The Lives Of The Artists

nicktodhunter
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Arts

A podcast exploring the lives of the artists and the world of art.

  1. Oct 26 ·  Video

    #65. Damien Hirst ~ His Auction, Painting In Exile & His Thoughts On His Hero, Francis Bacon

    After his extraordinary 2008 Sotheby’s auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, which raised more than £111 million in two days, Damien Hirst described the sale as the end of an era, a “brutal change” and a chance to move away from the machinery of his career. He subsequently spent time in Bali in 2009, painting and reassessing what painting meant to him. The experience was part of a much more personal return to the canvas: Hirst had spent years making work that deliberately avoided the traditional act of painting, but he increasingly felt he could no longer hide behind mechanical processes such as the Spot and Spin paintings. In Bali, surrounded by the tropical landscape and working directly with paint, he began exploring what he called a “new painting” a quieter, more instinctive direction.   At the heart of this return was Francis Bacon, Hirst’s great artistic hero. Hirst first encountered Bacon as a teenager in Leeds and said that when he began painting himself, everything he produced looked like “bad Bacons”, so he eventually stopped painting. Yet Bacon remained lodged in his imagination. Hirst admired the way Bacon could make a recognisable figure dissolve into raw paint, creating something psychological rather than merely descriptive. He said great paintings should work from a distance but dissolve when you approach them, leaving the viewer’s own imagination to create the horror. For Hirst, Bacon represented the courage to confront death, flesh, fear and the darker side of existence and his return to painting was partly an attempt to work through that influence rather than run from it.

  2. Oct 23 ·  Video

    #64. Pablo Picasso ~ Guernica

    Picasso’s Guernica, painted in Paris in 1937, is one of the most powerful anti-war paintings ever created. It was inspired by the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War by German and Italian aircraft supporting Franco. Picasso depicts not the bombing itself, but its human consequences: screaming mothers, a dead child, a wounded horse, a fallen soldier and terrified figures trapped within a shattered world. Painted almost entirely in black, white and grey, its fractured Cubist forms convey chaos, grief and brutality. What began as a response to one particular atrocity became a universal image of the suffering and destruction caused by war.

  3. Oct 20 ·  Video

    #63. David Lynch ~ A Day In The Life

    David Lynch (1946–2025) was an American filmmaker, painter, musician and writer whose work transformed the boundaries between cinema, dreams and the subconscious. Born in Missoula, Montana, he initially studied painting before attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he became fascinated by the possibility of making paintings move. His breakthrough came with the nightmarish experimental film Eraserhead (1977), followed by The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990) and the television phenomenon Twin Peaks (1990–91), created with Mark Frost. He later made increasingly unconventional films including Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, developing a distinctive language of fragmented narratives, eerie sound, dark humour and dreamlike imagery. Alongside filmmaking, Lynch continued to paint, make music, photograph and design, seeing creativity as something that could be cultivated through discipline and routine; he famously practised Transcendental Meditation and believed that ideas were like fish—you had to go fishing for them. His work ultimately became less about explaining a story than creating a mysterious emotional world that the audience could enter and interpret for themselves.

  4. Oct 18 ·  Video

    #62. Jake Auerbach ~ Frank Auerbach’s Son

    Frank Auerbach and his son Jake had a complicated but ultimately deeply affectionate relationship. Frank, born in Berlin in 1931, came to Britain as a Jewish refugee as a child, while his parents remained in Germany and were later murdered at Auschwitz; that trauma became an important backdrop to a life devoted to painting people and places again and again, trying to capture their physical presence and permanence. Jake, born in 1958, saw relatively little of his father during childhood, but they reconnected when Jake was 17, and he subsequently became one of Frank’s regular sitters, appearing in portraits over several decades. Jake went on to become a filmmaker, making films about artists and eventually documenting his father, revealing the much more humorous, cultured and sociable man behind the familiar image of the obsessive Camden painter. Their relationship remained close into Frank’s final years, when they would do crosswords together and spend time in London. There is something particularly poignant about the story: Frank had lost his own parents as a child, yet spent his life painting the people closest to him—including his son—while Jake ultimately became one of the people who preserved Frank’s personality and memory for the world. In that sense, their relationship almost mirrors Auerbach’s entire artistic preoccupation: looking at another human being intensely enough to make them remain present, even after they are gone.

  5. Oct 11 ·  Video

    #61. Peter Clossick ~ Figurative Expressionist Painter

    Peter Clossick is one of those painters who found the direction of their art early on, a revelatory moment on Hampstead Heath one evening after a day drawing in a shoe design studio in Mayfair, when "looking at a tree and feeling the world, grass, people, the wind, I knew I could draw it as I designed, in a cliched way. But I wanted to draw as I experienced. Which was totally different and the existential question then became how do I approach this thinking and feeling, which became a tactile reaching out into haptic contact. It was my first insight. The years that followed as he returned to art school in the mid-70s, Camberwell, fortunately for him at that time a rare bastion of the Bomberg/Coldstream tradition (colloquially known as the Bombstream') that runs through Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud even to the present day, reinforced that insight, his almost sculptural use of paint an equivalence of matter set against the physical realities of the people, rooms, still-lifes and occasional landscapes he was painting.

  6. Oct 9 ·  Video

    #60. Vincent Van Gogh ~ The Mystery Of His Final Day

    Vincent van Gogh spent his final day, 27 July 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, before returning to his room at the Auberge Ravoux with a gunshot wound to his abdomen. He claimed he had shot himself in the chest in a nearby wheat field, but the wound and the unusual trajectory of the bullet have led some historians to question the official story. Van Gogh survived for another day and a half, dying on 29 July 1890 in the arms of his brother Theo. The alternative theory is that he was accidentally shot by local teenagers, possibly with a gun they were playing with, and that Van Gogh chose to protect them by saying he had taken his own life.

  7. Oct 2 ·  Video

    #59. William Hogarth’s ~ English Grand Tour

    William Hogarth was deeply sceptical of the fashionable Grand Tour, where wealthy young Englishmen travelled through France and Italy to study classical art and culture. He believed that blindly imitating continental art could make British artists lose their own character and originality. Hogarth argued that England itself offered abundant material for an artist, its people, streets, theatres, taverns, landscapes and rapidly changing society. Rather than copying Raphael or the Italian Old Masters, he wanted artists to look directly at life around them. His own paintings and engravings became a celebration, and often a savage satire, of 18th-century English society, suggesting that an artist did not need to cross the Channel to find subjects worthy of great art.

  8. Sep 26 ·  Video

    #58. The Secret Life Of Portraits ~ A History Of Portrait Painting

    Portrait painting in European oil paint emerged in the 15th century, particularly in Northern Europe, with artists such as Jan van Eyck exploiting oil’s ability to achieve extraordinary detail and luminous flesh tones. During the Renaissance, Leonardo, Raphael and Titian made portraiture increasingly concerned with personality and status, while the 17th century brought the psychological intensity of Velázquez, Rembrandt and Van Dyck. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Goya, Manet and Sargent gradually loosened the tradition, until artists such as Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso radically challenged naturalistic representation, transforming the portrait from a likeness of a person into an exploration of perception, form and identity.

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About

A podcast exploring the lives of the artists and the world of art.

Information

  • Creator
    nicktodhunter
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    65
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Lives Of The Artists

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