Painting Commons^™

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 …

A Worm Turns, Jacob Galt Judelson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

A Worm Turns

Jacob Judelson

“Even a worm will turn”––an idiom, essentially meaning that anyone or anything will retaliate if pushed too far. Even the weakest, most docile of things––like a worm––will eventually revolt, demanding the recognition and respect that it deserves.

I often wonder if I'm a painter or a sculptor. As an artist, I am drawn to gesture, texture, color, and material. While the majority of my work hangs on the walls of interior spaces, I use materials and processes affiliated with industrial and sculptural realms. My …

Here And Now, Samaira 2023, Samaira G. Wilson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Consider my work as a thread weaving through time. Illustrations of grappling with the present and its illusive constant nature. Questioning permanence. The temporary. This show, these walls, not forever, not for lease. Just a point in time. Can we hold time? Keep it? Is it ours? No. Time is something that is eaten, driven through, falling, perpetual, casual, necessary, fought against, spent, and healing.

Here and Now plays with what time feels like and is contrasted by an active voyage to another world.

My Beulah, Georgia Edlyn Lenz

Senior Projects Spring 2023

My mom and dad owned two sister cats when I was born, Beulah and Yoyo. Yoyo was shy and moody, while Beulah was patient, kind and wide faced. Beulah was my chariot and my stuffed animal. She was almost like an older sister to me. So patient with me even when I would try to ride her like a pack animal.

It wasn’t until this year that I decided to look into the etymology of the name Beulah. I don’t think I’d ever heard of anyone named Beulah other than my cat, but I knew it had to come from …

Contained Messes, Cora M. Quinlan

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Contained Messes is an installation consisting of a range of sculptures or bundles that communicate my urgency for self-preservation. I put up massive boundaries when other people try to tell me about myself. When I think of setting boundaries, I think of building walls and I’ve built a lot of walls at Bard. The threat level determines the height and durability of the walls I build. When I started this project, I took a step back to look around and realized that I built myself a big house, an oyster shell if you will, suitable only for myself. Here, I …

Tryna Be A Mountain, Aru Apaza

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Ok I'M Perfect, Dania Skye Leibowitz

Senior Projects Fall 2023

okay i’m perfect

I make art as a way to externalize my anger in a way that won’t hurt anyone. I’ve been making art about my anxieties, my exhaustion, my fear. Some of my drawings scare me to look at, and to think of other people looking at. So then I make other things to protect myself from them, and from you.

Most of the time when I get into my studio, I don’t know what to do. I draw myself, and I make rectangles from fabric and I stuff them. The repetition of drawing and sewing grounds me until …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Evocation, William Robert Gary

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Evocation

When I began my time at Bard College, I was already deeply interested in children’s Art. The ideas supporting my senior project reach all the way back towards the end of my Freshman year. The last few years have consisted of practicing, preparing and researching for what would become my thesis. Evocation encompasses a large body of paintings, prints and sculptures inspired in part by my own childhood artwork. After discovering a box of nearly five hundred drawings from my childhood during the summer of 2021, I have sought to infuse my interest in the expressive and symbolic tendencies …

Common Thread, Isobella Rose Grubb-Kovach

Senior Projects Spring 2022

We are nature, and nature is everything. Our bodies reflect the patterns found in nature—our veins and cells mimic lichen and mold, roots, water, vines.

Painting does not require a message. It is independent of me, the artist; it stands on its own, a child made by my hand. It is sent out into the world alone, unaccompanied by my touch or comment, its only task to procure a visual experience, a collaboration between geometry and gesture, for those whose eyes rest upon it.

The mind is drawn to nature; we are endowed with the ability to connect our selves …

She Is Clothed With Strength And Dignity; She Can Laugh At The Days To Come!, Immanuel J. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Motherhood in the words of Aunt Brenda.

See, we look at our parents first as these godlike figures like they're going to figure it out, not realizing that they were children. They were people. They had dreams and aspirations and all that. And when you strip that away, the title of mother– parent– this woman…. Who is that person?

Well, they're a person. They bleed just like you. They had dreams and thoughts and all that, just like you.

You know, I challenge everybody, you know, take your mother or father off of that godlike pedestal because you'll find that …

Hunting Rabbits, Bones Olson Gilmore

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I’m excited to extend an invitation to you to join me on a hunt for rabbits. I’ve only seen the rabbits that live in my parents’ backyard and I’ve never held a pet rabbit because I’m afraid of being bit. There’s a lot to learn from the distance between ourselves and the things that are right in front of us but blend into the background, things that are always running away, and things sitting in our lap that we’re too scared to hold. In Hunting Rabbits, the rabbit represents the parts of me that get away, and the paintings are …

As Many Names As Objects, Luke Herrigel

Senior Projects Spring 2021

“And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves”

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Honesty is Unbelievable”

• A Bumper Sticker I Saw

For my senior show I used collected materials, found objects, personal ephemera (both genuine and fabricated), paintings and sculpture to make installations that I would change every night of the show’s duration. Each morning the installation would be photographed, left for only a few hours, and then would be uninstalled to make way for creating a new iteration. …

The Seasons Of Genji, Elizabeth Mudry

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Artist Statement

The Seasons of Genji

The Tale of Genji was written for Empress Fujiwara no Shoshi by Murasaki Shikibu, a fellow court noblewoman, during the Heian Period of Japan (794 AD to 1185 AD). One could dismiss The Tale of Genji as a romantic tale of a prince and his lovers, a story full of beauty, poetry, and women named after flowers. While Genji is a shining prince with poetic affairs, the focus of the tale never lingers too long on the sweetness of love. Rather, the tale explores the cycles that grip Genji’s life and the control they …

