Art Talks with Martin Randall

TUCSON ART TALKS brings Art Talks on a wide variety of art history topics to your public library, school, residential facility, business, auditorium or home. With years of experience speaking at museums, libraries and other venues in the Tucson area, these highly popular and engaging talks are sure to fascinate and delight!

Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, ironically both immigrants to America - Bierstadt from Germany and Moran from England - were among the very first artists to make the long, arduous and sometimes dangerous journey out to the then largely unexplored West, often accompanying the early survey parties. They recorded the defining images of the rugged territories of Yellowstone,  Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon, and in the process were instrumental in creating the impetus for the establishment of the world's first National Parks.

We look at the lives of these two intrepid artists and the iconic paintings they created from sketches made on their journeys out West that enthralled their East Coast and European audiences. It was a time of great transition for the western territories, from the pre-railroad era of horse-back exploration, to the age of tourism after the advent of the railroad that made it possible for large numbers of travelers to visit these landscapes and see these great places for themselves.

 For much of his life the French artist Paul Gauguin searched for an escape from 'anything that is artificial and conventional'. He traveled first to Brittany to live a simple, uncluttered life among the rural communities there, far from the bustle of the increasingly industrialized and materialistic life in the cities. Dissatisfied with that, he ventured deeper, to Martinique in the Caribbean, and then to the distant South Pacific islands - first to Tahiti, and finally to the even more remote Marquesas Islands. 

We explore the controversial life and work of Gauguin as he delved deeper and deeper into the mystic in search of the authentic, and look at the astounding images he created, particularly during his time in Tahiti and the Marquesas, sometimes blending reality with imagination, bringing a vision of a paradisiacal world that most of us will never ourselves see.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the most famous and beloved artists of our time, but in his own time he lived in relative obscurity, known to have sold only one painting during his lifetime. He was a famously troubled man, plagued with self-doubt and mental illness, but he produced some of the most beautiful and evocative paintings of his generation.

In this talk we focus on Van Gogh's final years, from Arles to Auvers, by far his most productive. In his last months he was producing paintings at the astonishing rate of more than  one a day. It was during this time that he painted many of his greatest masterpieces that are so well-known today. We'll look at many of his paintings from this period, and also try to understand something of the man behind the paintings through the letters he wrote.