Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Iconography: At The Intersection Of Historical & Personal, Alyssa Mcconnell Johnson

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Searching For The Sublime, Kheng Saik Lim

Theses and Dissertations

The influential philosophers Edmund Burke and Emmanuel Kant understand the sublime as events and objects that cause an emotional reaction so magnificent that the intellect fails to comprehend it. It is thus deeply felt and experienced but remains undefined and non-understood. Searching for the Sublime is a suite of paintings that seek to respond to these definitions of the sublime. Together they address and evoke themes of mystery, fear, power, and the unknowable through the medium of painting.

La Écfrasis En La Literatura Hispana. Confluencias Interartísticas Entre La Pintura Y La Literatura, Jimena Zambrano

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research analyzes the dialogue between literature and painting; specifically the convergence of aesthetic practices generated through ekphrasis. This study addresses the question of the role of ekphrasis in Hispanic literature, emphasizing the features and significance of the pictorial record in each fictional work. The research starts by delving into the theoretical discussion that has arisen around ekphrasis, in order to propose a definition that fits the needs of the investigation. It analyzes Las siete cabritas by Elena Poniatowska; specifically the narratives addressed to Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo and Nahui Olin. The objective of this article is to examine the …

Thin Skin, Jason Stovall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis contains two distinct chapters as well as a section of photographs of my paintings. The first chapter is a comprehensive artist statement that outlines my approach to image making using Heewon Chang’s autoethnographic method. This approach emphasizes cultural analysis and interpretation of the researcher’s behaviours, thoughts, and experiences in relation to others in society. Chapter two is a case study on the artist, John Brown. In addition to being a significant influence on my practice, Brown and I are both deeply concerned with representations of the body in contemporary painting as well as the formal capabilities of paint. …

Hovering, Benjamin J. Blatt

Masters Theses

Hovering is an attempt to navigate the contemporary digital environment through traditional means. The imagery created function as paintings, photographs, prints, and drawings. They explore and raise questions about visual perception and sensory awareness, as well as highlighting the modular limitations of the pixelated image and the illusion of reality in the digital landscape.

Summoning The Body That Acts, Brendan M. Mccauley

Masters Theses

Seven series of artworks; painted, drawn and performed. These works are presented as affective incorporation exercises, that test modes of aesthetic communication in response to varying political contingencies. The constitutive processes used to develop the work also function as a methodology for my own political radicalization. As an artist I am wagering how to talk, as an activist I am preparing to act. The artworks discussed occur at the crossroads of these desires as enactions of futurity within the subjunctive mood.

An Aesthetic Theory Of Gamesmanship, Derek A. Fordjour

Theses and Dissertations

An Aesthetic Theory of Gamesmanship is an in-depth analysis of the personal, sociological, and historical elements contained within the art of Derek Fordjour with considerations given to artistic and literary influences that inform his intention and goals in the work. Also included are illustrations of specific art works and descriptions.

Chiasma: Plural Selves On Ink And Paper, Sapira Cheuk

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work depicts female sexual experience, particularly the complexity of the subject and corporeality. The series Pair, examines the notions of individual subjectivity as porous at the site of desire. These images explore moments of sensual experience - moments when the individual subject is destabilized and becomes indistinguishable from another.

Very much like the Chinese brush painting tradition of having the viewer experience the mountain and streams in performative brush strokes, I intend to capture the feeling and expression of the body and communicate the feeling of that sexualized body with a calligraphic mark. Instead of illustrating a figure's features …

Wild: Paintings Intertwining Body And Mind, Jennifer Montenegro

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I believe creativity can be a direct link to the soul, a space to have a conversation with the divine and I seek to explore this idea in my art. I also want to invite the observer to move through my work and explore the space contained within their own emotions and sensibilities, beyond boundaries, allowing the work to linger and sink in.

Translating these ideas into the form of my works, following my intuition intelligently, involves an intensive process of many layers of paint and textures combined with thread. My work involves the intersections of spirituality and art making …

Interior Mountains & Distant Clouds, Ping Zheng

Masters Theses

Painting allows infinite scope for imaginative freedom beyond the ambiguity of the inner landscape. Painting connects the natural world outside to the inner natural world, allowing me to exist in the present while also reconciling childhood meanings. It brings me alive, allowing me to find a new identity. No longer trapped within the repressive structures of family, rigid schooling, and culture, the language of sky, land, mountain, and water become living metaphors of limitless possibilities with forms and color. My paintings are abstract, but they also present me as a character, independent and emerging from the environment. The work explores …

Departing From Photography. Place, Space, Non-Place, And The Quotidian: Painting From Pictures Of The Everyday, Mathew A. Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates the relationship between photography and painting. It explores the way in which Mathew Tucker's paintings have been informed by his photographs of everyday places and the ways that they depart from those images and express new and different meanings.

