Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Portraits, Nicholas J. Bontorno

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a documentation of and supplement to my thesis project, which is on display in the Harold B. Lee Library Auditorium Gallery from April 2 - May 25, 2012. The seven paintings on display are included in this report are found on the following pages:

Leann (18”x 24”) …………………………………………………………..9

Claire (28”x 36”) …………………………………………………………..10

Janell on a Couch (48”x 60”) ……………………………………………..11

My Dad in Winter (84”x 96”) ……………………………………………..13

Mel in Springtime (84”x 96”) ……………………………………………..14

Man on a Horse (48”x 60”) ………………………………………………..15

Danny Holding a Cat by the Ocean (28”x 36”) ……………………….…..15

Franz Marc As An Ethologist, Jean Carey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Keywords: Animalisierung, Einfühlung, Ethology,

Expressionism, Painting, German Modernism

In this study I deploy the perspective of ethology to examine Franz Marc's paintings of animals. To perceive animals ethologically means acknowledging that animals feel, think, experience, and imagine the world. Ethology has come to include interpretive pursuits as well as traditional field studies, and as I show, Marc's practice encompassed both aspects of this evolving discipline. To establish the presence of ethology in the humanities I give a "case study" of what I call "retroactive ethology" in the work of J.M. Coetzee. I present an account of Marc's deep …

Everyday Rituals, Chen Gu

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the trajectory of Chen Gu’s work over a three year period, looking at major influences such as Bustos and Saville, on her painting and film projects. She explores the concept of childhood, memory, and portraiture.

Don't Mess With Magic, Anna K. Nieman

CGU MFA Theses

The art is more of an event than a discrete object. The gallery is a set. It is one large piece, not a collection of sculptures. It’s very clear what is going on but the connections are vague and misleading.The room feels smaller but the projections feel expansive. The images have been recorded and re-cut and copied so many times that it’s barely a film. It becomes just a shifting image. An intoxicating scent fills the room. It’s a bit of a spectacle. The moment is memorable but in a deceiving kind of way. The piece is most effective as …

Harbor Island, Joe Lloyd

CGU MFA Theses

Paintings within this body of work evolve from themselves. Looking at the previous painting, I start a new painting. I stopped using photo references because I realized that I already knew what I wanted to paint and that my intuition is more important than images that already exist in the world. As a result, the paintings continue to move away from observational space towards something more artificial. The paintings become about the two-dimensional place on the canvas rather than some real place out in the world. This transition is seamless for me because geometry equally exists in two-dimensional and three-dimensional …

Kathleen Melian Mfa Thesis - Lalaland, Kathleen Melian

CGU MFA Theses

I am interested in the struggle in our culture to project an image and the burden of that endeavor. This preoccupation with image creation permeates our society as a whole and is not bound by social or economic status. In this body of work, I wish to expose a sense of the emotional fallout of such existence, and the truth beneath the fiction.

A twist to this narrative, is that the falsity is also a source of pleasure and enjoyment. This creative reinvention of self, although fraught with desperation and anxiety, offers intense satisfaction as participants take roles like actors …

Being-There, Atilio A. Pernisco

CGU MFA Theses

I blend figures with backgrounds to define pensive areas of focus and delve between figuration and abstraction. These paintings connect the viewer with the strangeness of the ordinary world. This is the moment of unconsciousness. It is then where elements of a narrative emerge. I depict the figure in movements of awkwardness. Images of the familiar environments of children involved in some kind of work-play activity, the inheritors of generational trauma, reoccur in my work--a parade of daydreamers in direction to witness the uncertain.

The Darkness Is Passing, Grace Heeeun Park

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the interplay of light, darkness and space. I express illumination of space and penetrating light with abstract painting. I use the white of canvas and thick application of black paint to create frames and to break rules of defined dimensions. Through my paintings, I challenge the perception of space and question the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

Reflections On Sexuality, Sensuality, And Painting, Loie Hollowell

Theses and Dissertations

The written component of my thesis will take the form of an extended artist statement in which I discuss all six paintings included in my thesis exhibition. A major theme of my work is sexuality, specifically female sexuality. This thesis will begin by looking at the three miniature paintings that spearheaded the investigation of this theme. I will examine the generalized and personal feminist symbolism that these paintings contain. The two works that followed the miniatures are depictions of sexual interactions between my husband and myself. I will explain the significance of my depictions and relate them to the work …

Float In Float Out, Jason Sabbides

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses Float In Float Out, his Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at The Slocumb Gallery, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee from March 19, 2012, to March 23, 2012. The work consists of paintings on canvas, panel, and paper and employs a variety of media ranging from traditional materials to spray paint. The painting sizes vary from 20x24 inches up to 48x96 inches and all hang directly on the wall, framed and unframed. Topics discussed in this thesis paper include the influences of the artist's military experience and travelling abroad as well as the influences …

Marais Des Cygnes, John Michael Orr

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis documents the concept, process, installation, and specific pieces in my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Marais des Cygnes. The Marais des Cygnes is a river in southeast Kansas and western Missouri, near a Bleeding Kansas-era massacre site of the same name. The river is notorious for flash flooding, was named by French explorers and translates to Marsh of the Swans. The work is about a fictional wandering car thief and alcoholic named Vernon, the bad guy in my novel. Vernon is obsessed with the distant past, particularly the time before the Louisiana Purchase and the Louisiana of …

