Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

For today's mini episode, I thought it might be nice to change things up a little bit and cover the history of a medium rather than a specific artwork. Learn a little bit about pencils, what the numbers and letters mean, what is in the core of a pencil and how colored pencils differ from regular pencils. Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab Who ARTed is an Airwave Media...

Skipping ahead a few hundred years, the artist Xu Bing created Book from the Sky as a monumental print. It is brobably among the most ambitious, labor intensive, and useless books ever to be printed in China or anywhere else. He created 4,000 unique characters on wood blocks to print this massive "book" but while those characters look like Chinese writing, they are actually completely meaningless....

Modernists said, “form follows function” focusing on how people will use a space, but Gehry focuses on how people will react to the space. His goal is to inspire, to make them feel. He talks about the challenge of creating feeling with inert materials. He says it is the movement that brings out a feeling. With his design in Bilbao, Spain, rather than simply designing a building to house a collecti...

This episode is about Arthur Boyd the Australian painter known for his use of symbols from mythology to express his philosophical views. My guest this week was Matthew Bliss, a podcaster and producer. Check out his work at https://matthewbliss.net/from-my-home-to-yours Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in a...

Today Diego Rivera is less of a household name than his wife Frida Kahlo, but in the early 20th century, he was the more established artist. Rivera was born December 8th, 1886 in Guatajaunto Mexico. As a 3 year old, he was caught drawing on the walls, but instead of getting angry, his parents chose to encourage his creativity by hanging canvas and chalkboards on the walls. He would go through a lo...

The Bay was painted in 1963 as Frankenthaler had refined her soak and stain process. While Mountains and Sea was made with diluted oil paints, The Bay is acrylic on unprimed canvas. She had found that using acrylics gave her greater control over the viscosity or how fluid the paint was. As I look at The Bay, the title indicates a landscape and the brightness, the organic shapes of blue and green g...

Few people know this, but Art used to be an Olympic event. Starting in the 1912 games, artists could win Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals in five categories of art. This is an encore presentation of my fun fact mini episode from season 2. Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any...

Maria Martinez belonged to the Tewa-speaking Pueblo people, known for their rich artistic heritage. Pottery-making was deeply rooted in Puebloan culture, serving as a means of artistic expression and a reflection of their close connection with the natural world. Maria grew up watching her family members create pottery, learning the traditional techniques. Of course, we seldom talk about those who...

In 1894, George Seurat began going out to an idyllic little island away from the urban center of Paris. It was a place where people of various classes would relax. While the image is of people at leisure, Seurat was anything but relaxed. He was a disciplined artist on a mission to create a work that would be significant in art history. He spent years developing this work. He made dozens of prepara...

This week we are looking at Yves Klein and his famous photograph, Leap Into the Void, from 1960. Klein had a short but highly influential career as he pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art. He made a symphony of a single note, used humans as paint brushes, and even patented his own color. My Guest this week is Tim Bogatz, host of Art Ed Radio from The Art of Education University. I...

Katsushika Hokusai is best known for The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa, part of his series of 36 Views of Mount Fuji. His family was in the mirror business, but Hokusai showed a proclivity for art starting at a young age. When he was 14 he started apprenticing as a wood carver. He spent 4 years carving wood blocks to use as stamps for printmaking. He then went on to study under artists to produce his...

Roberto Matta was a Chilean born artist whose life and work transcended boundaries. He was always looking to explore new ideas, push his work further and to astonish. As he said, “A landscape is at peace whenever there is no visible catastrophe and yet ecologically it is violent and devouring. One must grasp what lies behind appearance.” Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science...

In this depiction of Shiva we see the natural rhythms to everything in the cosmos. Birth and death, creation and destruction are symply phases all things will go through. In this bronze work from 11th century India during the Chola period, we see Shiva in a dancing pose. He is surrounded by a ring of flames. Fire is an interesting force as it can be tremendously destructive and dangerous, but simu...

Lisa Gherardini was not born to fame and fortune. In fact, her family had fallen on hard times as wars laid waste to their land. She was an unlikely subject for a prominent artist. Leonardo da Vinci was a second-class member of his family. He was acknowledged by his father but barred from the family trade and left to make his own way in the world. He was smart and talented but bounced around pursu...

On September 12, 1940, a dog fell down a fox hole and four boys went in after it. They descended into a cavern with a makeshift lamp and hopes of finding their dog, but they found way more creatures than they were expecting. In this episode, we explore the caves of Lascaux, France and some of the most famous prehistoric art in the world. Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science...

An artist’s skillful application of paint will make an artwork good, but a good story makes that artwork great. In 2010, a painting went on auction at Sotheby’s and sold for $1.5 million and I would argue that price is not because of the image, or the artist, but rather the story. Harry Hahn was an American pilot fighting in World War 1. He was fortunate to not only survive the brutal war, but als...

In November of 1957, a small committee was formed. February 17, 1958, they held the first public meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. That same year, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament asked the artist Gerald Holtom to create a symbol for the movement. The CND has been at the forefront of the peace movement in the UK and claims to be Europe’s biggest single-issue peace campaign. Holt...

Diego Velazques was one of the most significant painters of Spain's Golden Age in the 17th century. He was a master of both portraiture and genre painting, Las Meninas is a sort of mix of both. We see people who seem rather formally dressed by today’s standards, but the subject is also, it was a peak behind the curtain of royal life. Withing the work, the first focal point would be the little girl...

Rene Magritte's painting, Son of Man, is among the most famous images of the Surrealist Movement. It is one of the few artworks that transcends the museum and has become a part of pop culture. Actually technically it isn’t even in the museums. Son of Man is privately owned and rarely seen on public display, but it has been referenced in books, movies like Stranger than Fiction and The Thomas Crown...

Steven Seidenberg is an incredible photographer and in this episode, I spoke with Steven Seidenberg and the writer, Carolyn White about a little-known bit of history in Post World War 2 Italy. His latest book The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South documents the ruins of a failed policy that gave impoverished people a bit of land and housing without the infrastructure nee...

Alma Thomas was an amazing African American painter known for her abstract paintings with bold brush strokes that take on a mosaic quality. Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

In honor of Alphonse Mucha's birthday, I thought I would post an encore of my mini episode about the poster that catapulted him to fame. In December 1894, Alphonse Mucha just happened to be in the print shop checking some proofs for a friend, when in walked an actress, Sarah Bernhardt in need of posters for her upcoming play. All of the regular artists she worked with were off for the holidays lea...

This mini episode is about The Book of the Dead, a collection of funerary texts from ancient Egypt. To better understand the collection as well as the culture and mythology behind these works, I looked a little bit at the page showing the judgment of Hunefer, a high-ranking scribe and priest. I gave a quick shoutout to Abigail Green from CourseStorm.com who was kind enough to include me in her blo...

I was asked to create an episode about how art affects the brain. I found there is quite a bit of research conducted by neuroscientists around the world indicating that engaging with the arts makes people smarter, happier, and healthier. Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other...

The bulk of Olowe’s carvings seem to have been both decorative and functional artworks for the Yoruba kings and prominent families. One of his celebrated works for example is the veranda post that sits in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. In that piece we see the elongated neck and oval faces that were a part of his signature style. Traditionally Yoruba artists used scale and proport...