Artificiality And The New Image: The Image Body, Liza H. Butts

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This paper sets up a historical argument for how images exist in the world and how artists relate to these images. The questions of the paper are concerned with defining the “Contemporary Image” and looking at how the digitization of all the images in our world affect the art object and the experience of art in the physical world. The conclusion and answer to these questions is found in a resistance to images that oversaturate our culture. This resistance occurs by looking to the painted image to function as a body in the world; aware of its existence, responsive to …

Rewriting History: The Press As A Tool For Destruction And Preservation, Emily L. Mogavero

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement describes my two bodies of work, Aufheben and Artist-Hero/Squish, in which I use printmaking processes to rewrite history. In Artist-Hero/Squish I mimic canonical paintings of women by modernist male painters and run my quotations of these paintings through the press while the paint is still wet on the canvas. Through this process, I examine, confront, and change the male-dominated history of art. Aufheben currently includes one hundred drypoint prints that catalogue the personal history of my mark. This series represents a process of constant change, with individual prints suggesting stages of my process including moments of growth …

A Fearsome Beauty: Material And Cultural Exchange Between Venice And The Islamic Near East, Tahera H. Tajbhai

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the relationship between Venice and the Islamic Near East. By examining works from various media, this paper argues that Venetians viewed the Islamic Near East as being ‘awesome,’ and that this view was twofold, as Venetians were both enamored with and fearful of this rising power.

Cruelty: Aesthetics, Narrative, And Invented Worlds, Sarah Slappey

Theses and Dissertations

Sarah Slappey investigates ideas of cruelty and beauty through the lense of narrative, aesthetics, and invented worlds.

Kimono, Elizabeth D. Hoffman

CGU MFA Theses

Globalization opens up opportunities for the international community to push for freedom of expression. It is precisely because the history of kimonos is a multi-cultural one, invented by the Chinese, then adapted and adopted by the Japanese, then altered by Western colonialists and changed as it permutated from the aristocracy to the middle class and to laborers, that I felt that it was relevant to today and the cross-cultural influences of globalization. This summer, I purchased two authentic Japanese kimonos, (one an everyday cotton one to use as a model for my drawings, and the second, an elaborate silk one …

Aesthesia, Cindy G. Garcia

CGU MFA Theses

My art practice in itself, is first and foremost about me as a Human on this planet. Second, I am drawn to the cognitive dissonance that happens within each individual, this is key to the majority of my work. For this show I really wanted to emphasize; A: The textural, corporal involvement that I personally really enjoy and get satisfaction out of. B: The color of Life. C: The beauty in very introspective particular instances that happen in day to day life.

Unfettered, Doraelia Ruiz

CGU MFA Theses

My life has been built on high wire tensions between the two vastly different worlds I live between. I live somewhere between illusions of minority success and harsh realities of not having a trust-fund in an elite world. I’m neither here nor there. Painting is my one refuge where I can combine the vastly different worlds I exist in and between. My works are the only semblance of a home that doesn’t vanish .

Black-\`Blak\, Venise Keys

Theses and Dissertations

My studio practice explores themes of identity derived from the basic question of Langston Hughes, What does it mean to be a Black artist? My artwork draws from memory, Black Feminist literature, along with the aesthetics of the African diaspora and the Black Arts Movement. In this essay, I reexamine childhood experiences in my mother's hair salon; beauty rituals of U.S. Black women; and the consuming male gaze in Western art to explain how these influences manifest in the artwork of Black-\`BLAK\.

Place(Ment), Ashley Lynn Byers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout her time at the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts program, Ashley Byers has been creating work about the folklore, landscape, and people of the Ozarks. Though she continues to create work with the Ozarks in mind, it became a motif used for a broader conversation about the ad hoc, holiness, painting, landscape, the figure, and intimacy.

In many ways, the concepts within her work are born out of the Ozarks.

