Art Practice Commons^™

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.

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 …

Visions, Ella J. Menees

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Visions, by Ella Menees, comprises four diptychs. While the paintings serve as a true exploration and celebration of color, each pair also has a distinct focus on the psychological and the unexpected. Littered with bright colors and surreal landscapes, these paintings cause the viewer to ponder all that is not shown. Each diptych presents the same subject in two different moments. The strange lighting washed over each face acts as a mask, whereas the background depicts each subject’s state of mind. Instead of “landscapes,” I consider them to be “mindscapes.”

Each subject has a distinct, yet similar, experience with trauma. …

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, …

Making Space For You, Livia Elizabeth Sponberg-Paraday

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Making Space for You is a senior thesis submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College. I created Making Space for You over the course of 8 months in my studio and in my living room of my apartment. My intentions for my paintings are to create an aesthetically awesome image that the viewer is automatically attracted to. I use color confidently to make the paintings strong and catchy. I enjoy painting people, hands, feet and objects. The project began with oil paint and the goal to teach myself to paint an image of people in a space in …

Color X Line, Vittoria Ciaraldi

Senior Projects Spring 2019

COLOR x LINE

VITTORIA CIARALDI

The four main paintings that are 6x6 foot are my central concept of the Color by Line theme. In these paintings I chose to work from sketches I made two years ago. My past sketch paintings revolved around a self reflective human figure. As I was thinking about the bigger scale and what those paintings meant to me, I wanted to deconstruct the notion of the figure and really break it down to the basics that for me, revolve around: Color and Line.

My four central paintings are meant to emphasize colors and how lines …

Dog Eyes, Jackson Shea Denahy

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

All At Once, Maddie Rose Assarsson

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to the Division of Arts of Bard College

The Music Lesson: An Analysis Of Two Works From Dutch Seventeenth Century, Valory Hight

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Look&Leave, Ruby Brooke

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Over the summer I had the opportunity to study in a program that focused on drawing and painting the architecture of Rome. Upon returning to the studio, I integrated this attention to architecture with my interest in painting the figure. Over the course of the year, the figure disappeared from my paintings. Instead, I started to paint large empty interiors. My intention was that the viewer feel the vastness of the space, emphasized by the absence of a figure.

This body of work explores interior architectural space and how the presence or absence of a figure affects it. I paint …

Wrap Your Arms Around Me, Frederick Lightfoot Bayne

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Most of the personal themes in this project are not things I am comfortable with expressing verbally or textually. The reason they came out in this body of work is because it how I found myself comfortably addressing them. I can acknowledge that I was working through frustration, pain, and confusion related to my body and relationship to other bodies. Being a private person, however, I am far more interested in people approaching this work with their own narratives and associations than using it to get a glimpse into my own personal struggles. While visually and thematically the work can …

Abra: The Canvas, And The Evil That Men Do., Daniel Louis Nielsen

Senior Projects Spring 2017

“Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” — Susan Sontag

I used this idea as a way to highlight the symbolic value of the traditional European canvas by separating each material of its composition with a sheet of plexiglass. A canvas, of any style, is a platform for creation. it servers as a foundation for perspective, and is thus symbolic of the foundation of a given cultures perspective.

Similarly to the “White Cube” discourse that is in reaction to the popular style of many museums and galleries which dominate in any …

Relics, Secular, Kaitlyn Sue Kester

Senior Projects Spring 2017

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

Lifecasting & Ubiquitous Relationships, Alexis Charlotte Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

My subjects do not know I exist. They do not know who I am, and they do not know their lives are the center of my painting series. But I know them - at least, I think I do. My acrylic paintings depict people in domestic spaces in specific moments in time. The relationships of person-to-person, person to space, paint to canvas and voyeur to subject drives my obsession to watch and to paint what I see. What I am seeing are a collection of pixels that make up human forms, living rooms, and kitchens. These digital bodies move through …

Pieces: Form And Ephemera, Louise Cooper Smith

Senior Projects Spring 2013

As with anybody, I am not a singular self but one constructed of ever-shifting parts. This constant state of flux is expressed in the play of paint and canvas, lending the act a seriousness wherein images and ideas emerge and co-exist. I do not know what will happen in advance and finish at the same speed that I start so that there is no precious moment. The object is always in a state of transformation. A story or specific narrative is secondary to the need to leave a trace. At times, the image is completely external from me. My work …