A Constant State Of Change, Karianne Canfield

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Collecting the unwanted waste of life and compiling it into something beautiful. A reminder that all things can always continue to change. An assertion that I will continue to change with them. Expecting that despite the disregard for what it was, it can be valuable as something else. It is not new, this form which it is transformed into, it was always there as an opportunity for it to become. Made of items from across my past, this was always an option of what I could be. From here it will continue to reform and reuse its materials and meanings, …

Quimby's Quests, Jamie E. Hoelzel

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Introduction to Quimby:

Quimby, the little green pom-pom with googly eyes and pipe-cleaner limbs, was my quarantine companion last Spring Semester while I was on the mostly empty campus. He was created during the beginning stages of the pandemic while I was stuck here at Bard finishing my classes remotely. They could go on adventures using his imagination while we were in quarantine, and they have followed me in my work ever since.The purpose of their creation was for their cute and simple character to use their imagination to have some wholesome fun, hopefully bringing smiles to people’s faces.

Quimby …

Sang Pi, Visakha Jane Phillips

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

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 …

Good Grief, Madeleine Pearl Buzbee

Senior Projects Spring 2020

“Good Grief” is a memorial project that began with the loss of my childhood best friend, Camille Sdao (1998-2019). She was a light.

Grief is a thing that is carried, compartmentalized, expanded, forgotten, and remembered. Grief is nothing and everything at the same time. Grief explodes, lingers, leaves and returns again. Grief is blue. I know this because Louise Bourgeois, Maggie Nelson, Taryn Simon, the Pacific Ocean, my tears, the sky, my mother, and my grandmother have taught me this. Loss means wading in deep waters for a long time and you must build a boat to stay afloat.

Consumed …

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

Path^3, Yuexin Ma

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Architectural space is political.

The project is composed of multiple paintings connected by a wooden scaffold built to resemble the urban landscape. The paintings depict quotidian architectural spaces, presenting the typology of functional public spaces, ranging from the zoo and the courthouse to the library, the church, and the bus stop. Their physical characteristics reflect the culture, values, and governmental tactics of modern states, functioning as control techniques to regulate our social actions within the realm of normality. For example, in the painting about the classroom, the even distribution of desks with the same size reveals that academic institutions' role …

Touch(Screen), Almeida Paroubek

Senior Projects Spring 2020

How do you maintain a relationship with someone who lives 3,639 miles away? Last spring I collaborated with my partner, who lives in Germany, on one of my final art projects. I wanted to find a way for us to be able to work together despite the distance. This evolved into a larger body of artwork and became the focus of my senior project. The project as a whole became an examination of how my partner and I established a relationship and how it has lasted for two and a half years; despite a heavy reliance on technology--often seen as …

Nothing But The Night, Theo Drake Trotter

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I am concerned with fragile, delicate things that have been discarded, used, and left behind. I often think of my work as a sort of a “skin” between myself and the viewer- it hides a lot but also reveals a lot, the way that the skin does on the human body. I think of the way the skin shows traces of a person’s history, of a person’s touch. Because of this my work also has a connection to memory and the act of remembering, which is often fragmentary and connected to small details that only become important long after the …

Consumption, Aurora Blake-Jennings Abzug

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This body of work is neither a chronicle of my eating disorder, nor a record of my recovery. The oil paintings and graphite drawings that make up this exhibition, seek to explore my difficult, complicated, and often self-contradictory relationship with food, and how it affects my relationships with my friends and with myself.

I am particularly interested in eating rituals. These are the sets of cultural prescriptions for the ways in which food and the process of eating can define a social interaction. Ice cream picnics, brunch dates, and Instagram snapshots all lie at the heart of my culture's social …

This Key Won't Work, Grace Gordon Waring

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This Key Won’t Work

I like to play with objects that are thought of as mundane. Either I make mundane objects “un-mundane” by giving them deeper meaning, or I allow their mundaneness to become more conspicuous by putting the objects in extraordinary contexts or by giving them undue symbolic importance.

During the making of this project, I gravitated toward using symbolic or familiar imagery, and the inviting image of a house was a perfect candidate for a familiar image. That is why the subject of many of the drawings I made are houses--anyone can look at that shape with five …

Thanks To You, I'M Alive, Antonio Scott Nichols

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Antonio Nichols

Artist Statement:

In this project I am using figurative painting to explore the meaning of relationships/emotion and my connection to the people I am painting. I question what this means and how each individual’s identity ties to mine and why it may or may not matter. “Thanks to You, I’m Alive,” the title of this project, encompasses the message I am sending not only to the individuals I painted but also to the viewer because there is a certain exclusivity in who I decided to paint.

I want the connection I have with these people to not only …

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 …

Mud Bog: Reconsidering Rural America, Michael Vincent Bodnar

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Mud Bog is an examination of the social and economic realities that present-day Americans living in rural communities endure, and how circumstances beyond their control have prodded them toward narcissistic displays – which can often be troubling expressions of darkness and intolerance.

I hasten to add that my artistic goal is not to wag a finger of disapproval at those depicted, or to punch down at them. I strive to treat this material with sensitivity and empathy. My intent is to shed a light on the conditions that have contributed to the current rancorous state of political and cultural division …

The Holistic Self: A Visual Analysis Of Carl Jung's The Red Book, Emma Lindsay Klement

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This senior project will look at Carl Jung’s The Red Book and how it’s creation was the process by which he healed from his psychotic break, or “deep-sea voyage.” Through the exploration of various other texts by Carl Jung this thesis will endeavor to understand Jung’s psyche during this time of deep turmoil by analyzing the images that he creates and the way in which he creates them. Jung was deeply molded by both Christian doctrine as well as Alchemy and the Occult, thus this project will take into account the specific Christian and alchemical meanings of particular motifs within …

As You Were Sleeping, Nora Yamazaki Heineman

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.