Although I use my email calendar function to keep track of my schedule, I still hang a wall calendar on my office wall. It's decoration, and I look forward to flipping that page each month.

Similarly, I now look forward to a new piece of desktop wallpaper art for my computer every month, and the new images from the June issue of The Pastel Journal are now ready. The two paintings (shown here) are: Jimmy Wright's floral,

Pompeii No. 7 (top; pastel, 29x41) and Rick Stevens' Divine Convergence (pastel, 24x30). Download them for your own computer desktop at our website.

For "bonus" wallpaper selections, be sure to sign up for our email newsletter (see the link under "Navigation" at left)—and get access to an extra page of selections.

The Chicago Pastel Painters recently presented their Second Biennial National Juried Exhibition, Pastels Chicago 2009, at the Koehnline Museum of Art in Des Plaines, Illinois. The selections and award recipients were chosen by Doug Dawson, MPSA, 2008 PSA Hall of Fame Inductee, and 2005 IAPS Master Circle. Among the artists receiving awards were Remley Martin, who won the Best of Show for Tubac Pots Series III; Al Zerries, who won First Place for The Eternal Redhead; and Tatijana Jacenkiw, who won Second Place for Solitude - Babusia in Pink I. (The winning paintings are presented above).
 
The Chicago Pastel Painters is a society of professional artists dedicated to the promotion and exhibition of the medium of pastel in the Chicagoland area.

Congratulations to Dan Michael, the winner of our Creative Spark contest No. 7. The Mechanicsville, Va., artist submitted his painting, Fog After Freezing Rain, in response to Cheri Dunnigan's February 2009 challenge "Grappling With Grays."

Michael explains his approach to gray: "I used muted colors overlayed with purplish-blue grays and blue grays to keep the background and middle ground cooler. These were blended together and feathered with a brush to eliminate hard edges. In the foreground, I used less grays and more complementary colors to let the warm oranges and yellows show through and come forward."

The artist will receive a set of Terry Ludwig pastels (Maggie Price Essential Grays, valued at $90) along with a $50 gift certificate. Many thanks to Terry Ludwig for this generous prize donation!

We had great response to this Creative Spark challenge and received a number of wonderful pastels. Here's a few we'd like to share as honorable mentions: The Matriarch by Ariel Freeman; Leaving by Dawn E. Miller; Morning Light by Kathy Hirsh; Grey Barn, Red Trees by Mike Allen; and Broken by Brittany Lane Allen.

To see the past winners and challenges from all our Creative Spark contests, and the current challenge, visit the Creative Spark hub on our website.

If you want your work to be seen, it's up to you to make it happen--at least that's what Brian Sherwin from MyArtSpace argues in his most recent blog post: "It is my opinion that an artist can’t wait to be discovered. An artist must take the bull by the horns and utilize every opportunity in order to promote his or her artwork--again, he or she must make it happen," he says.

Fair enough, but what steps does today's artist need to take to get the ball rolling? Sherwin offers a number of good tips for artists, including: Answer email that you receive about your art promptly; be smart about how you list your contact info; have a website or online community profile that is devoted to your artwork; and maintain an active blog for your art.

Click here to read the full post.

Warning: If you'd rather not lose the next hour of your life to an online game, read no further. If, however, you can't think of a better way to spend an hour than looking at fine art and battling world hunger at the same time, then read on!

Last Thanksgiving, I blogged about Free Rice, a vocabulary-quizzing website that tests your verbal powers and supports a charitable effort to fight world hunger at the same time. I recently discovered that Free Rice made some new additions to the site, and now you can test your knowledge of several subjects, including art! This is seriously addicting, but what fun! Click here to get started.

P.S. The answer to the question shown here? Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Congratulations to Mike Beeman, of Cheyenne, Wyo., for winning the June Creative Spark challenge. His beautiful painting, Spring Bouquet (at right), fit well with Carole Catchen’s prompt on letting shape contribute to a painting’s total composition.

“Both positive and negative shapes are created as equal components within the composition and should come together much like a composer would arrange notes for a melody or musical arrangement,” says Beeman. “It’s important to me that shapes create a sense of tension between the essential form and the background.”

The artist won $200 toward the purchase of a Heilman pastel box. Our thanks to Heilman Designs for their generosity!





Other favorites of the PJ editors included Refined Reflections, by Stephanie Wellman; Meadow Matriarch, by Deborah Maklowski; and Tea for Two, by Deborah Kidwell (pictured, L-to-R, below).

   


Did you miss the deadline for the June challenge? There’s still time to get involved in the August challenge—deadline is Aug. 29, and the prize is Mount Vision Pastels!

Looking for a way to rejuvenate your painting process? Try putting yourself on the clock. Force yourself to complete a painting in one session, for example, or take it to extremes like the artist featured in this video. He completes an entire work in spraypaint, in less than one minute. We might advise you not to try this at home, unless you have a supply of drop cloths at the ready. This may be the one painting process more messy than painting with pastels.

In honor of the French Post-Impressionist painter’s birthday (Jan. 19, 1839), we thought it might be nice to post a slideshow of some of his works. Perhaps they’ll inspire some of your own projects this weekend, as they did for a certain well-known writer:

“I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Enjoy!

This may be a stretch as an art-related topic for the blog, but as a writer, I certainly consider words to be an important artistic tool. With that in mind, I'd like to share with you my favorite new website: www.freerice.com. A sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com, Free Rice tests your English vocabulary and, with every correct answer, sets aside grains of rice for hungry people around the world. Think of it: You can improve your vocabulary with an addictive online game and help stop world hunger at the same time!

