Three-time Emmy award winning animation director for The Simpsons, Mark Kirkland, chats with Marie about all the aspects of his career as an artist: drawing, animation, directing, and comedy.

He talks about his beginnings drawing with his father, the famous photographer, Douglas Kirkland. About his time as a student learning from legendary Disney animators who worked on films like Bambi, Snow White, and Fantasia. He talks about the start of his career at Hanna-Barbera and how that prepared him for becoming a director on The Simpsons, not long after the show started, while it was still in its first season.

Mark shares a lot of what happens behind the scenes to create an episode of The Simpsons, how he sits in on table reads to create new characters, how he's taken acting classes to bring reality to his animations, how he inspires his team, and how he brought in his own instrument as a model for Lisa's saxophone!

Michael Markwick is a Berlin based Dutch-American painter. In this episode, Marie joins him in his art studio in the Kreutzberg district of Berlin to talk with him about the inspirations, memories, and experiences behind his work. Michael's work is based in nature, and they talk about his process of creating a painting and his relationships with different natural and urban environments, while also discussing what it's like to be an artist today and the new life a painting takes on when it is displayed and viewed by others.

Michael Markwick's paintings have been recently published in a new catalog from the exhibition, Geist und Form: Ten Painters from Berlin, by the Indiana University Grunwald Gallery of Art.

To see the works discussed here, visit: The Fidelio Podcast facebook page