The Best Online Resources for Artists Part Three

The Best Online Resources for Artists Part Three

Each week I write a new article for members of our three wonderful art groups on Facebook, The Artists Exchange, The Artists Directory, and The Artist Hangout. This week we continue with my latest series which identifies some of the very best places on and offline to visit and find the very best resources for artists. This week we have a truly international selection of resources which I like to call, the internet’s hidden gems!

This week there are also some fun questions to answer as you read along too, no prizes except that you will be forever respected for knowing the answer, no Googling, Binging, or cheating, and leave the answers in the comments! Tip: you’ll find the answers in the resources!

Times Educational Supplement (TES)…

If you are an art teacher or interested in art education more generally there are millions of great resources which can be found online. The problem for anyone looking for great educational resources is that many of the resources haven’t been updated in years and the content within can be a decade out of date. 

Tes.com which you can find here is perhaps one of the very best online resources for education in general and pretty much every subject is covered. The resources for the arts though are where TES really excels in my eyes. Occasionally TES resources fall into the 404 page not found trap as do many online resources but it is much rarer for this to happen than on many websites. 

There are lots of free resources on the site and there are also a lot of resources which have been created by teachers and for which there is sometimes a small charge for. Some of the resources will have multiple versions which make them relevant to a particular country so for example you might visit one of the resources which has been geared towards a UK based curriculum and find an option for a different version which is geared towards a US based curriculum and there are specific country based collections too. Think of TES as Etsy for teachers and this will give you a better idea of how the whole thing works!

IMMA…

The Irish Museum of Modern Art has a website chock full of educational resources for educators and those just wanting to understand more about the arts. You can view their website here.  

The IMMA has some stunning artwork in its collection which you can look through here, and the learning resources can be found in the engagement and learning section of the site which you can find right here.  

There are a series of information booklets which are available for download which have been designed in response to IMMA’s exhibitions where they have asked artists to respond to each of the works. This is a great resource and whilst some of the information was created back in 2012, they are an interesting read.

The resources on offer through IMMA also include audio resources which can be found on the IMMA Soundcloud channel and you can listen to a conversation about the Freud Project or a curator’s introduction which are just two of the many interesting audio episodes which are available for right here.  

My Modern Met…

Not the first time that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art has appeared as a great place to identify resources for artists but there is one area of the Met’s website which I haven’t mentioned in the past and that is the huge selection of images which they have put in the public domain. The Met have lifted the barriers and provided the world with access to its image library through a Creative Commons licence, which essentially means that for the most part you are able to browse any of the works in the public domain collection and choose which ones you need to share or remix without any restrictions. 

There are currently around 375,000 images available and you can start looking through them right here.  

The Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam…

The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is very much worth a visit if you are close by, but their online offering gives those who cannot visit the museum a real taste of not only Van Gogh, but the works of those artists who were friends with him and those artists who have been inspired by him.

Van Gogh was a serious art collector as well as an artist and he collected hundreds of Japanese prints whilst he was alive. There are also reference to French printmaking between 1890 and 1905 and you are able to take a deep dive into the Parisian print world of the fin de siècle. Discover a period of artistic innovation and decadence, from quiet interiors to the bustling streets of the modern city.

You can explore the collection right here.  

The Tate (again!)

Tate are not a newcomer to this series as I have previously mentioned the resources that they make available online, but there is one area of the website that I totally forgot to add and that is the amazing archive collection of images. 

The Tate Archive contains more than one million items on artists, figures from the art world, and art organisations in Britain and it masterfully creates a history of fine art practice in the UK. Included in the archive are letters, writings, sketchbooks, audio-visual material, photographs and press cuttings amongst many other fascinating resources. 

The Tate’s site is one of my primary sources of reference for British art whenever I carry out research for this site because the quality of the content is exceptional. 

You can visit the Tate Archives by clicking here.  

As well as browsing the collections you can collate your discoveries in an album which you can then publish on Tate’s website. You can find out more about that right here.  