When can remnants come together to become more than the sum of their parts? Derelict, easily dismissed objects, when set in the right context or viewed through …

Three Landscapes For Orchestra, Nathan D. Raught

MSU Graduate Theses

Three Landscapes for Orchestra is a three-movement orchestral suite, with music composed based on corresponding artworks. Each movement is inspired by an abstract painting by Samantha Keely Smith. Stylistically, the focus of these pieces is on color and mood, and the emulation of the atmosphere and emotions elicited by the source material. As such, the music either takes a literal approach to musical representations of certain aesthetic features, or an abstract approach wherein the music conveys a similar emotion or mood as the painting. Musically, the approach taken is an amalgamation of Late-Romantic, twentieth century, and twelve-tone styles, with influences …

The Art Of Devotion: Style, Culture, And Practice In Mid-Nineteenth-Century Kashmir, Nina Cavazos

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Largely produced in the Kashmir Valley during the mid-nineteenth century, gutkas are pocket-sized anthologies of texts, hymns, and prayers that a Hindu would recite in a sacred place in the home, usually near an altar. In the past, these objects have been relegated to the periphery of art historical discourse due to scholarly discriminations against their unrefined, "folk" characteristics. However, despite the lack of academic interest, a critical study of gutka culture provides the ideal viewpoint from which to explore South Asian art history, cultural history, and historical Hindu practices. Although these objects were often left unsigned by their illiterate …

Remembrance: Drink While The Water Is Clean, Marissa Angel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Artist’s Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at the Tipton Gallery, located in downtown Johnson City TN from November 30, 2015 through January 22, 2016. The works Included in the exhibition consists of a series of mixed media collage paintings, a large scale etching combined with clay and a site specific installation.

The Exhibit features work that delves into the concept of nature as a subject of beauty, as well as a symbol of the resiliency of life. The work in this exhibit exposes the separation that exists between humanity and the natural world. Through …

Una Entrada En La Vida De Las Mujeres Inmigrantes: Una Exposición Visual Para Representar Las Experiencias De Mujeres Inmigrantes De México A Través De Retratos Y Entrevistas, Ashley Ables

World Languages and Cultures

Una entrada en la vida de las mujeres inmigrantes:

Una exposición visual para representar las experiencias de mujeres inmigrantes de México a través de retratos y entrevistas

Ashley Ables

California Polytechnic State University

Intent:

The intent of my project is to research the lives of migrant, farm-working women who have migrated from Mexico and now live and work in California. The other purpose is to present the findings to the Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo communities through interviews and artistic expression.

Methodology:

In order to research and present the lives of these women, I plan to do the following: …

Nature And Nostalgia In The Art Of Mary Nimmo Moran (1842-1899), Shannon Vittoria

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the work of American painter-etcher Mary Nimmo Moran (1842-1899), an innovative printmaker and influential interpreter of the American landscape. She began her career in 1863, studying drawing and painting with her husband, artist Thomas Moran (1837-1926). Throughout the 1870s, she exhibited works at both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, and published wood engraved illustrations in books and popular monthly magazines. Yet it was in the medium of etching that she achieved her greatest recognition: between 1879 and her untimely death in 1899, she …

A Portrait Of The Artist As Sisyphus, Jared N. Crane

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis statement, contemporary artist Jared Nathan Crane uses the French philosopher Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus as a framework for discussing meaningfulness in art and life, and reflects on how his own experimental creative process evolved during his graduate studies.

Nothing Behind The Sun, Sebastian Fierro Castro

Theses and Dissertations

painting as a containment exercise, and as such, a tool that allows us to interiorize the world

American Splendor, Christina Ehmann

Theses and Dissertations

Artist Statement

My photographs and paintings are reflective of a simpler and slower paced, rural life. This focus is in high contrast to what contemporary urban life often requires. I depict scenes of tranquil landscapes, farm animals, old barns, fields of grasses, and growing crops.

I alter my digital photographic images with computer software. I use various filters that transform color, clarity, and value to give the photographs of nature an intentionally peaceful mood. These photographs are a basis for my paintings where I soften nature’s contours and emphasize tranquility. My desire is that viewers will look at my work …

Memory Of A Landscape, Elizabeth Halliday

Theses and Dissertations

Artist Statement

Creativity is one of my strongest talents. As a visual person, I understand and interpret the world through observation and analysis. Nature intrigues me. I find it awe inspiring how the natural environment can change so dramatically day-to-day. As a result, I record my experiences and memories of landscapes and seascapes.

My areas of interest are painting and computers in the arts. I am an abstract painter and my media consists of acrylic, watercolor, mixed media, and digital imagery. I create low relief and rough textures with added materials, and develop layers of paint with a palette knife. …

Perspectives, Beatrice Modisett

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings are linked to a thirst for exploring new landscapes and perspectives, my interest in the extremes and subtleties of geological phenomenon and a desire to create, chase after, and teeter on a brink. Here I will discuss these topics and work to unpack my interest in avoiding comfort, my relationship to control and the creation and function of my paintings. To extract myself from my tactile and visual world of process and paint and enter the world of written language presents very different challenges than the ones fostered in the studio. The goal in both is to reveal …