Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

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Michelangelo | The Sistine Chapel Ceiling (encore) Oct 09, 2023

Show notes

This episode gives a brief overview of the life of Michelangelo, one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, and one of his most famous works, the fresco on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. I was joined once again, by my good friend, Chuck Hoff who teaches art at the middle school my students feed into.

When he first commissioned the painting for the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius II just wanted Michelangelo to paint the 12 apostles on the pendentives (a triangular architectural feature). Michelangelo was hesitant to take the job because he considered himself more of a sculptor than a painter. Also, Pope Julius II had hired Michelangelo to design his tomb and the two of them both had tempers and fought a lot during that project. He convinced the pope to give him free rein on the project along with a payment equivalent to about $600k today. The massive work basically illustrates The Book of Genesis over around 5300 square feet (500 square meters for those using logical measuring systems). The painting depicts the creation of Adam, the fall of man, the prophets, and the genealogy of Jesus.

Contrary to popular belief, he did not paint laying on his back. He stood on the scaffolding, but don’t worry he was in physical discomfort during the entirety of the 4-year job. He stood craning his neck. He actually wrote a little poem about how painful it was including a little doodle in the margin illustrating it.

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 other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Pencils Oct 06, 2023

Show notes

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 Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Xu Bing | A Book from the Sky Oct 02, 2023

Show notes

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.

A Book from the Sky is one of the required artworks for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist, AP Art History Cram Session to learn about other artists and artworks from that curriculum.

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 other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Gehry | Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain Sep 29, 2023

Show notes

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 collection of some of the world’s most beautiful and inspiring art, Gehry made the building itself a work of art that inspires awe and wonder.

The Guggenheim Bilbao is one of the required artworks for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist, AP Art History Cram Session to learn about other artists and artworks from that curriculum.

Check out my other podcasts Art Smart and Rainbow Puppy 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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arthur Boyd | Nebuchadnezzar on Fire Falling over a Waterfall (encore) Sep 25, 2023

Show notes

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 advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Diego Rivera (encore) Sep 22, 2023

Show notes

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 lot of canvas in his life, but ultimately I suppose it was his work directly on the walls that he would come to be remembered for. The Detroit Industry Murals consists of 27 frescos. Rivera and his assistants painted the murals in just 8 months. They worked at a grueling pace routinely putting in 15 hour days without breaks. The work was said to have been so intense that Diego Rivera lost 100 pounds during this time.

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 other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Helen Frankenthaler | The Bay Sep 18, 2023

Show notes

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 give me a sense of a Bay, but it feels like it is more about a happy, contented sort of tone. There is movement, but it seems gentle like sitting out on a boat drifting in calm waters. The Bay represents a different sort of take on Abstract Expressionism. While many followed Jackson Pollock’s and Willem de Kooning’s aggressive and agsty style, Helen Frankenthaler’s color fields are more gentle and at peace. Her work was a breath of fresh air showing that painting could reduce art to fundamental elements in line with esoteric modernist philosophy and still be beautiful and joyous.

Related episodes:

Jackson Pollock

Diego Rivera

The Bay from 1963 is one of the required artworks for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist, AP Art History Cram Session to learn about other artists and artworks from that curriculum.

Check out my other podcasts Art Smart and Rainbow Puppy 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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olympic Medals in Art (Encore) Sep 15, 2023

Show notes

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 other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria and Julian Martinez | Black on Black Pottery Sep 11, 2023

Show notes

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 simply carry on a tradition. Maria Martinez and her husband Julian revolutionized pottery production and shared their methods with their community. In doing so, they raised the profile of pottery as an art form while helping others understand and appreciate their cultural heritage.

If you would like to learn more about modern clay production, check out the clay episode of my other podcast, Art Smart.

Art Smart | Clay

Art Smart | Glaze

This is one of many episodes I have created covering artists and artworks required for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist AP Art History Cram Session to learn more

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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

Georges Seurat | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (encore) Sep 08, 2023

Show notes

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 preparatory sketches to work out the composition and technique.

While the 1890s was the heyday for Impressionists, Seurat was part of a new breed. Some consider him a post-impressionist or neo-Impressionist. Today his technique is called pointillism, but in his day, Seurat preferred the term divisionism. He was dividing the image into discrete bits, carefully painted, uniform dots of paint like pixels that make up our digital images. While his process was careful and hand-crafted, Seurat was fascinated by science. He developed his approach after reading the works of scientists like Michel Eugene Chevreul and Ogden Rood. One of the key concepts that Seurat latched onto had to do with how color is perceived in relation to its surroundings. Seurat read about the trouble restoring tapestries because they could not simply dye to match a piece, they had to account for surrounding colors. Seurat’s idea was that by dividing the image into discrete dots of color, the painter could arrange combinations that would heighten the contrast and make the colors more vibrant. Seurat wanted to make his work even more vibrant by painting a frame of colored dots around the perimeter of his painting and that was offset by a clean white painted frame.

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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

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