Art World Sets Plans for 2021 Fairs (in Pencil) - The New York Times

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Art World Sets Plans for 2021 Fairs (in Pencil) – The New York Times

Published

3 years ago

January 5, 2021

Harry Miller

Exhibitors and collectors are looking cautiously forward in the coming year, knowing that their schedules will be at the mercy of the coronavirus.

Thousands of well-heeled frequent fliers browsing around yet another exhibition center, in yet another country, eager to discover the art world’s next big thing …

That was the fun of art fairs, the destination events that defined and fueled a global boom in recent years. In 2019, sales from the world’s art fairs reached an estimated $16.6 billion, with dealers relying on fairs to generate more than 40 percent of that year’s revenue, according to last year’s Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report.

But the coronavirus pandemic stopped the art fair merry-go-round. Back in March, the Tefaf Maastricht fair in the Netherlands closed four days early when an exhibitor tested positive for the virus. After Tefaf’s closure, at least 25 participants and visitors reported having Covid-19 symptoms. Mass-attendance art fairs have been on hold ever since, replaced — with limited success — by less lucrative online equivalents.

via TEFAF

Now, as countries roll out vaccination programs, even with the virus continuing to mutate and infection levels rising, the art world is banking on the return of in-person events. In November, live fairs made a comeback for local collectors in China, where infection rates had subsided.

But most of the art world’s major international events scheduled for the early months of 2021 have already been postponed or converted into more pandemic-aware formats.

The ARCO Madrid fair has shifted from February to July, as has Frieze Los Angeles, which this year will leave Paramount Studios and be dispersed across several smaller venues in the city. Tefaf Maastricht has moved from its traditional March slot to May, as has Art Basel Hong Kong. Frieze New York says it will maintain its usual May timing, but it has cut its exhibitor list by two-thirds and will move from Randall’s Island to the Shed, the new cultural center in the Hudson Yards area of Manhattan.

“New York is one of the few cities where you can hold a fair for 60 international galleries without having to rely on a huge international attendance. There are so many collectors in the city,” said Victoria Siddall, the Frieze board director. “It’s a much smaller fair, but it felt right for the first half of the year.”

Brett Beyer

Alain Servais, a Brussels-based collector who before the pandemic would typically attend around 15 major art fairs per year, said that the crisis provided an opportunity for smaller regional events.

Mr. Servais said that he planned to be in the Netherlands in early February for Art Rotterdam, a showcase mainly for Northern European galleries representing emerging artists that as of Tuesday was still scheduled to be an in-person event. But Arabella Coebergh, a spokeswoman for Art Rotterdam, said that an expected announcement by the Dutch government next week regarding pandemic restrictions could lead to the postponement of the fair until July.

Still, said Mr. Servais, “There is room for local fairs if they have a good focus — I’m not so worried about them.” But he added: “The big international fairs are most exposed this year. People will travel less, and these fairs count on international attendance for their success.”

This shake-up of the international fair scene comes at a time when, in a contracting art market, many gallerists were already questioning the cost of exhibiting at such events.

“In 2017, we were doing 12 art fairs,” said Marianne Boesky, a New York-based gallerist. “I felt I had to do these events. They’d gotten so expensive. When I looked at our revenues compared to overheads at art fairs, we barely broke even, and that didn’t count the man hours.”

In 2021, Ms. Boesky’s program will be cut down to about six fairs in Europe, the United States and Asia, she said. “But I’m not sure,” she added. “Every two weeks we seem to change our plans.”

Arguably, the bellwether test for the mass-attendance art fair model will come in June at Art Basel in Switzerland. In recent years, the event has become a must-attend fixture for most international collectors. The in-person fair, which usually features about 290 exhibitors drawing about 90,000 visitors, was canceled last year and converted to an online format.

Theodore Kaye/Getty Images

“If things go quickly in the right direction with new vaccination programs and we start to see a lifting of travel restrictions, we’d love to have Art Basel Hong Kong in May and Art Basel in Basel come June mark the beginning of a huge comeback for the art world and the art market,” said Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s global director. “Now, that’s our hope, but it’s not our only scenario.”

If Art Basel does take place, with or without the glitzy parties and dinners that go with it, will a critical mass of collectors, curators and advisers be prepared, or allowed, to fly across the world to be there?

At this stage, many fair-goers remain cautious.

“As much as I would love to attend Art Basel in June, I will not like to attend a fair until such an event is no longer the highest-risk activity for Covid-19,” said Heather Flow, an art adviser based in New York. “I will not suggest a client attend a fair until the risk level is lower. Very few people enjoy buying art online, but no one wants Covid-19.”

