free admission isn't enough to get the people in the doors—the Imperial War Museum has put Halle Berry's bikini from "Die Another Day" on display. The article reminded me of an infographic I saw recently in GOOD magazine. " Who Pays For Museum Tickets?" compares the cost of admission for the 20 biggest US museums with each museum's cost per visitor. It's very interesting to look at how the museums compare. The largest museum, the Getty, has free admission—and the cost to the museum per visitor is a whopping $177.92. Knowing that makes me consider donating! Click here to see the graphic.
By Grace Dobush | Cool Web sites | Random Thoughts
4/28/2008 2:28:45 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Friday, April 25, 2008 Thursday, April 24, 2008
A Charley Harper birthday
I am so excited—this just arrived at the office:  I'd been considering getting a Charley Harper print for months—and I finally sprung for one as a combination late birthday present/promotion present. (I got bumped up to associate editor from assistant editor last week!) This gorgeous artist's proof, Hare's Breadth (serigraph, 20x15), came from Gallery One in Mentor, Ohio. (In the sake of full disclosure, I should mention that my aunt works there.) I can't wait to get this beautiful thing home!
By Grace Dobush | Notable Artists | Random Thoughts
4/24/2008 2:02:46 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Awesomely weird art supplies
Hey all! Sorry about being a lame blogger lately! (It's funny how when you return from a vacation, everything seems normal and then BAM! you're hit with a ton of things to do.) So to make it up to you, I share this link: American Science & Surplus, the weirdest, wackiest mail order catalog you'll ever receive. I don't know where or how they obtain all the weird things they sell, but I highly recommend them. (Reading the descriptions of the products is half the fun.) I ordered a bunch of stuff from them for making Christmas presents last year—I gave coworkers sets of organic loose tea in glass test tubes! They have art supplies, too. Need a pencil torch for etching things? Dental tools for your pottery? A brush holder for your brushes? Fabric dye for batiking? Geodes just for the heck of it? You are totally set. If you live in the Chicago or Milwaukee area, you can go to one of their stores in person. And if you do, you must report back and tell me about it!
Advice | By Grace Dobush | Cool Web sites
4/23/2008 11:13:10 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Friday, April 18, 2008
Friday Flowers: Pansy Power
Projects | Tips
4/18/2008 4:45:08 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The cartoon guide to San Francisco
 San Francisco was just as gorgeous as I'd hoped. (The picture on the right is of Dolores Park in the Mission District, with a beautiful view of downtown.) The skies were blue (mostly), the weather was beautiful, and the view from the top of my friend’s apartment building couldn’t be beat.
I was in town for CraftCon but had a lot of time to explore the city with my bus pass. I spent time at a beach and marina area near the Golden Gate Bridge, got lost downtown, had tea in Golden Gate Park and exhausted the Haight and the Mission District.
My plans to see a lot of art museums while I was there got waylaid because it turns out most of them are closed on Mondays, but I did get to visit the Cartoon Art Museum.
 The Cartoon Art Museum (655 Mission St., 415/227-8666) has about 6,000 original pieces in its permanent collection, plus seven major exhibitions a year. Of the ones on display when I was there, I especially liked the Bay Area Spotlight on Creig Flessel. The 96-year-old's work encompasses every major turn in cartooning history, from early and Golden Age books to strips from the '60s to Playboy illustrations and recent commissions. There's an air of sophistication even in the drawings printed on pulp. "Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love" was hit-or-miss. The one-panel gags were often tired, seldomly truly funny. Frequent New Yorker contributor Roz Chast was a bright spot in the exhibit.San Francisco must have a lot of love for cartoons, I decided after seeing the storefront at 826 Valencia, a writing center for kids disguised as a pirate supply store. On my second trip to the pirate supply store, I was happily surprised to see the top of the building covered with a giant mural by Chris Ware, one of my favorite modern cartoonists.
 Ware's style is schematic, but it's not cold. One panel often contains more emotional detail than you'd find in an entire issue of any superhero comic book. (I highly recommend " Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth," or, if you want to read something containing fewer than 380 pages, try " The ACME Novelty Library #16.") Here's a closeup of the mural:
 It's corny, but you know I had to say it: I definitely left my heart in San Francisco.
Advice | By Grace Dobush | Random Thoughts
4/17/2008 3:26:51 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Competition deadline draws near!
This is a public service announcement: Have you entered The Artist's Magazine's Annual Art Competition yet? Act fast—the 2008 deadline is May 1! Click here for all the details! You can compete in five categories to win more than $25,000 in cash prizes, but here are some of the prizes you can't put a price tag on: • Winners will be featured and finalists' names will be published in the December 2008 issue of The Artist's Magazine
• 13 finalists will be included in The Artist's Magazine's 2009 calendar
• A number of finalists will be featured in the magazine's Competition Spotlight column
• 12 more will be featured as the 2009 Artists of the Month on our website
Can't win if you don't try, right?
