Video Resource

Making Art

Subject

Duration

2 hours, 17 minutes (total)

Language

Request a DVD

This DVD collection of six presentations filmed in studios, laboratories, and museum galleries provide rare behind-the-scenes experiences. It introduces art elements, such as color and perspective; demonstrates artistic techniques ranging from sculpture to printmaking; and addresses conservation issues that relate to art objects. Artists interviewed include Sam Gilliam, Roy Lichtenstein, and Sean Scully. This film is available to be licensed to affiliates.

The Making Art DVD compilation includes the following titles:

  • Seeing Color: Object, Light, Observer
     Focusing on works by Titian, Turner, Monet, and Matisse, this film asks, "What is color?" and turns for answers to artists, curators, conservation scientists, and science students. Filmed in studios, laboratories, and museum galleries, Seeing Color looks at its subject as both an aesthetic and physical phenomenon.
    27 minutes
  • Masters of Illusion
     While Columbus and Copernicus were changing humans' understanding of the world, Renaissance artists were dramatically transforming the way in which it was seen and depicted. This film examines the discovery of one-point perspective and the perfection of visual techniques that create convincing illusions of space.
    30 minutes
  • Art + Science = Conservation
    The film introduces the concepts of art and science in museum conservation and takes viewers behind the scenes of the Gallery's conservation lab. Discussion is focused on the effects of light on works on paper, environmental conditions on outdoor sculpture, and the use of varnish on oil painting.
    19 minutes
  • Introduction to Sculpture
    This orientation to the art of sculpture surveys major stylistic periods in Western art—from the medieval, renaissance, and baroque to the 20th century. Additional footage shows a sculptor demonstrating techniques: carving marble, molding clay, casting bronze, and welding steel.
    19 minutes
  • James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings
    Whistler worked extensively with etchings. This film shows the changes in his art and style over the years, focusing on the effects he achieved by experimenting with inking and printing techniques.
    22 minutes
  • Roy Lichtenstein: The Art of the Graphic Image
    Renowned pop artist Roy Lichtenstein discusses his printmaking career over the course of two decades. This is an intimate glimpse of the artist at work, both in his own studios and at two of the most innovative printmaking workshops in the United States: Gemini G.E.L. in California and Tyler Graphics Ltd. in New York.
    20 minutes

Artists: Sam Gilliam, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Nardo di Cione, Sean Scully, Titian, Joseph Mallord William Turner, James McNeill Whistler

All programs are closed captioned.

You may also like

Educational Resource:  Beyond the Frame: Dorothea Lange

The spruce-green silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing among palm fronds looks up at a faint red star against a field of green circles radiating out from the horizon in this abstracted vertical painting. The scene is made with mostly flat areas of color to create silhouettes in shades of slate and indigo blue, lemon-lime and pea green, plum purple, and brick red. To our right of center, the man faces our left in profile. His eye is a slit and he has tight curly hair. The position of his feet, standing on a coffin-shaped, brick-red box, indicate his back is to us. He stands with legs apart and his arms by his sides. Terracotta-orange shackles around his wrists are linked with a black chain. A woman to our left, perhaps kneeling, holds her similarly shackled hands up overhead. A line of shackled people with their heads bowed move away from this pair, toward wavy lines indicating water in the distance. The water is pine green near the shore and lightens, in distinct bands, to asparagus green on the horizon. On our left, two, tall pea-green ships sail close to each other at the horizon, both titled at an angle to our right. Concentric circles radiate out from the horizon next to the ships to span the entire painting, subtly altering the color of the silhouettes it encounters. To our left, a buttercup-yellow beam shines from the red star in the sky across the canvas, overlapping the man’s face. Spruce-blue palm trees grow to our right while plum-purple palm fronds and leaves in smoke gray and blood red frame the painting along the left corners and edge. The artist signed the painting in the lower right, in black, “AARON DOUGLAS.”

Educational Resource:  Storytelling: Aaron Douglas

We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

Educational Resource:  Exploring Identity through Modern Art

How do artists draw on memories and experiences to create art that reflects their identities? How does an artist’s connection to place spark inspiration? Through guided looking, sketching, and writing activities, students will consider how artists explore identity through their art.