Tutti Frutti, Damaris G. Rivera

CGU MFA Theses

Mark making is equivalent with making a place one's own. Demarcation of a site is not solely a negative act. The negation of a space is pre-transcribed, presupposed. The point is to take the negative and invert it. It’s not a one-way street. In order to change the building you have to move through the building and let the building move through you. Once the building lives in the occupant the experience of the building can be altered. Total absorption of architecture and its environment can provide a means to live in a unified expressive way. It’s about the person. …

The Vision Of Reality As A Paradox: Salvador Dali's Creative Process From 1927 To 1939, Stefanie Saperstein

Scripps Senior Theses

From 1927 through 1939, Salvador Dalí went through an arduous artistic pursuit to visualize his perspective on reality. Dalí’s inter-connected visual and verbal process lasted for over a decade, during which he went from confronting reality to accepting that the world is an irrational paradox. This study asserts that his investigation took him from the fragmented images of cinema to the metamorphic shapes of the ‘soft and hard’ and ultimately to a series of multiple images, which envisioned his paranoid-critical method. In his 1930 article “The Rotting Donkey,” Dalí wrote, “I believe that the moment is near when, through …

Dismemory: On History, The Southern Imaginary, And Abusing The Visual Record, Matthew Pendleton Shelton

Theses and Dissertations

Using the literary device of a fictional interview between the artist and a sympathetic intellectual, I explore concepts relating to subjectivity, pedagogy, memory, “Southernness,” whiteness, the deceptive nature of images, social justice, and 20th century art as they relate to a contemporary artistic practice.

Teller Machine, Reid Ramirez

Theses and Dissertations

This document examines the work in my MFA thesis exhibition. The objects in that installation address specific socio-aesthetic sites of class and power. The personal and cultural narratives examined here further explain the objects’ symbolic potential.

The Threes, Clifford Eberly

CGU MFA Theses

In the physical world I explore and gather regenerative clues that vivify the installations I build. The harshness and unforgiving power of nature’s nature, combined with the infinity of the cosmos, inspires me to cobble together sculptures that defy absorption into a finite, descriptive category. Like our beings change from second to second, I work diachronically, chugging along, shifting the purposes of supplies until they manifest like organisms that pulled themselves together from shiny and dirty matter or arrived from an extraterrestrial playground. By reusing and layering a complex blend of materials, I blur the ambiguous origins of the objects …

G-Plex Psi, Jacques Louis David

CGU MFA Theses

Monumental metal sculpture that incidentally creates sound. Heaviness and lightness displayed via large, heavy, metal sculptures of abstract geometric forms suspended from the ceiling by seemingly fragile wires that not only appear to defy gravity but provide tonal expression when plucked, hammered, or bowed. Further conversation associated with the micro to the macro is easily revealed when the sounds and shapes are compared to the vibration of life identified with imagined subatomic movement.

Spatial Phases, Eric Schott

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Stephen Chang Kim Mfa Thesis Statement, Stephen C. Kim

CGU MFA Theses

Stephen Chang Kim Thesis

I'M Here..., Jocelyn Edwards

Senior Projects Spring 2012

This is a collection of things from my life in the past year. Some of them are things that I saw and some one them are things that I felt. Some images, like “Rachel under the bed” were in my head for months before I decided to finally paint them. Other paintings are just historical documents of beautiful things that I have seen.

This past year, I lived in a large old house. This house was the subject of a majority of these paintings. I find its spaces sad and hollow. Houses make me lonely. This house especially makes me …

Vestige, Gina Hunt

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The work in Vestige alludes to aging and the physical deterioration of the human body through time. My interests in early radiography and X-ray technology, paired with a recent exploration of spirit photography, have become the conceptual basis for this body of work. The relationship between medical imaging and spirit photography deals with technological efforts to document the elusive and less tangible. In this work, the artistic process has become a metaphor for existence and ephemera. Utilizing monotype printmaking with spray paint, I create marks that are traces. This quality becomes a metaphor for the transient, similar to watching a …

Color Locality, Michael Frederick Secor

LSU Master's Theses

Secor, Michael, B.A. Art, Centre College, 2006 Master of Fine Arts, Spring Commencement, 2012 Studio Art Color Locality Thesis directed by Professor John Malveto Pages in thesis, 10. Words in abstract, 188. ABSTRACT I go outside to make small drawings and sketches of the local landscapes. My paintings are created in my studio. I use the lines and shapes from the drawings as a guide in making a design of color and space. This practice allows me to relate my enjoyment of the outdoors to my interest in color relationships. It is very important to me to spend time outside, …

Peacocking, Margaux Hymel

LSU Master's Theses

My work attempts to express personal experiences and external observations of the present day western female ethos. Through visual depictions of forms with mixed media, my paintings convey females exposing themselves as sexual beings yet displaced in reality, as the illusion of their character is a projection based on environment and other people. Dressed in intimate garments with different hairstyles or wigs, I reference myself and create various extensions of my persona. Through these facades I investigate aspects of womanhood dictated by a cultural paradigm. I aim to create sexually charged scenes and explore the concept of perception, the internal …

Inside And Outside, Joshua Harry George

LSU Master's Theses

The boxing paintings and drawings are not about fighting as much as they are about the fighter’s existence. Many of the images show the boxer training or in an isolated environment in order to show how methodical their lives become. I see boxers as sacrificial athletes, not only because their health is at risk, but also because they must separate themselves from loved ones during training, as well as abstain from certain foods in order to maintain a certain weight. Every boxer is an underdog, in a sense. They are all at risk of losing something, whether it is their …