So, as our minds turn to feasting this week, perhaps this will be one way to "give back" to those less fortuntate. If nothing else, now you have something to do while you wait for that turkey to come out of the oven!

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's not too late to create your own Robotic Snap-O-Lantern in time to impress the socks off your trick-or-treaters this evening--Evil Mad Scientist Ladoratories can show you how. Visit their site (where you'll find lots of other interesting projects, by the way) for a step-by-step and to watch a video of one of these pumpkins in action.

Ah, PBS—the single upside to not having cable. Next Sunday the channel airs the fourth season of the Emmy-nominated public television series, Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, so get your TiVo, DVR (or, in my case, ancient VCR) ready. Running Sunday nights Oct. 28-Nov. 18, the latest installment offers four one-hour episodes based on ideas of romance, protest, ecology and paradox, featuring 17 contemporary artists divulging their creative process. First on the lineup is “Romance,” featuring artists Laurie Simmons, Lari Pittman, Judy Pfaff and Pierre Huyghe on the role that emotion, regret, fantasy and nostalgia play in modern art.

The series’ website also includes listings of season 4 artists who might have exhibitions coming your way. If you’re near Cincinnati in May, check out An-My-Lê’s gelatin silver prints at the Contemporary Arts Center.

Check local listings for air times.

Whether you have yet to take a workshop with pastel artist Richard McKinley, or you're a regular attendee, chances are you haven't considered that reaching him with your most pressing pastel problems might be as easy as turning on your computer. That is, unless you've already visited our new Pastel Pointers blog.

Topics McKinley has already discussed include:
What does simultaneous contrast mean?
Why have a section for neutrals in your pastel palette?
What governs my choices for an underpainting?

Be the next artist to add your questions to the mix by e-mailing us at pjedit@fwpubs.com

The commencement address that Dana Gioia, poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, delivered to Stanford University graduates on June 17 is a lament on the position of the arts in today's culture. Fortunately, it is also a persuasive and passionate argument for why the arts are important and why his audience of new graduates should make a conscious decision to live lives that are arts-engaged.

Gioia's main point is that we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists. "There is an experiment I'd love to conduct," he says. "I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name. Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name. I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name."

Gioia asserts that today's culture is all about entertainment, the purpose of which is to market things to buy. "American culture," he says, "has mostly become one vast infomercial." While he admits to enjoying film and his big-screen TV, Gioia cautions that there is a price. "The role of culture must go beyond economics," he says. "It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us."

I felt eager to share his message, because there may be a time when you must make the argument to a friend or to a son or daughter about why art is important, or to a school board about why a curriculum rich in arts is essential, or to your local newspaper about why coverage of the arts is vital, and Gioia's parting words may be of some service (you can see the entire transcript here):

"Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world--equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being--simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

"Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, 'It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.' Art awakens, enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity."

Well put.

French impressionist painter/sculptor Edgar Degas would be 173 years old today—imagine all the other great works he could’ve put out into the world with another 90 years to spare (he died at 83). For a little inspiration today, tour The National Gallery of Art’s online feature on some of his dancer paintings.

For those of you itching to get your hands on our December issue, in which we publish the Greatest Pastels of All Time feature, rest assured that Degas will be in there—how could he not?

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” —Edgar Degas

With the latest Harry Potter movie opening on Wednesday and the much-anticipated final book due for release on the 21st, you have no doubt been hearing and reading a lot lately about Harry hysteria. The Pastel Journal blog and magazine may have been one place where you didn't expect to see coverage on the topic. Well, you won't find me adding anything to the heated debate over whether or not Harry dies in the finale, but--in the middle of all the excitement--I couldn't keep from revealing that we're working right now on a feature about Mary Grandpre, the illustrator of the Harry Potter series, for our December issue.

In addition to her work for Scholastic and many corporate clients, Grandpre has also illustrated a number of other children's books, including Chin Yu Min and the Ginger Cat, The Thread of Life: Twelve Old Italian Tales, Plum, Pockets and The Sea Chest. The artist told The Pastel Journal contributing-writer Deborah Secor that pastels have been her medium of choice from the start. “I actually started with big, soft sticks of charcoal," she says, "but I’ve done pastels since I was five years old and was given some as a gift. Even as a kid I liked the immediate contact I had, getting involved physically with the pastel. It’s an extension of my hand."

The December issue ships to subscribers in early October and hits newsstands October 30.

In honor of the Mexican artist’s 100th birthday, the home-turned-museum of Frida Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera unveils a collection of photos, drawings and other personal items today. Read yesterday’s Washington Post story here. Find more articles on Kahlo’s birthday celebration here, and here, and here.

Since a portion of the items—found in a trunk and unused bathroom three years ago—includes puppets and a puppet theater, we found it fitting to share an image of Anne’s Frida doll that lives at her desk. And check out Anne and Sarah’s mesh tributes to the tortured artist, which they picked up in Albuquerque while attending the International Association of Pastel Societies convention in May.

“I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.” —Frida Kahlo

We thought we'd direct you to a few good blogs we know at our sister publications, The Artist's Magazine and Watercolor Artist.

The Artist's Magazine Blog
Michael Skalka: Anatomy Art Materials
David McEown: Painting at the End of the Earth

Watercolor Artist Blog