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In this week's Artworks Feature: a poet; a painter; and a lot of birds evoked in music, image and verse.

You go to the art gallery. You're looking at some famous painting and you just want to be able to get closer -- to touch it. Or you want to look at it without hordes of other people getting in your way.

What does the colour red mean to you? Anger? Danger? Love? Desire? Blood? Violence? Power? Communism? Happiness? Prosperity? Death?

Is there a more evocative title in the history of Australian drama than Summer of the Seventeenth Doll?

For the French thinker and writer Denis Diderot, drawing liberated the imagination, generating a fire and energy that finished paintings often lacked. Michelangelo urged his students to draw, draw and don't waste time. Even Picasso filled hundreds of notebooks with his lines and sketches.

On this week's Artworks Feature, a trip to Denmark, the spiritual home of Children's Theatre.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, graffiti painted sections have been featured in all sorts of museums and public places. It's the art and slogans that vividly express the story of the wall -- the exercise of political power and resistance to it.

Have you ever come across very elegant people dressed in wild neo-Victorian gear -- complete with top hats and brass goggles, bustles and leather bustiers? If so they were probably members of the ever growing Steam Punk community. Or maybe you are a DIY tinkerer, who has been making elaborate brass and watch-cog paraphernalia in your back shed, and suddenly you have realised you are not alone. So what's it all about?

Lloyd Newson is an Australian dancer who set up DV8 Physical Theatre in London 25 years ago. DV8's work reflects Newson's personal interests in social, psychological and political issues. He has largely rejected the abstraction that permeates most contemporary dance. Recently he has started exploring verbatim theatre, looking at the relationship between text (drawn from interviews) and movement.

In the Artworks Feature this week: how much work can go into making a single photograph?

One of our best loved landscape painters, Fred Williams, is the subject of a big retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia right now. The exhibtion's called Infinite Horizions and it includes more than a hundred paintings, from landscapes around the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria near where Fred Williams lived, to views of the Murray River, to Weipa in North Queensland and the Pilbara in Western Australia. Fred Williams died in 1982, aged only 55. According to the director of the National Gallery of Australia, Ron Radford, he 'was Australia's greatest and most innovative landscape artist of the 20th century. His paintings defined a new way of viewing and understanding the Australian landscape.'

In the lead-up to International Museum Day, a two-day symposium was held in Sydney on the subject of museums and climate change. Called 'Hot Science - Global Citizens' it featured a range of international and local speakers. The specific question raised by this event was how should our major cultural institutions present the subject of climate change, when it's a subject of debate and disagreement.

Have you wandered about town and been surprised by a piece of knitting adorning a lamppost or a tree or a car? If so, you have stumbled upon a growing phenomenon known as yarnbombing. It's a kind of knitted graffiti, where the grandmotherly art of knitting has been given a punk edge.

At one time Hannah Gadsby thought she might be an art gallery curator but things didn't work out as planned. The Tasmanian born comedian is currently performing at the Melbourne Comedy Festival but she hasn't completely given up her art career. She's running tours at the National Gallery of Victoria over the next couple of Saturdays; April 16 and 23 and they're about making art accessible. And there's a two-part TV special coming up on ABC1 next month—it's Hannah's version of the National Gallery of Victoria for the gallery's 150th anniversary.

The Melbourne Writers' Festival is underway, and this year there's a whole part of the program that's devoted to visual story-telling, featuring numerous illustrators and graphic novelists.

Betty Churcher is best known for having been the director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in the 1990s, then as the presenter of a television series about art. Her book, Notebooks, has just been published. Its starting point, as the title suggests, is her notebooks: of drawings she made of much loved paintings, when she started to lose her eyesight a few years ago, drawings she made so that she could fix these paintings in her mind and her imagination.

This week on the Artworks Feature, we're taking you inside the pictorial world of the Bande Dessinée - the Graphic Novel. It's an art-form that Belgians claim as their own - with Brussels as its spiritual home.

Since the death of the painter Margaret Olley, on July 26, there's been speculation about what will happen to her home and studio in Paddington in Sydney. Should it be preserved intact and open to the public? Should it be reconstructed somewhere else, possibly in an art gallery? Could it become an artist's residence, for short-term stays?

Do you like the idea of being a patron of the arts? A latter-day Medici? But you probably lack the funds. Well, for anything from just a few dollars up, you can help back an arts project, among many other enterprises, with a thing called 'crowd funding'. So what is crowd funding and how does it work?

Tate Modern in London is the world's most visited modern art gallery. It's just over 10 years old now, although the original Tate Gallery, now called Tate Britain, goes back more than 100 years to 1897. In the ten years of Tate Modern though, it's become the most visited modern art gallery in the world, with some attendant problems. The recent blockbuster Gauguin exhibition drew record crowds but also created a new phenomenon in contemporary art museums: gallery rage. The queues were so long and the crowds so big that visitors complained they didn't really get a chance to see the works.