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!

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.

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 military 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.

Free admission.