Nikolaus Barta, a collector based in Vienna who fell seriously ill with Covid-19 after visiting last year’s Tefaf Maastricht, said he was thinking about visiting Art Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, in March, but no other in-person fairs.

“If you get on an Emirates flight, you have to have been tested,” he said. “I have had a bad feeling about fairs after Maastricht. In Europe they are too big and too crowded. I’ve had Covid, but the virus is mutating. You never know.”

Ms. Boesky, the New York gallerist, said she did not expect the art fair scene to fully return until September at the earliest. That would be just in time for the rescheduled Armory show and the following month’s Frieze fairs in London and FIAC in Paris.

Remko De Waal/EPA, via Shutterstock

Even that seems premature to Josh Baer, an art market commentator and adviser based in New York. His influential Baer Faxt online newsletter predicted last week that 2021’s “first real art fair in person” would be Art Basel Miami Beach in December.

Like many in the art world, Mr. Baer regards online viewing rooms as a poor substitute for the real thing. “Collectors are already bored of online everything,” he said.

Patience, of course, is a virtue. And it appears that art fair organizers and exhibitors are in for a virtuous 2021.

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Art

Art in Bloom returns – CTV News Winnipeg

Published

3 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Harry Miller

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Art in Bloom returns CTV News Winnipeg

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Crafting the Painterly Art Style in Eternal Strands – IGN First – IGN

Published

4 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Harry Miller

Next up in our IGN First coverage of Eternal Strands, we’re diving into the unique and colorful art in the land of the Enclave. We sat down with art director Sebastien Primeau and lead character artist Stephanie Chafe to ask them all about it.

IGN: Let’s talk about Eternal Strands’ distinctive art style. What were some of the guiding principles behind the art direction?

Primeau: I think what was guiding the art direction at the beginning of the project was to find the scale of the game, because we knew that we were having those gigantic 25-meter tall creatures and monsters. So we really wanted to have the architectural elements of the game – the vegetation, the trees – to reflect that kind of size.

So one of my inspirations was coming from an architect called Hugh Ferriss, and I was very impressed by his work, and it was very inspiring for me too. So just the scale of his work. So he was a real influence for Metropolis, Gotham, so I was really inspired by his work.

Chafe: I think one of the things that, just as artists and as creators, we were interested in as well was going for a color palette that can be very bright. And something that can really challenge us too as artists, and going into a bit more of at-hand painterly work, and getting our hands really into it, into the clay, so to speak, and trying to go for something bright and colorful.

Eternal Strands Slideshow – IGN First

IGN: That’s not the first time I’ve heard your team describe the art style as “painterly.” What does that mean?

Primeau: Painterly is just a word that can give so much room to different types of interpretation. I think where we started was Impressionist painters. So I really enjoy looking at many painters, and they have different types of styles. But we wanted to have something that was fresh, colorful, and unique.

And also, I remember when we were starting the project there was that word. “It’s going to be stylized,” but stylized is just a word that gives so much room to different kinds of style. And since we were a small team, we had to figure out a way to create those rough brushstrokes. If it was painted very quickly by an artist, like Bob Ross would say, “Accident is normal.” So I think we wanted to embrace that. And because we’re all artists, it’s hard too, at some point, to disconnect from what you’re doing. It’s like, “Oh, I can maybe add some more details over there.” But I was always the- “Guys, oh, Steph, that’s enough. Let’s stop it right there. I think it looks cool.”

IGN: So, when you create an asset for Eternal Strands, is somebody actually painting something?

Chafe: I can speak more on the character side. For us, we do a lot of that hand painting, a lot of those strokes by hand. And we try to embrace, not the mistakes, but the non-realistic part of it having an extra splotch here and there.

We’ve got brushes that we made that can help us as artists to get the texture we’re looking for. It really is a texture that gives to it. But a lot of the time it’s not just something generated in a substance painter, or getting these things that will layer these things for you, making it quick and procedural. Sometimes we have those as helpers, but more often than not we just go in and paint.

IGN: Eternal Strands is a fair bit more colorful than lots of games today. Why was it important to the team to have lots of bright colors?

Primeau: You need to be careful, actually, with colors. Because with too many colors you can create that kind of pizza of color.

We wanted to balance the color per level, because we’re not making an open-world game. I really wanted each level to have their own color palette identity. So we’re playing a lot with the lighting. The lighting for me is key. It’s very important. You can have gorgeous textures, props, characters, but if your lighting is not that great, it’s like… So lighting is key. And especially with Unreal Five, we have now, access to Lumen. It brought so much richness to the color, how the color is balancing with the entirety of the level. It definitely changed the way we were looking at the game.

