Nellie Blue is one of the muses of Happy Medium. The energy she brings to the stage is infectious and she's inspired hundreds of us over the last 6 months. Working with Nellie, we've had the pleasure of getting to know the woman behind the muse and we thought it was time you learned more about her too. We sat down with Nellie to ask more about her life, art, and what inspires her. Enjoy!

Before cameras and computers, art served the critical function of capturing the visual side of life. In today’s content-heavy world, it’s easy to forget that art was once not a mere ornamental luxury, it was a requirement for preserving history visually.

If you grew up in the US, you probably know Shel Silverstein as the author of classic children’s books, but did you know he had a column in Playboy for more than two decades?

Enjoy!

Pablo Picasso is known as the father of Cubism, but Jean Metzinger was its biggest champion. Read more about Jean, his work, and how his paintings helped shape our knowledge of quantum theory.

This virtual exhibit is organized by Netflix in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, and curated by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator for Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum.

When you're looking to add to your art collection, the flea market is a good place to start. Not only can you find amazing, one of a kind pieces, sometimes you can actually strike gold. This week, we're learning about 3 recent cases of striking flea market gold.

Powers of Ten is one of the Eameses’ best-known films. Since it was produced in 1977, it has been seen by millions of people both nationally and internationally. As with A Communication Primer and 2n (a 2-minute Peep Show from the exhibition, Mathematica), in this film, Charles and Ray employed the system of exponential powers to visualize the importance of scale. When the Eameses came across the 1957 book by Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps, they decided to use it as the basis of a film investigating the relative size of things and the significance of adding a zero to any number. Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. It begins with a close-up shot of a man sleeping near the lakeside in Chicago, viewed from one meter away. The landscape steadily moves out until it reveals the edge of the known universe. Then, at a rate of 10-to-the-tenth meters per second, the film takes us towards Earth again, continuing back to the sleeping man’s hand and eventually down to the level of a carbon atom. In 1998, Powers of Ten was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius. Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of crafts, art and technology in the Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression [Gesamtkunstwerk]. Gropius developed a curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

Filmed over three years with unprecedented access, A Bigger Picture is one of the very few documentaries to capture a major artist at work. Bruno Wollheim’s award-winning film records David Hockney’s return from California to paint the East Yorkshire landscape of his childhood - outside, in all weathers, through the seasons - culminating in the largest picture ever made outdoors. It is at once the inspiring story of a painter in creative dialogue with Nature and photography, and a revealing portrait of Britain’s most popular and celebrated artist.

We take a deep dive into the life and Salon of Gertrude Stein and learn how she helped bring Modern Art to a wider audience.

Who was Édouard Manet and why was his work so radical? We look closer at the father of Modern art and his most controversial piece, exploring the history of female nudes in art along the way.

Daniel Arsham, a 2003 The Cooper Union School of Art graduate, delivered a free, public lecture that uncovered the processes, materials, and techniques found in Arsham Studio on March 6, 2020.

The innate desire and ability to create is present in every single one of us from birth. We, as humans, are at the same time acts of creation and creative forces on the world, acting on the endless sea of energy that surrounds us at every moment.

Spies, lies, and the world's largest private art collection

"In Ambulance Call, an ailing man is carried away on a stretcher as a crowd gathers. The artist painted blocky forms in a bold but limited palette, creating a rhythmic pattern. Lawrence conveyed the sense of community in his Harlem neighborhood by grouping the figures closely together, their individual expressions communicating sadness and concern. He emphasized that his paintings had a universal quality, conveying the human experiences of joy, pain, and community through a focus on African American urban life."

Born in 1990, Inès Longevial grew up in the South-West of France. Eldest of her siblings, she would always rush for her canvas rather than through the fields. A cherished timeless moment for this dreamer, who would otherwise challenge her professors' authority. After a degree in Applied Arts, she moved to Paris aged 23. Across massive oil self-portraits, the warm colors of her childhood are reborn. Under the influence of the masters of the early 20th century, she draws her inspiration from the light and nature. There is much more than meet the eye to her seemingly mute characters, which reveal themselves to be multiple and mystic, through a kaleidoscope of sensual shadows.

Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed: a visionary, trailblazing figure who—inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world around her—began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colorful, sensual, strange works without precedent in painting. The subject of a recent smash retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, af Klint was for years an all-but-forgotten figure in art historical discourse, before her long-delayed rediscovery. Director Halina Dyrschka’s dazzling, course-correcting documentary describes not only the life and craft of af Klint, but also the process of her mischaracterization and erasure by both a patriarchal narrative of artistic progress and capitalistic determination of artistic value.

Don't be turned off by the corny title, there is real power in this book which guides you through a 12-week journey of creative self-discovery. The course goes something like this - you read one chapter each week and tackle a new obstacle that stands between you and the improved version of yourself. There is homework, both daily and weekly, but most of it is fun. We're a big fan of the requisite Artist Dates, which involve spending 2 hours of time alone doing something indulgent. Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Tim Ferriss are all fans.

Just Kids starts out as a love story and ends up on Elegy Row. Serving as a Baudelarian salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions, it makes for a true fable, a portrait of two young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, ascending the halcyon daze to fame. Smith's penchant for immortalizing herself this side of the graveyard dog, lets all the struggle and morphing genius connect for a rhythmic ride through that singular time and space. Smith plants herself at the epicenter of a time when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, Smith/Mapplethorpe would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Featuring many of the greats – Mapplethorpe, Shepard, Warhol, Joplin, and more. With b&w photos. A New York Times Bestseller.

Considered one of the most influential schools of art and design of the 20th century, the Bauhaus forged a unique educational vision that blended theory with practice in order to cultivate a new generation of artists and designers. Conceived in tandem with the Getty Research Institute’s gallery exhibition, Bauhaus Beginnings, this online exhibition offers an in-depth look into the school’s novel pedagogy.

Big Eyes is a 2014 American biographical drama film directed by Tim Burton, written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. The film is about the life of American artist Margaret Keane—famous for painting and drawing portraits of people with big eyes. It follows the story of Margaret and her husband, Walter Keane, who took credit for Margaret's phenomenally successful and popular paintings in the 1950s and 1960s. It follows the lawsuit and trial between Margaret and Walter, after Margaret reveals she is the true artist behind the paintings.

As part of the #colorourcollections campaign, Fredonia University has compiled this eclectic assortment of images to color.

What was it like to be a woman making art during the feminist and civil rights movements? In this season of Recording Artists, host Helen Molesworth delves into the lives and careers of six women artists spanning several generations. Hear them describe, in their own words, their work, relationships, and feelings about the ongoing march of feminism. Contemporary artists and art historians join the conversation, offering their own perspectives on the recordings and exploring what it meant—and still means—to be a woman and an artist. This podcast is based on interviews from the 1960s and ’70s by Cindy Nemser and Barbara Rose, drawn from the archives of the Getty Research Institute.

In this series, the lecturers will consider and discuss significant artworks which depict the nude, in turn raising questions regarding the representation of gender, race and beauty.

David Hockney is one of the most popular and widely recognised artists of our time. For over sixty years he has enchanted audiences with his bold, colourful, and innovative art. In the 1950s and 1960s when Hockney was just starting out, lots of artists were experimenting with abstraction. For example abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock were making paintings using only colour and gestural marks. Although Hockney explored abstraction at art college – simplifying and abstracting people and using expressive marks – he has always been interested in representing the places and people around him. Focusing on David Hockney's iconic painting A Bigger Splash we look at the ideas, themes, and inspirations that make Hockney such a great picture-maker.

"Unprecedented times call for unprecedented ideas. So we asked 24 of our favorite creative minds from the worlds of art, music, film, fashion, comedy, and beyond to tell us about what they’ve been making in quarantine—and how this period has changed the way they create. What we got back were bold new experiments, from June cover star Robert Pattinson (who photographed himself while in isolation in a rented London apartment) to superstar architect Bjarke Ingels (who offers a glimpse of his master plan to save the planet) to the four painters who unveiled new work in our pages. As novelist Ottessa Moshfegh writes in an essay for GQ, creating right now is “the light side of the darkness.” Here, she and 23 other luminaries share some of that light."

Offered as part of the #colorourcollections campaign, Wagensteen Historical Library has compiled a wonderful collection of strange and beautiful creatures to color.

