Painting Commons^™

Polished Memories: Zhang Xiaogang’S Bloodline: Big Family No. 3 And The Ideal Family Of The Cultural Revolution, Abby Wiggins

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Zhang Xiaogang’s series of paintings, Bloodline, is a strange, surreal, and haunting collection of family portraits. As a Chinese artist who was young during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s, Zhang has a complicated relationship with his own national history. The paintings of Bloodline are not photorealistic portraits; rather, they are constructions coming from within his mind, returning to these memories and feelings decades later. This essay examines Big Family No. 3, a painting for this series done in 1995, exploring the influences and processes that contributed to its creation. It argues that this work in …

Visual Representation Of Cultural And Collegial Collaboration, Afsah Ali Hussain

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

Our colleagues are those on whom we not only rely to help us with patient care and advocacy but also to establish a meaningful and collaborative relationship. The connection between comrades of different departments and specialties facilitates a deep understanding of the intricacies involved in treating a variety of maladies, and we quickly find ourselves ardently discussing our own life struggles, achievements, woes, and joys with those whom we once considered strangers, which only demonstrates the steadfastness of our professional and collegial relationships. However, for a holistic approach to the discipline of healing, the interconnectedness of other subdisciplines needs to …

Leonardo’S Ancient Inspiration, Willem N. Roelandts

CAFE Symposium 2023

Investigating the hidden ancient inspiration in Leonardo de Vinci’s 'Battle of Anghiari' and it’s significance to the city of Florence. How and why Leonardo chose to incorporate Greco-Roman aesthetics into his art.

Botticelli's Adoration Of The Magi: The Power And Beauty Of Individual, Trang B. Nguyen

CAFE Symposium 2023

Adoration of the Magi in Uffizi was a commission from banker Guasparre dal Lama for his chapel in Santa Maria Novella. The altarpiece was painted by the famous artist Sandro Botticelli. It illustrates one of the most famous scenes in the Bible: The Epiphany of the three Magi greeting the birth of Jesus who would bring salvation and peace to the world of sins. This beautiful piece now resides in Uffizi Museum in Florence. Adoration of the Magi represents the peak of Renaissance art, and carefully reflects the political message of Florence in the 15th century through the figures of …

Botticelli’S Pallas And The Centaur: Virtue Triumphant, Alice N. Nguyen

CAFE Symposium 2023

While waiting to see the Duke of Aosta in an anteroom of the Palazzo Pitti, William Blundell Spence, a painter and Florence resident, noticed a larger-than-life painting on the wall. He immediately informed Erico Rifolfi, then the Director of the Uffizi, because Spence recognized the brushwork of Sandro Botticelli in that little-known painting. Upon the announcement in La Nazione in March 1895, the forgotten piece created a sensation. However, even when exhibited in public, the painting is still veiled in mystery. Pallas and the Centaur belongs to the same time period as Botticelli's famed Primavera and Birth of Venus, commissioned …

Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …

“This Artwork Is Always On Sale”: The Need For A U.S. Resale Royalty Right For Digital Visual Artists In This Technological Age, And Proof Of Concept Through The Blockchain And Nfts Explosion, Janae Camacho

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

With the explosion of the internet, social media, non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”), and blockchain technology, there has been a shift in how people consume and commercialize art, thus resulting in the increased use of digital visual mediums to create, purchase, and receive payment for visual artwork. This increase has renewed the question of whether the United States should implement a resale royalty right for visual work artists. This question is of concern, especially in this digital age where it has become more difficult for digital visual artists to receive equitable compensation for their work, like that of their musical and written …

‘Can You See What I See?’: An Art Project Promoting Living Well With Dementia, Jennifer K. Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Caroline Hyland, an illustrator and former occupational therapist based in Dublin, Ireland, provided the cover art for the Winter 2023 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). “Can You See What I See?” is an acrylic painting on black textured paper. The piece was inspired by Caroline’s grandmother Kathleen Duhig, her love of flowers, and the song “The Dutchman.” Kathleen and three of her sisters lived with dementia. This painting, and several others, are featured in a book Caroline wrote to support living well with dementia. By combining her artistic talents and training as an occupational therapist, Caroline …

“This Little Patch Of Earth Is Inexhaustible”: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner And The Outdoors Movements, Erica Evans

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the influence of reform movements and hiking and mountaineering organizations on the life and work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. I explore how principles of these outdoors movements, including a healthy mind/body connection and rustic lifestyle, inform Kirchner’s works created while living in Davos, Switzerland.