By Grace Dobush | News
4/15/2008 5:24:04 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Monday, April 14, 2008
My guide to Portland's Alberta Arts District
Portland, Oregon, always treats me well. It's developed a reputation for being a hipster haven—the rental market has been totally saturated because of all the refugee Californians and creative Midwesterners flocking to the city. (Moving to Portland might just beat out going to grad school as the preferred adulthood escape route for my generation.)
One of my favorite areas to explore is the Alberta Arts District, which stretches out over 15-20 blocks of NE Alberta Street. Amid the plentiful clothing boutiques and taquerías are a lot of great galleries and stores that feature a lot of local work. Here are a few of my faves:
REDBIRD STUDIO
I visited Redbird Studio last year and loved it immediately. This year, I happened to stop by on the studio’s second birthday, which meant free cupcakes!
Owners Paul Evans and Melissa Rau make a lot of the stuff for sale in the shop, which includes lots of stationery and cards, handmade accessories and screenprinted T-shirts and baby things.
I really loved the large-scale portraits by Kevin Noonan of political figures that were on display in the back of the store, which is a whole other gallery called Haiku. Melissa told me Kevin intentionally puts very affordable prices on his paintings. They were so low I seriously considered buying one and toting it home on the plane with me.
And if you’re in the neighborhood, right next door are HiiH Gallery, which sells beautiful handmade paper lanterns, and Guardino Gallery, which displays contemporary art and crafts.
Redbird Studio, 2927 NE Alberta St., 503/593-0833
TOGETHER GALLERY
Together Gallery popped up since my last trip to Portland. I arrived just in time to see "The Color of Nature," an exhibit featuring work from local artists Seth Neefus, Amy Ruppel, and Jill Bliss. Together also has a healthy offering of zines and small press publications, which I’m a big fan of.
Together Gallery, 2314 NE Alberta St., 503/288-8879
OFFICE PDX
Anybody who loves industrial-strength work supplies has a one-way ticket to heaven at OFFICE. The décor and the goods are heavy on the Americana, with a hearty dose of Japanese utility.
I got to check out Jill Bliss and Brittany Kate Powell's kooky "Califoregon" collection while I was there. And, like I always do, I spent too much money on letterpressed cards.
OFFICE PDX, 2204 NE Alberta St., 888/355-7467
Advice | By Grace Dobush | Exhibits
4/14/2008 1:18:27 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Friday, April 11, 2008
Friday Flowers: White Tulips
 Watercolor artist
Birgit O'Connor shares her strategy for painting glorious white tulips in the latest installment in our Friday Flowers series.
As she shows you how she painted White Tulips (watercolor, 40x30), O'Connor offers this advice:
Treat a white flower like any other flower, only with much less paint, letting the white of the paper represent the brightest hues. The principal idea in the latter method is to paint the lines that imply the shape and let the white of the paper represent the flower.
Click here to see all nine steps and her palette, and click here to see last week's demonstration, Radiant Reds. And be sure to check back next Friday for the next step-by-step demonstration!
By Grace Dobush | Notable Artists | Projects | Tips
4/11/2008 1:12:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Online image editing options
For the July issue of The Artist's Magazine, I edited a feature on the best software for artists, including everything from inventory trackers to model manipulators. As far as image editing goes, the gold standard is Photoshop. (If you haven't used the full-blown version, you've likely come across its less expensive sibling, Photoshop Elements.)
Now, a free version of the software is available online, with 2 GB of storage thrown in. Adobe Photoshop Express offers many of the features included with Elements, such as cropping, color correction and some fun filter and distortion options. (Be aware, though, that agreeing to the terms of service gives other users the rights to display, print and distribute your shared images. If you don't want your pictures to go public, don't opt to share them through the site.)
Photo sharing site Flickr also recently rolled out photo editing abilities in partnership with Picnik. All Flickr users can access the basic editing options, and becoming a premium member unlocks more features. Both Picnik and Photoshop Express have some integrated functionality with other websites, like Facebook and Picasa.
Both Photoshop Express and Flickr are good options for artists who don't want to put down a big chunk of change for a program they'll use only to resize or crop their pictures.
(And speaking of pictures, I'll be uploading photos from my trip soon—promise!)
Via Craftzine.com blog
By Grace Dobush | Cool Web sites | Tips
4/10/2008 3:05:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Hello again!
Hello, blog readers! I've returned to my cube here at The Artist's Magazine. Thanks to Skybus, I ended up with an extra day on the West Coast, and I loved having more time in San Francisco. In the coming days I'll write about a hot art neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, and a few notable San Francisco sights.
(Above photo of me in the Pacific Ocean by Leslie Stroope.)