Curator Sarah Urist Green left her office in the basement of an art museum to travel and visit a diverse range of artists, asking them to share prompts that relate to their own ways of working. The result is You Are an Artist, a journey of creation through which you'll invent imaginary friends, sort books, declare a cause, construct a landscape, find your band, and become someone else (or at least try). Your challenge is to filter these assignments through the lens of your own experience and make art that reflects the world as you see it. You don't have to know how to draw well, stretch a canvas, or mix a paint color that perfectly matches that of a mountain stream. This book is for anyone who wants to make art, regardless of experience level. The only materials you'll need are what you already have on hand or can source for free. Full of insights, techniques, and inspiration from art history, this book opens up the processes and practices of artists and proves that you, too, have what it takes to call yourself one.

Art and Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. The book's co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are themselves both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. Their insights and observations, drawn from personal experience, provide an incisive view into the world of art as it is expeienced by artmakers themselves. This is not your typical self-help book. This is a book written by artists, for artists -— it's about what it feels like when artists sit down at their easel or keyboard, in their studio or performance space, trying to do the work they need to do. First published in 1994, Art and Fear quickly became an underground classic. Word-of-mouth response alone—now enhanced by internet posting—has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity nationally.

Throughout history, some of the world's most amazing works of art have simply disappeared. Through re-enactment, rare archive, and expert comment we see how these treasures were looted, stolen or vanished into the archives. Some have been recovered but many more are still waiting to be found.

You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself. That’s the message from Austin Kleon, a young writer and artist who knows that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone. A manifesto for the digital age, Steal Like an Artist is a guide whose positive message, graphic look and illustrations, exercises, and examples will put readers directly in touch with their artistic side. When Mr. Kleon was asked to address college students in upstate New York, he shaped his speech around the ten things he wished someone had told him when he was starting out. The talk went viral, and its author dug deeper into his own ideas to create Steal Like an Artist, the book. The result is inspiring, hip, original, practical, and entertaining. And filled with new truths about creativity: Nothing is original, so embrace influence, col- lect ideas, and remix and re-imagine to discover your own path. Follow your interests wherever they take you. Stay smart, stay out of debt, and risk being boring — the creative you will need to make room to be wild and daring in your imagination.

Watch Bob Ross bring his signature wet-on-wet style to a bevy of bucolic landscape paintings celebrating the beauty of nature.

Based on the last years of Pierre-Auguste Renoir at Cagnes-sur-Mer during World War I, the film tells the forgotten story of Andrée Heuschling, also known as Catherine Hessling, who was the last model of impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the first actress in the films of his son, the film director Jean Renoir. Andrée was the link between two famous and widely acclaimed artists, a father and son. While the father is at the end of his brilliant career, the son is still searching for himself, his great career as one of the most celebrated movie directors having not yet begun. Director Gilles Bourdos used the services of a convicted art forger, Guy Ribes, to create and re-create the Renoir paintings in live action on screen.

How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle’s incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide range of Salle’s friends and contemporaries―from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others―How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres. Salle writes with humor and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the reader develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result: a master class on how to see with an artist’s eye.

Shortly before he turned fifty, we had the unique pleasure of spending six months with Danish artist Tal R, while he was in the process of making his grand series of nine enormous railcar-paintings, ‘Habakuk’. “There’s one character, in the world of characters, that I like the most, and that character is the colon.” Tal R uses the colon to illustrate the relationship between the past, present and future. In this film, Tal R – on the brink of turning fifty – looks forwards as well as backwards and shares what being an artist and a human being means to him, and why the two can’t be separated. It’s the pictures that have something capricious within them that truly touches the Danish painter: “If you want an aesthetic discussion about when a picture is fabulous, it’s when something in the picture is an unpredictable movement.” Furthermore, as an artist, you have to be as mystified as the observer: “For instance, if an artist paints a store front, part of the drama is imagining what’s inside the store.” What happens when something from the outside “breaks” or “besmirches” culture? Tal R feels that this is when progress happens: “Within most contexts it’s a catastrophe if you don’t speak the language, but I think nothing opens up language more than those so-called linguistic catastrophes.”

Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art world's most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds. From the first sparks of inspiration — and how to pursue them without giving in to self-doubt — Saltz offers invaluable insight into what really matters to emerging artists: originality, persistence, a balance between knowledge and intuition, and that most precious of qualities, self-belief. Brimming with rules, prompts, and practical tips, How to Be an Artist gives artists new ways to break through creative blocks, get the most from materials, navigate career challenges, and above all find joy in the work.