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.

El Cuerpo Armónico (The Body Harmonic), Luis Emilio Romero

Theses and Dissertations

L R’s process-oriented oil paintings explore tactility within harmonious and complex structures rooted in Guatemalan and Mesoamerican weaving techniques. Employing comprehensive rituals and mindfulness through an array of delicate linearity, his works reference his ancestry through a focus on progressing color, form, and space into a liminal, light-based aura.

An Exploration Into Public Art, Samantha Fazio

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project explores both the processes of designing and creating a mural and the community impact of public art. It aims to answer questions including: What goes into creating a mural? What is public art and why is it important? How does it socially and economically impact the community and its members? In doing this project, I aimed to gain a deeper understanding of how to create a mural and of the greater cultural context that public art projects exist in.

Symbols In Sketchbooks, Diana Rice

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My installation is an expression of the sketchbook in the sense that it is an object bound by time. Specifically, it is the assemblage of time, cognition, and the materiality of the sketchbook. The installation consists of various sized papers interlinked by tied thread. On the papers are drawings and sketches arranged in proximity to other sketches that are the inspiration or iteration of one another. Thus, a web of evolution is created. This project is an exploration of how images are created and evolved, such as symbols, and how the material construction and physical presentation of the installation affects …

Graphic Design & Painting, Emily Zepp

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Starting with the desire to explore the connection between GD and painting, I realized the only difference between the two is the context in which the work is created. Both graphic design and painting seek to impart messages upon the viewer and explore a certain perspective. Success can be measured in both disciplines by the effectiveness of the communicated message.

Deadly Snow: Meditations On Muriel Rukeyser, Andrei Tarkovsky, And The Pandemic Era, Nicole Lawrence

Critical Humanities

The following personal essay meditates on Appalachian fatalism and its relationship to vaccine and mask hesitancy. The analogous relationship between ecological destruction and uncertainty with the exploitation and abuse of the body serves as a waypoint to explore Appalachia’s larger dismissal towards “protection” during the pandemic. Included are original art pieces that serve to intertextually converse with Rukeyser’s activism, West Virginia’s aesthetic schism between industrial catastrophe and symbols of prosperity, and Tarkovsky’s imagery of desolation and hope.

Review Of A Revolution In Canvas: The Rise Of Women Artists In Britain And France, 1760-1830, By Paris A. Spies-Gans, Gabrielle Stecher

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 by Gabrielle Stecher

No Canvas, No Rules, Francisca B. Ugalde

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This presentation activity is a creative exploration of the concept of DIS-EASE, as in the absence of ease, uneasiness, or discomfort.

Conceptually, I am exploring DIS-EASE in three ways:

1. As you can see, I am painting directly onto the gallery wall. As the keeper of these galleries, I can assure you that this is a big no-no. I mean how dare anyone disturb these pristine surfaces?! The rationale behind my discomfort is rooted in the idea that the gallery is a sacred space, and that these walls ought to be kept pristine so that the objects displayed against them …

Terminally Ill Documents: The Lasting Impact Of Ephemera, Deama Khader

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Murals and portraits of cultural icons such as George Floyd and Ahed Tamimi are more than aesthetically engaging objects. They can inspire viewers to act, attend protests, and share their own feelings on an issue, whether that be in the form of more street art or something as simple as a social media post. This is often how social and political movements are made.

Street art poses a unique challenge to information professionals since the documents that are created with the intention or expectation of disappearance. They are documents suffering from terminal illness. Their ephemerality is their disease. Per the …

Elevating The Queer Body, Grant Mahan

Graduate Theses

Elevating the Queer Body is an art based exploration in removing objectification in the visual consumption of my own queer body. Throughout this thesis, I explain the experience of queer objectification, and how to overcome it through abstraction in a painting practice. This research comprises spiritual ideologies, as well as the history of abstraction, to inspire me in creating an ethically consumed representation of my figure. This is achieved through an abstract depiction and veiling of my figure. Presented compositions are overlaid with Islamic inspired devotion and ornamentation as a form of elevating the body itself.

