2024/2025 Fine Arts Speaker Series

The French film director Robert Bresson was one of the great artists of the twentieth century and among the most radical, original, and radiant stylists of any time. He worked with nonprofessional actors-models, as he called them-and deployed a starkly limited but hypnotic array of sounds and images to produce such classic works as A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Lancelot of the Lake. From the beginning to the end of his career, Bresson dedicated himself to making movies in which nothing is superfluous and everything is always at stake.

Discusses life, time, beauty, experience, meaning, music, and art.

Streaming film is also available here https://archive.org/details/good-morning_202012

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as 'meaning', 'form' or 'expression' apply to computer art? A Philosophy of Computer Art is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as 'interactivity' and 'user'. Drawing on a wealth of examples he also explains how the roles of the computer artist and computer art user distinguishes them from makers and spectators of traditional art forms and argues that computer art allows us to understand better the role of technology as an art medium.

The Digital Renaissance teaches you how to translate the methods and skills found in traditional art to the digital medium. By covering fundamental painting principles and the basics of digital software, before moving into tutorials that break down key techniques, professional artist Carlyn Beccia teaches you how to use the tools at hand to paint your own works of art.

Discusses the nature of art, the painter and society, inspiration, style, the philosophy of modern painting, the picture plane, color and medium, creativity, and modern artists

Follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.

A history of art told through the storied biographies of colors and pigments.