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!

Until the time of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-69), western art had been predominantly religious, with scenes of figures or events from the Bible, or else of royalty or wealthy patrons. Bruegel took a radical new approach. He practically invented the landscape in western art, and he also gave us our very first glimpse of ourselves, of the life lived by the common people, our own ancestors.

In this talk we look at the life of Bruegel, and examine some of his greatest works. In doing so, we learn a little about the lives our ancestors lived. 

Free admission.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born at a time of seismic change in Britain, as the Industrial Revolution swept away the bucolic agrarian society and replaced it with machines and industry. Turner's art documents and reflects this profound change in the country, as the age of sail was replaced by the age of steam.

It was a time when audiences were fascinated by the Sublime - the immense and awesome power of nature, at times breathtakingly beautiful, at times terrifying - and man's place in it. Turner's work - his skies, his depictions of seas and storms, and his ability to paint with light, making his canvases seem to glow with their own inner light - reflects this fascination, as well as man's struggle to harness and overcome the forces of nature through his ingenuity.

Free admission.

 Georgia O'Keeffe has been called 'The Mother of American Modernism'. In this talk, through her paintings as well as through archival photographs and quotes from her letters and interviews, we examine the remarkable life and work of Georgia O'Keeffe, from her humble childhood on the plains of Wisconsin, through her time in New York with the renowned photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, and focusing especially on her time in New Mexico where she spent the last five decades of her groundbreaking life capturing the rugged beauty of this stark landscape.

Please contact the Tubac Center of the Arts for tickets.