Art and Design Commons^™

The Land Of Reverie, Sarah Moon

MFA in Visual Art

As children we are fascinated by the mythical. Imagining the attractive or even the disturbing serves as an escape from reality. By painting unicorns, vast surreal landscapes, and imaginative playscapes my work expands the white cube gallery into an immersive extension of my imagination. By viewing the canvas as a portal into a world where limitations dissolve, I paint acidic colors, fluid boundaries, and a malleable reality.

My studio practice is inspired by artists who experiment with color and scale like Kenny Scharf, Katharina Grosse, and Pipilotti Rist. In my colorful, large-scale works I explore the transformative power of play …

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

Chromaticity, Whitney Anne Hagen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Chromaticity is an objective specification of the quality of a color regardless of its luminance consisting of two independent parameters. These are often specified as hue and colorfulness, where the latter is alternatively called saturation, chroma, intensity, or excitation purity. These parameters follow how the human eye perceives color, giving us visual cues when navigating the world. In abstract art, where form is not bound by the constraints of representation, color becomes the primary tool for communication. Creating harmony, tension, emotion, and balance, the color relationships in this collection of work communicates to the viewer in a visual language that …

(1-12 All The Way Down), Amorelle Jacox

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings are born out of a profound sense of cosmic free-fall. Tables and black holes hover in a realm where slippage between figure, object and space are confused. Metaphor pries open depths of metaphysical inquiry. That, with a brushstroke, the sky’s stomach might fold into a plate, and slip between the days.

Exploring The Emotion Of Color, Hannah Hewerdine

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

For me, color is innately connected to emotion -- even as children we inherently understand the connection between simple emotions and colors, such as yellow with happiness or blue with sadness. With my exhibition, I wanted to ask the question of whether the color yellow elicits emotional response from the viewer. I created six abstract paintings that centered around the color yellow in order to explore that specific color’s emotional ties. I wanted this exhibition to simply propose a new idea for viewers to think about. I learned that I was not possibly going to elicit the broad spectrum of …

Idylls, Madison Aunger

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

An “Idyll” is defined as a happy, peaceful, or picturesque scene. The term references poetry that describes a small intimate world, and scenes from everyday life.

This exhibition, Idylls, showcases the little world of my home here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The paintings mirror my experience of the domestic spaces in my life, and the peaceful moments I encounter. In Idylls you are encouraged to be idle. We do ourselves a disservice when we don’t take the time to slow down.

My work begins as an excitement about a specific formal quality, a shape of light, a hint of color, repetition …

Color Compliments, Jennifer Hansen Rolli

The STEAM Journal

A discussion of the range of use of complimentary colors

To Protect The Hell Yeah And Every Hell Yeah's Variations, Lukey Walden

Masters Theses

I try to imagine a scrutiny free from transaction and authority, where time and generosity are not scarce. If real generosity divests from the expectation of returns, then what are the full implications of imaging someone in this way, through touch? My sitters gave me permission to stare at them in private. What happens to this momentary consensual gaze over time, prolonged into months of looking? Prolonged into an abundance of labor, abundance of attention, abundance of precious materials?

‘How Has Art Refocused Consumers’ Attention Within A Visual World Through The Exploration Of Package Design?’, Frances Hackney

Honors Theses

The art of design has refocused the attention of consumers as they have entered into a visually demanding world. While this concept is complex and perplexing, stemming from endless influencing factors, the elements of design can be broken down into areas of focus to dissect the visual world of marketing. A simple way to communicate the influence of design on the consumers is to unveil the answers through the study of art.

In this thesis, the study will turn to the world of art to learn more about consumerism. The goal is to understand how visual images and the ongoing …

Turning And Turning, Nicola Stephanie

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores Nicola Stephanie’s works in painted and shaped canvas, which investigate sensation and visual awareness of motion. Inspired partly by clothing forms, her vocabulary of color, shape and surface articulates a sense of the body and its boundaries. These spatial drawings evoke perceptions of gravity, rotation and orientation.

Making A Scene, Lucy Madeline Reiss

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Making a Scene

Over the past year, I have worked to produce what I think of as a visual work of translation. I have spent the last few years intermittently making work from childhood images or videos. I am lucky to have a sizable archive of visual information depicting me and those around me during my childhood at my disposal. Simultaneous to this long-term project dedicated to depicting scenes of my childhood, I have become enamored with teaching small children. In my quest to become a preschool teacher or work with kids in some capacity, I have had the delight …

Vincent Van Gogh's Wheatfields And Piet Oudolf's Meadows: Color, Contrast And Change In The Landscape, Erin A. Cox

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This capstone investigates the unique relationship between Vincent Van Gogh and planting designer Piet Oudolf's vibrant use of color and contrast in their work as it relates to their perception of the landscape. The project is mainly a comparison of the two artists, exploring Van Gogh's use of complementary colors and brushstroke techniques to create vivid contrast in his renderings of agrarian landscapes, and Oudolf's parallel approach to creating painterly meadows and prairie gardens. The project focuses on Van Gogh’s study of wheat field landscapes, which are essentially the same in structure and composition but can be used to compare …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

Anywhere Out Of This World, Amanda C. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This essay discusses my paintings alongside Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception and the history of form and color in painting. The relationship between perception and color is examined in the work of Paul Cézanne, Hans Hofmann, and Luis Barragán, along with Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary.

Through Space, Paige Lauren Eckensberger

Senior Projects Spring 2019

The experience of creating this body of work has been about progress and discovery. My pieces have been formed using lines, shapes, and color, through reactionary processes. Shapes interact with each other, responding to the other elements in the piece, either in sync or in opposition to each other. Some lines are infinite, extending past the limitations of the canvas and implying an extension beyond the work of art itself. In this way, I construct imaginary spatial dimensions that I find myself lost within.

I started this body of work cautious and rigid. By introducing the element of chance into …

The Committee On Taste And Leisure, Katherine E. Barrie

Theses and Dissertations

Within my studio practice I have been examining the aesthetics of leisure spaces, the implications of good and bad taste, and what it means to live one’s best life. Considering the history of design motifs and the influence of color upon the human psyche, my thesis exhibition of abstract paintings contains references to patterns, design movements, and modes of artifice that have historically been seen as brazen and tacky. These include nods to the Memphis Design group, faux marble, terrazzo, stucco, and artificial sand. Each has held an important place in the history of designed spaces, and at one time …

Laura Myntti 2017, Laura J. Myntti

CGU MFA Theses

This work is about the actual making of a painting, not subject matter. It's about use of materials as a means and a sense of space to a dynamic end.

The Use Of Color, Lois Kirkpatrick

Honors Theses

With receding colors or appropriate contrasts, the apparent size of a room can be markedly increased. Ceilings can be made to seem higher or lower with a coat of paint. Where there is no sunlight, its effects can be simulated with yellow walls, and excessive brightness or glare can be reduced with cool, darkish surfaces.

An Exploration Into Aspects Of Broken Color As Exemplified In The Works Of The Impressionists And Neo-Impressionists And The Application Of These Theories Within Painting Experiences Of The Adolescent Student, Frank Edwin Handy

Dissertations and Theses

I. Statement of Research Problem.

The research was an exploration into the broken color technique within the paintings of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists and the application of their techniques within the painting experiences of the adolescent student.

II. Resume of the Data.

The application of pure pigment directly, without blending, constitutes one of the major aims of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. The breaking of color was done in many methods by juxtaposition of hues and values in various combinations to give the desired effect; it was applied through a wide range of brush techniques such as comma-shaped, spots, hatchings, and …