Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

Discover the life of Michelangelo, one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. Dive into his obsession with art and explore the influences that shaped his unique style. Learn about the powerful art patrons in Florence and the Vatican, as well as the use of stained glass and frescoes for educating illiterate individuals. Explore Michelangelo's financial success and the challenges he faced in painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, including building scaffolding and working with drying plaster.

Learn about the history and variations of pencils, from ancient Roman styluses to modern-day graphite. Discover the composition and techniques of colored pencils, including pigments, binders, and blending methods. Hear about the differences between artist and student grade pencils and the call for reviews.

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 LabWho 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

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 LabWho 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

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-yoursCheck out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science LabWho 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

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 LabWho 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

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 PollockDiego RiveraThe 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 LabWho 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

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 LabWho 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 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 | ClayArt Smart | GlazeThis 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 moreWho 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

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 LabWho 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