Guggenheim (again!)

The Guggenheim’s collection is spread across four venues in New York, Venice, Bilbao, and Abu Dhabi, and contains more than 7,000 pieces of modern art, including masterpieces from Picasso, Pollock, and Modigliani. Now you can view more than 1,700 artworks from more than 625 artists by clicking right here.  

The Guggenheim in New York have also made more than 200 books available after spending more than half a decade digitising its exhibition catalogues and art books and placing the results online. 

There are catalogues on retrospective exhibitions on masters such as Paul Klee amongst others which also include Rothko and Francis Bacon. 

This really is one of the best sources of information if you want to advance your knowledge of modern art. 

MOMA (again!)

Yet more resources are available from the Museum of Modern Art and another I didn’t add when I last wrote about the great resources from MOMA was that they have digitised many collections so that you can at least virtually visit their collections and exhibitions. 

At the time of writing there were 4,844 exhibitions online and when you click on any of them the site opens up more access to dive deeper and view the works as well as the catalogues and any other relevant documents. 

You can access any of them by searching and you are then able to drill down to exhibition dates, and types of exhibitions and artwork by clicking this link right here.  

Disappointed that I wasn’t born in the USA before December 12^th, 1929, when the exhibition of paintings by 19 living Americans was held, I can now go back and retrospectively and virtually attend in the year 2018 thanks to this resource. You can find the link to that one right here.  

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

I was surprised when a friend who lives just a few blocks from LACMA told me that he had never visited the museum in all his years of living there which was a surprise because pretty much every weekend you can find him hanging out in galleries around the world. That’s probably true for a few of us who often forgo visiting somewhere local because well, it’s local. But when you have somewhere as exciting as LACMA there’s really no excuse not to visit, and especially because they have such great online resources and they too have placed more than 20,000 images into the public domain. You can filter the public domain images direct from the search page.

Some of the images can be used without any restrictions for any purpose although some of the images have very specific sets of licensing conditions, but there is plenty to keep your eyes and your mind entertained with some of the world’s greatest art. 

It is a really easy site to use and the search engine can even drill down to showcase only the highlights or curatorial area, but they have tagged individual works with their defining attributes so if you are looking for something as specific as a banana, it’s searchable. You can spend days looking through the works right here.  

Colouring Books…

If you just fancy putting some colour into existing works of art or you are an art tutor looking for something to engage younger students with, then #ColorOurCollections which can be found on The New York Academy of Medicine’s website is where you need to head. 

That link is here, and this is where libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions have made colouring sheets and books available based on the materials within their collections. 

The institutions are too many to list but a visit to the link above will give you an idea of who has been engaged with the project but there are organisations and cultural institutions such as The Smithsonian, University of Kansas, Carnegie Hall Archives, The Brooklyn Collection at Brooklyn Public Library, New York Academy of Medicine, and The British Library who have all made some of their collections available as colouring pages. 

Images range from fine art to fun and political and medicine, and everything in between, it really is a great resource which has so many uses. The only downside is that you will spend hours just going through everything that has been made available so make sure you have plenty of time set aside as you will get sucked into this one too!

The National Gallery of Art…

The National Gallery of Art have also released more than 51,000 digitised works of art for free too and this particular set of images has plenty to inspire you. You can start viewing the collection right here.  

Many of the images can be used for personal or commercial reasons but there are some restrictions on some images and there is plenty of guidance on the site to keep you on the right side of the law.

The National Gallery of Art is in Washington DC and they regularly update their featured image collections which facilitate learning enrichment. There are some outstanding works included in the collection and as with a few other services of this type, you are able to curate your own collections but you can also add annotations, and click and drag to sort and store each work using their Lightbox Arranger tool which can be found right here.

Rijksmuseum…

Not to be outdone, the Rijksmuseum which is based in Amsterdam, have more than 600,000 digitised works of art available to view with many Dutch paintings from some of the Dutch Masters such as Rembrandt. Their portrait collection features works from the 14^th Century to the present day and this is where Van Gogh’s Self Portrait can be viewed in all of its digital glory.