Dream Border, Pardis Ahmadpour Mobarake

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dream Border is the result of my lived experience of relocation. The exhibition addresses the duality of being on the border between reality and imagination. In this place, the present, past, and future exist simultaneously. By engaging with personal narratives, childhood memories, as well as Iranian cultural and literary visual elements, I search for universal concepts in relocation. These works evoke the imposition of power and the many phenomena that the contemporary world endures despite globalization, such as anxiety, fear, and oppression on a small or large scale, which compel people to relocate. Uncertainty in the process of migration and …

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

Michelangelo Buonarroti And Homophobia In The Renaissance, Grace T. O. Ray

The Confluence

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was a young man with an aristocratic background when he first met famous artist Michelangelo Buonarroti in Rome. Tommaso was known to be an incomparable physical beauty, with intelligence and elegant manners, as well as being a member of one of the most illustrious families of Rome—the Orsini. Some have said this is what drew the artist to Cavalieri from the start. Though not much is known about their encounter, it is confirmed that Cavalieri remained a close and loyal companion to Michelangelo for thirty-two years until the artist’s death in 1564. Furthermore, throughout their years together …

Promoting Longevity Through Engagement In Purposeful Occupations, Jennifer K. Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Ron Henry, an artist based in Grand Junction, CO, provided the cover art for the Fall 2022 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). “On the Trail to Durango” is a 36” x 36” painting made from oil and acrylic on gesso board. Ron has been creating beautiful art since he was a child. Art has provided Ron with a strong sense of purpose throughout his life. At age 90, Ron attributes his longevity to living a healthy lifestyle and regular engagement in purposeful occupations, such as painting. In this tenth anniversary issue of OJOT, Occupation and the …

Scrubbing Off The Grime, Angelena M. Chaishowarat

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Artist Statement

This piece is centered around isolation and caring for one’s inner child. The inner child is someone each of us has, and it is our job as the adult, to look after, keep safe, and protect this child. Growing up as an Asian American in the southern region of the United States, I felt an immense amount of isolation and lack of belonging. From a young age I felt alone, weird, strange, and out of place. I knew I looked different than most of my classmates, I knew my packed lunch was different, and I knew my last …

Black Lives Matter: Keep Your Eyes On The Prize (2021), Gregory T. Wilkins

The International Journal of Equity and Social Justice in Higher Education

The image is of a woman of African descent who is wearing a colorful headdress which cascades down one side of her head to her tattered sweater. One eye is blind. The other eye has a target over it with her eye looking to the side. The target represents the world looking at her, targeting/labeling her because of the color of her skin, and it also represents her looking out into the world focusing intently on the future. Her eye is looking to the side engaging the periphery; she is ready and fully aware of her surroundings. Pending on the …

Black Lives Matter: Hands Up, Don't Shoot (2021), Gregory T. Wilkins

The International Journal of Equity and Social Justice in Higher Education

The image is of a multi-colored background with crochet thread radiating across the canvas. White Fleece letters are quilted onto the canvas spelling out the words ‘Hands Up, Don't Shoot’

Aeneid: A Depiction Of Dido In Dutch Golden Age Art, Rebecca R. Kaczmarek

Parnassus: Classical Journal

No abstract provided.

Looking For Beauty: Humboldt’S Plein Air Community Shows Why Art Matters, Cm Phillips

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

This historic publication serves as Humboldt County's first anthology of painters. It showcases a snapshot in time of thirty-seven members of Humboldt's Plein Air community—from beginners to world-renown professionals—in an avant-garde design that blends layers of paintings with commentaries about them, photographs of the artists, and responses to the prompt, "Does art matter in this crossroads of our time?"

Now more than ever, it is an important question to ask. In this book, you'll find answers from thirty-seven different artists, with each response as unique as Humboldt's thriving Plein Air community. In he words of Plein Air painter Steven Taylor, …

At Dusk, Michelle Paterok

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In supplement to my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, this dossier is composed of an extended artist statement, photographic documentation of artwork, a transcribed interview with artist Ben Reeves, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize the motivation and research that inform my studio work in painting. The extended artist statement describes the personal and theoretical foundation of my Master’s thesis project—a series of paintings collectively titled At Dusk, which documents everyday interior space in order to explore the invocations of colour, light and atmosphere. The interview with Ben Reeves provides insight into his artistic practice in painting, …

Colby Museum Of Art: Faith Ringgold “Story Quilt” Acquired, Bob Keyes

Colby Magazine

The Colby Museum of Art adds a coveted Faith Ringgold story quilt to its collection.