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!

Gustav Klimt's career straddled two worlds - the world of classical art that first made him famous, and the new and exciting world of Symbolism and Art Nouveau that would change the world of art forever.  He was instrumental in shaping this new world, with his daring compositions, his new ways of looking at art, and his dazzling use of gold and his use of themes from the ancient world that made his paintings both timeless and hyper-modern. 

We'll look at Klimt's life and career, from his humble beginnings and his classical paintings for theaters and museums, through his break with the past in helping form the Viennese Secession, and his bold and dramatic new style of mythical themes, his portraits of women, and his landscapes, that helped shape the world of fin de siecle Vienna.  

This talk will be given at Miller-Golf Links Library on December 12 at 10:30am; and again at Sun City Oro Valley on December 15 at 4pm.

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 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 that seems to presage the age of the Impressionists that would follow decades later - reflects this fascination, as well as man's struggle to harness and overcome the  forces  of nature through his ingenuity. 

We trace the evolution of Turner’s art, from his earliest paintings of British towns, to his breathtaking skyscapes that seem to glow with their own inner light. 

Please contact Tubac Center of the Arts for tickets.

Spring is the season of love, and in this talk we look at the ways love has been depicted in art over the centuries, from the days of Ancient Egypt all the way to present-day Burning Man, as well as across different cultures of the world. There is no greater emotion in life than love, and artists have depicted its various aspects - romantic love, motherly love, unrequited love - since time immemorial. 

We also learn about some of the great love stories in history that have inspired this art. We all know the story of Romeo and Juliet, but in this talk we also learn about some of the other great love stories of history - Abelard and Heloise, Paolo and Francesca, Dante and Beatrice, and others. 

Free admission.