It’s not just paintings, there are also photographs of historical furniture and interiors, and applied arts and fashion and many of the images come with lots of documentation too. Again you can become the curator of images by creating your very own Rijksstudio and it is fascinating to see the curations of many of the people who have signed up to use the site, it is a fascinating glimpse into how some people really like some styles of art but others have a passion for something different entirely. 

You can view the studio and the collections right here, or you can download the Rijksmuseum App on the App Store or on the Google Play store by clicking here to find out more. There is a terrific multimedia tour in the app and it really does put a museum in your pocket!

More than 10,000 Art History Books…

I remember studying art history in the pre-internet days and boy was is a task. The reading was easy enough but if you needed a book then it would mean physically going outside to the book store or the public library. Then the internet came along and information became accessible with the touch of a button. Well mostly information became available, it would still be some years before it would completely replace the occasional trip to the book store.

Today we can find pretty much anything online and when it comes to art history, and if you head to the Getty Research Portal from this link here you will be able to access, explore, share, and download, more than 100,000 freely available art history texts it has and continues to make available.

The great thing about the Getty portal is that there are some real gems within it, and there are many rare titles too. There is a French version of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem from 1845, The Raven, which is beautifully illustrated by Édouard Manet which you can read here.  

So if your thing is to study art history this year, this is the site to head over too. 

Art Resources for Teachers and the rest of us!

Teaching is a difficult job and in the current age it is even more difficult with the lack of resources which they have been provided to do the job with. Ask any art teacher who teaches kids and they will probably tell you that they often spend their own money on essential supplies to keep the class engaged because the art department all too often comes second to any other given subject.

So when you stumble across great online resources for teachers, well they deserve a mention. Anything that can make an art teacher’s job a little less arduous should be welcomed by everyone. 

The Student Art Guide can be found here with the free resources for teacher’s right here. There’s plenty of content covering a wide range of subjects such as how to create an art portfolio, art project ideas and plenty of student work covering everything from digital media to sculpture and 3D design. 

Cleveland Institute of Art…

For more than 135 years, the Cleveland Institute of Art which back in 1882 was chartered as the Western Reserve School of Design for Women before becoming officially known as The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1956 and in 1981 the school purchased a former Ford assembly plant.  

The Cleveland Institute of Art first popped up on my radar a few years ago and has continued to be a useful source of information since. You can find their homepage right here but for resources then take a look right here.  

It is at this link where you will find a carefully curated list of links and resources which cover topics such as securing work opportunities in the arts, and grants, and there are many artistic subject specific resources which have been identified and listed here too. The list is interesting as a number of external websites which wouldn’t necessarily pop up on the first page of a search engine results page have been listed.

Yale…

Since its founding in 1701, Yale has been dedicated to expanding and sharing knowledge and preserving cultural and scientific information for future generations and its reach it truly international.  As a university it is first rate and regarded as one of the finest academic institutions around the world, so wouldn’t it be great if we could get a Yale education online for free? Well you can thanks to Open Yale Courses.

Visit this link which will take you to an introduction to the Open Yale Courses which provide a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale. 

You don’t have to register to experience any of these courses and all of the lectures have been recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available as videos, audio, and text transcripted formats. 

Many of the courses from Yale can be found on Coursera at this link  and I will touch on Coursera next. Before I do though it is worth pointing you in the direction of Yale’s digital content where nearly two million items and a half a million images from across Yale’s collections can be found. 

Yale’s cross collection discovery which can be found here  is a way to search across Yale’s art collections, natural history, books, and maps as well as photos, audio, and video documenting people and places. 

Coursera…

Some of you might already be aware of Coursera, it is available on an app for iOS and Android, and it has a solid body of users who benefit from accessing and taking part in the rich learning experiences on offer. The mission statement of Coursera is that they envision a world where anyone, anywhere can transform their life by accessing the world’s best learning experience. 

Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from the world’s best universities and educational institutions. The courses include recorded video lectures, auto-graded and peer reviewed assignments and community discussion forums. Best of all when you complete a course, you will receive a sharable electronic course certificate.

Whilst many of the courses will cost you some money to participate in especially where you access graded assignments, there are a number of courses available for free and many of the actual course resources such as videos and lectures are free to watch. You can find out more right here. 

edX…

If you are looking for free courses from the likes of MIT, Berkley, Harvard, and The University of Queensland, Australia, amongst many others then edX offer a range of courses for free, you only pay if you want the certificate at the end.

Founded by MIT and Harvard back in 2012, edX is an online learning destination and MOOC provider who offer high quality courses. There are more than 130 global partners which include the world’s leading universities and non-profits.

You can explore a range of subjects with everything from marketing to the arts being represented and a number of courses are available in other languages too. Some of the courses have specific start dates and require a little commitment each week as they are run as live courses, others though are self-paced so you can take as long as you want. 

You can sign up right here, and once you do there’s plenty that will keep your interest such as the 8-week long course from Harvard, Modern Masterpieces of World Literature which you can find right here,  and there’s one specifically on the topic of social media – How Media Got Social, which you can find right here. 

The course outcomes for the latter will help you to understand how to extrapolate current social trends and map possible directions in social media, so if you relay on Facebook and Twitter for your marketing campaigns to sell your work, this is a great little course to start off with. 

If you are into all things Hollywood and want to explore the history of the home of cinema and celebrity, the birth of film and the rise of the internet then the offering from Penn (University of Pennsylvania) which takes around 3-4 hours per week over 4 weeks will provide you with some amazing insights as to how Hollywood got to be the global powerhouse that it is today. You can find out more right here.  

More to come!

I haven’t finished with this series just yet, there is certainly more that I have planned out and am currently writing for you, but if there are specific resources you are on the lookout for, let me know by leaving a comment below and I will try to track them down!

Changes…

You might have noticed that the comments section has changed a little, I tinkered under the hood last week and changed a few things around. Hopefully you like the new look and feel of the comments section and it should be much easier than it was to post a comment. I wanted to make sure that the spammers would have a harder time posting links to dodgy websites in the comments and this new system means I can respond much faster and get to the spammers and remove them. The change meant that I lost all of the comments to every post but it’s a happier place to be.

I have been busy working on a couple of new pages for the site but it has taken a bit longer than I thought it would! There will be a new title banner across the page at some point too, and I am trying desperately to finish off the redesign of some of the existing pages. If I had a hundred pairs of hands working on this stuff, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t be enough! 

I am looking out for more artists to showcase and will post some details right here soon, but if you are a member of any of our three Facebook groups (soon to be four), and wish to be considered to be featured, please do let me know on Facebook. Bear with me though as I receive sometimes a few hundred messages each month so sometimes I am playing catch up!

The only other change is that I am putting together the final preparations in opening a new online store for some of my artwork! This is where you will be able to buy selected pieces of my art and download it for printing at home! There will also be some limited edition art available too and each of the limited edition prints and originals will be signed. Keep an eye open here for more details!

About Mark…

I am an artist and blogger who specialises in abstracts, landscapes, and seascapes. My work is sold in more than 150 retail locations across the USA and Canada including The Great Frame Up, Framing and Art Centre, and Deck the Walls and you can also buy from Fine Art America or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com   

I also offer some works directly and these come signed with a certificate of authenticity. Please do get in touch if there are any pieces you are interested in owning.

You can also follow me on Facebook at: https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia and on Twitter @beechhouseart

If you would like to support the upkeep of this site or just buying a coffee so I can keep on writing hopefully useful articles for you at https://gofundme.com/mark-Taylor-beechhouse-Media  

There’s no obligation to do so but in time I hope to remove adverts from the site entirely and create more pages which focus on and support independent visual artists.