Ignorant Artists is a show about art history without the pretension. I dig into the stories behind illuminated manuscripts, printmaking traditions, and the artists who made them, minus the academic weight that usually comes attached. Each episode takes a single thread, a manuscript, a technique, a tradition, and follows it somewhere interesting, without pretending you need a degree to care about it.
The name comes from a Chicago artist collective I helped form in the early 1980s. A handful of us started calling ourselves the Ignorant Artists, half joke and half genuine philosophy. The idea was simple: too much immersion in art history can get in the way of actually making art. Study too hard, worship the canon too much, and you can talk yourself out of ever picking up a brush or a carving tool. Ignorant don't mean stupid. It means staying loose enough to make something honest instead of something borrowed.
This series is also a tribute. Bob DeVaughn and Mike Bobo were part of that original Chicago group, and both are gone now. I'm the last of us still working, and every episode carries a piece of what we believed back then, that curiosity beats credentials, and that art history is more fun when you approach it like a fellow traveler instead of a lecturer standing at a podium.
So far the series has covered ground from William Blake and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval scriptoria to the Celtic tradition, Islamic and Persian calligraphy, and the roots of printmaking itself, with more episodes on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean printmaking traditions in the works. I record the intros and outros myself, dig through primary sources and museum archives for each episode, and try to give you something you can't get from a textbook.
I'm also a working printmaker myself, so this isn't purely academic curiosity. Everything I cover here connects back to what happens in my own studio, softcut relief printing with water-based inks, the same techniques and traditions this show explores.
New episodes post regularly. Browse them below, or check out the Knowledge section for deeper dives into specific topics and traditions.
William Blake: The Man Who Saw Angels
William Blake saw visions from childhood and built an entire way of working around them, refusing to separate his art from his faith or his politics. This episode digs into how a man dismissed as mad in his own lifetime became one of the most singular voices in printmaking and illustration.
[See full show notes →]
Before paper, artists wrote and illustrated on vellum and parchment, animal skin transformed through a brutal, precise process into a surface that could survive centuries. This episode traces how that material shaped everything from monastic manuscripts to the illuminated pages we still marvel at today.
[See full show notes →]
Inside the Scriptorium
Long before printing presses, monks copied and illuminated manuscripts by hand in rooms called scriptoria, working in silence for hours at a stretch. This episode looks at the daily grind behind those pages, the tools, the discipline, and the occasional flash of humor hidden in the margins.
[See full show notes →]
Medieval Marginalia
The blank space around a medieval manuscript's main text was rarely blank for long. Scribes filled the margins with everything from sacred imagery to combat rabbits and other strange, funny doodles, and this episode explores what that says about the people who made them.
Chinese Printmaking: Where It All Began
Printmaking as a technology starts in China centuries before Gutenberg, and this episode traces that history from its earliest woodblock origins forward. It's the foundation for everything the show covers next, as the series moves into Japanese and Korean printmaking traditions.