By Grace Dobush | News | Random Thoughts
4/9/2008 2:03:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Rising Sun, Indiana
Last Friday, my younger daughter Margaret and I drove to Rising Sun, Indiana, in order to make the opening of the 2008 Second Annual Juried Exhibition at the Pendleton Art Center. Vera Curnow, the director, had planned a lovely evening: live music, a lavish spread, etc, and, of course, the show. Since I was the juror, it seems self-serving to praise the works, which were beautifully installed (by Vera, who is herself a fine artist), but they were objectively impressive: high in quality and diverse in media and style. It was lovely for me to meet the artists; here are some pictures of the festive evening.
Below: Maureen with Jackie Braden (Best of Show) in front of Jackie's painting.
By Maureen Bloomfield | Exhibits | Shows and Events
4/9/2008 1:39:17 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Friday Flowers for April
 Every Friday this month, The Artist's Magazine is bringing you a step-by-step flower painting demonstration on our website, www.artistmagazine.com. Today watercolor artist Birgit O'Connor shares "Painting Flowers Step by Step: Radiant Reds" for painting gorgeous red tulips. She explains step by step how to achieve a vibrant, clean red and the
right value contrasts to make your tulips blossom beautifully. See her finished piece, Parrot Tulips (at right; watercolor, 30x22). Don't miss more flower painting demos the next three Fridays in April! (OK, Grace, enough galavanting on the West Coast! Time to come back and tell us all about it!)
By Chris McHugh | Notable Artists | Projects
4/3/2008 8:17:36 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
On Poets and Painters
"April is the cruelest month," and perhaps not incidentally, National Poetry Month. You can find the entire text of T.S. Eliot's Waste Land (whose opening lines describe April as "breeding/ lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire...") at the marvelous site of the Academy of American Poets. Edna St. Vincent Millay's " Spring," actually addresses April: "To what purpose, April, do you appear again?" And, of course, it was in April that Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, in a far more convivial spirit, convened for their pilgrimauge. Poets and painters are natural allies. I recently saw a beautiful show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery of paintings by Jane Freilicher, who was a friend of the poets of the New York School (of the four most prominent—Frank O'Hara, James Schyler, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery, sadly only Ashbery is still alive). Freilicher often made appearances in Frank O'Hara's poems, as did other painters like Larry Rivers and Mike Goldberg. A lovely and jovial poem on the painter's and poet's art is " Why I am not a Painter." An art critic and curator as well as a poet, Frank O'Hara (1922-66) worked at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and famously wrote poems while walking around the city during his lunch hour. His tragic death in a freak accident on Fire Island has inspired several elegaic pictures. Jasper Johns has an homage to O'Hara currently on view ( Jasper Johns:Gray) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To read more about Frank O'Hara and the New York School of Poets, take a look at David Lehman's Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor Books, 1999). Sign up to receive a poem a day during April in your inbox at www.poets.org./poemADay.php.
Still Life Before a Window (below, 2007. oil on linen, 32x40) by Jane Freilicher. Photo courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery. . 
By Maureen Bloomfield | Notable Artists | Random Thoughts | Shows and Events
4/2/2008 11:06:18 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Sunday, March 30, 2008
On hiatus!
Hello from half-sunny, half-rainy Portland! I was just checking to see if there were any new comments on the blog (I can't stay away!) and realized I never wrote a see-you-in-two-weeks post! So, my esteemed colleagues have promised to post once in a while when I'm gone, but I will return, rested and rejuvenated, on April 8. See you then!
By Grace Dobush | News | Random Thoughts
3/30/2008 9:29:43 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Now online: Ask the Experts archive!
The latest exciting addition to our new website is the archive of Ask the Experts questions from The Artist's Magazine and Watercolor Artist! We're continually adding more content to this Q-and-A category, where you can find information like this: Q. I normally paint on stretched canvas or
gesso-primed Masonite panels. I've noticed a growing number of artists
in my area are gluing canvas to Masonite and I'd like to try this
myself. What type of glue would you recommend for this process?
A. If you’re going to glue canvas—either preprimed
or primed after attachment—to a panel, I'd recommend using a panel of
Luan plywood, birch plywood or Masonite. All of these create very
sturdy, durable supports.
Read the whole answer here. ( And you can click here to see all Ask the Experts questions with their categories showing to browse according to your interests.) If you've got a burning question, log in to the Ask the Experts forum and post it there, or send us an e-mail, or write to us at The Artist's Magazine, "Ask the Experts," 4700 E. Galbraith Road, Cincinnati, OH 45236. (Unfortunately, we can't respond to all letters personally.)
Advice | By Grace Dobush | Cool Web sites | Tips
3/25/2008 9:56:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
Monday, March 24, 2008
A Gauguin rarity
By Grace Dobush | News | Notable Artists
3/24/2008 4:10:18 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
|
|
|