We’re using the technology, but in a way to create something that feels like if you were looking at a painting. I think we have achieved that goal.

Chafe: I’m very happy with it.

IGN: What were your inspirations from other games or other media when developing the art style?

Primeau: I have many. I’ll start with graphic novels, European graphic novels. I really wanted to stay away from DC comics, Marvels comics, those kinds of classics.

Before I started Eternal Strand, I saw a video. It was one of the League of Legends short films for a competition. It’s “RISE.” I don’t know if you remember that one, but it was made by Fortiche Studio who did Arcane, and I’m a huge fan of Arcane. When I saw that short film, it was way before Arcane was announced, I was like, “oh gosh, this is freaking cool. This is so amazing. I wish I would be able to work on a game that has that kind of look.”

Chafe: For me, when we started the project, one of the things that I wanted to challenge myself a lot was in concept and drawing and stuff like that and doing more, learning more about color as well, which is something I find super fascinating and also kicks my butt all the time because of just color theory in general.

But with the [character] portraits specifically, I think, I mean, growing up I played a lot of games, a lot of JRPGs too. I played just seeing basic portraits in something like Golden Sun or eventually also Persona and of course Hades, which is a fantastic game. I played way too much of that, early access included. But I really liked that part. Visual novels too, just that kind of thing. You can get an emotion from a 2D image as well when it’s well done, especially if you have voices on top of it.

IGN: Were there any really influential pieces of concept art that served as a guiding document the team would reference later on?

Chafe: I have one personal: It’s really Maxime Desmettre’s stuff because it was so saturated. Blue, blue, blue sky. Maxim Desmettre is our concept artist that we have who works from Korea. When I joined the project, seeing that was just like… and seeing that as a challenge too, like ‘how are we going to get there?’

The one that I’m thinking of that hopefully we could find after, just in general with the work that always speaks so much to me is this blue, blue sky and the saturation of the grass. But also when he gets into his architecture and stuff like that, there’s just a warmth to everything. The warmth to the stone that just makes it look inviting and mysterious at the same time. And I think that really speaks a lot to it.

IGN: How did you go about designing Eternal Strand’s protagonist: Brynn?

Primeau: I think that Mike also, when he pitched me the character, he was using Indiana Jones as an example. So courageous, adventurer guy, cool guy. Also, when you’re looking at Indiana Jones, he’s a cool guy. And we wanted to create that kind of coolness also out of our main protagonist. And I remember it took time. We did many iterations.

Chafe: It was a lot of iterations for sure. Well, I think I had done a bunch of sketches because it’s what’s going to be the face of the player, and also to have her own personality as well in the story, and her history as well. And the mantle was a really big one too. What gives her one of sets of her powers and stuff, figuring that out was actually one of the longest processes. It’s just a cape, but at the same time, it’s getting that to work with gameplay and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, all of Brynn’s personality and her vibe really comes from a lot of good work from the narrative team. So, mostly collaboration there.

IGN: What’s the deal with Brynn’s mentor: Oria? How did you settle on a giant bird?

Chafe: Populating the world of the enclave was, “it’s free real estate.” You get to just throw things on the wall and see what sticks. And, “Oh, that’s really cool. Oh, that’s nice.” At some point I’d done a big sketch of a big bird lady with a claymore, and Seb said, “That’s cool.” And then kind of ran with it.

IGN: What’s the toughest part about the art style you’ve chosen for Eternal Strands?

Primeau: The toughest part was…A lot of people in the team have experience making games, so it was to get outside of that mold that we’ve been to.

For me, working on games that were more realistic in terms of look, I think it was really tough just to think differently, to change our mindset, especially that we knew that we would be a small team, so we had to do the art differently, find recipes, especially when we were talking about textures, for example. So having a good mix.

Chafe: One of the things too is also as we’re all a bunch of artists, and every artist has their own style that they just suddenly have ingrained in them, and that’s what makes us all unique as artists as well. But when you’re on a project, you have to coalesce together. You can’t kind of have one look different from the other. When you’re doing something more realistic, you have your North Star, which is a giant load of references that are real. And you can say “it has to look like that, as close to that as possible.”

When you have a style in mind and you’re developing at the same time, you kind of look at it and you review it and you have a feeling more than anything else.

You’re training each other with your styles as you kind of merge together in the end. And that kind of is how the style happened through, like you mentioned, like finding easy recipes, through just actually creating assets and seeing what comes out and, “Oh, that’s really cool. Okay, we can now use that as kind of our North Star.”

For more on Eternal Strands, check out our preview of the Ark of the Forge boss fight, or read our interview with the founders of Yellow Brick Games on going from AAA studios to their own indie shop, and for everything else stick with IGN.

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