Art Practice Commons^™

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …

Pockets Of Proximity, Christian Breed

Theses and Dissertations

My current paintings begin with images of people from the back, wearing hijabs, turbans, saris, kufis, or rasta gauzy shawls. I do not paint my subjects frontally, because I do not have access to them personally or culturally, and because it is their cultural indicators that fascinate me.

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

Everything I Thought I Was Supposed To Do, Jeff Conefry

Theses and Dissertations

It is within the liminal space between traditional mediums that my creative practice deconstructs the materiality of painting to subvert historical expectations. The irony associated with this deconstruction, excavates one medium to generate the building blocks for something inimitable. These blocks are most easily re-categorized into Words, Limits, and Power. It is these three themes that are the foundation of my thesis exhibition.

"Some Kinda Alchemy", Chelsea Boxwell

CGU MFA Theses

Multiple pieces and paintings come together in “Some kinda Alchemy” to create one large-scale painting environment that increases your interaction and perception of two- dimensional painting. The sculptural aspect is solely a means to an end, to allow the viewer to see more. I want everyone to see as much as possible- as much of the physical painting as possible and as much of the process and actions as possible. There’s more than just a front and 4 sides to my paintings. This structure also inhabits the space the way it does in order to direct you all the way …

Welcome To My Dream – Quasi Queer Fiction, Christian A. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Roseate and bodacious, the hand formed surfaces of Christian Rogers' paintings explore gay culture and history though a quasi-fictional lens. While utilizing folk like imagery, Christian depicts dramatic moments of love, lust, sex and violence as he takes us to queer realms.

No-Self, Impermanence And The Search For Freedom, Ahna Serendren

Theses and Dissertations

Ahna Serendren’s MFA thesis draws upon the Buddhist principles of anatta (no-self), anicca (impermanence), and nibbana (liberation), using them as a framework through which to explore her own artwork and the work of other historical and contemporary artists.

Perspective, Karie D. Cooper

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As an artist, I am interested in understanding how and why humans interact with the natural world. I examine my own individual behaviors and practices and research impacts made on nature by humans as a whole. I am drawn to nature for a multitude of reasons, including aesthetic beauty, psychological wellness, unraveling the mysteries of the universe and trying to understand the origins of life. As an artist I explore the dialectic relationship between everything we perceive outside of ourselves as the environment, and the way we think of ourselves in relation to that environment. I believe in the interconnectedness …

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …

Tony Larson: 2017 Mfa Thesis Exhibition, Tony Larson

CGU MFA Theses

I am interested in altering the modes of communication to which I am subjugated. I am open to participating fully in the world around me, especially in the arms of technology. With every new media channel directed at changing consumer behavior and every new gadget at its dedicated servitude, there are new cracks and chasms to inhabit. These spaces are where new propositions are made. I discover and expand these empty spaces by sticking to a regimented set of processes and self imposed limitations to the way I approach painting. My work proposes that the space of art is uniquely …

Remembering Virtual Worlds: Painting And Video Games, Nathaniel M. St. Amour

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Video games create the feeling of great achievement and place the player into a role that turns them into a great hero. These experiences feel significant because they require great time and emotional investment. The monumentality of these experiences, however, are at odds with the transience of the electrical virtual worlds. The medium of oil painting helps overcome the sense of transience because of oil painting’s durable permanent way of image making and stillness. Painting’s inherent nod to history also creates a dissonance between the newness of the video game medium and the antiquity of painting, a contrast exacerbated by …

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 …

Daughter, Wife, Mother: Women As Emblems Of Indian Authenticity Throughout The Diaspora, Saloni Kaur Kalkat

Scripps Senior Theses

It has been over a century since the maternal side of my family has resided in the natal land of our cultural heritage and religious proclivities – Punjab, India, where Sikhism was established. As an American I continue this extension of our roots from their source. Through the process of shifting location, cultural confluence, and passing time the experiences of the women in each successive generation of my family have altered significantly through our diasporic existence. However, even in the aftermath of colonization and immigration, the enduring responsibility of women is reliant upon their relation to family.

This ideology is …

Trauma And Recovery: A Confessional Process, Mia Siracusa

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.