Art Practice Commons^™

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Hot, Water, Mud: Some Attachments, Dianne Dillingham

CGU MFA Theses

The works in my thesis show came out of an investigation into what it means to really know something. To have such intimate familiarity with a place or object that the shape, smell, and touch becomes unforgettable; the dirt under your nails, smell easily recalled, the carved outline of a bedpost after years of touch. These things are unremarkable in their everydayness; but they can also hold power over time. They can become attachments – motifs that resurface and repeat - that have agency.

Over Certain Undecidedness These Heartstring Intimations, Martha Hemingway

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

over certain undecidedness these heartstring intimations is the culmination of a two-year-long abstracted cycle of textured conversation, internal eye contact, and endless playlist-making. Hemingway’s work is based in process-oriented reflections on habitual behavior, manifestation of sentiment, and sense of self. Her paintings draw inspiration from the ways in which we approach and avoid our internal and external routines – how degrees of our subconscious considerations affect how we extend ourselves to others. Individual auditory preferences of different colliding souls have carved a space for her in a language of empathetic abstraction – attempting to elaborate the curious beauty and pain …

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

Secrets, Todd Mccaffrey

CGU MFA Theses

What does it mean to be human and how does art help us in answering this question.

A Shift In Silence, Bailey Idom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Shift in Silence is a body of work that emerged because of a key shift in my life. Using the formal components of line, shape, and value, I create a space representing an intimate moment in time. Physically, the medium can be any material, but I process all of this as an expression of line. Each piece shares the commonality of lines and lineage, while the layering embodies the record of my relationships from the past that directly affect the present. The abstraction and unpredictability within my own relationships require openness and vulnerability. This honest dialogue sustains and informs …

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 …

"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 …

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

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.

Sharon Si-Chen Ye Artist Statement, Si-Chen Ye

CGU MFA Theses

Everyone is a separate individual. When individuals become aware that they are alone in this world, they can spend more time getting along with themselves and listening to the voice coming from the depths of their heart. This is the main idea of my works. I want to build a silent world with many creatures to make people feel and know that they are alone without feeling lonely.

Unfettered, Doraelia Ruiz

CGU MFA Theses

My life has been built on high wire tensions between the two vastly different worlds I live between. I live somewhere between illusions of minority success and harsh realities of not having a trust-fund in an elite world. I’m neither here nor there. Painting is my one refuge where I can combine the vastly different worlds I exist in and between. My works are the only semblance of a home that doesn’t vanish .

The Room Without A View, Antione L. Leonard

CGU MFA Theses

My work excites conversation about the creation of aesthetic sensations on the human eye while confronting ideas about the pervasive effects of beauty on the mind, body, and emotional sensitivities. Imagination is integral to my work, both in terms of how I make paintings and how they demand to be seen by viewers. I create individuality with the use of an anti-institutional spray paint next to institutional oil paint. I search my everyday lived experiences to find information that has been taken for granted to enhance my art, through natural behaviors within and outside of my studio environment, physically drawing …

Rope-A-Dope, Gabriel L. Perez

CGU MFA Theses

I create from everyday items, coming from everyday people. I do not think that what I create is too difficult for anyone to understand but I know that although I created it, it eludes me. Plastic containers, disposables, and clothing reach out to eyes that see them differently. I’m not trying to make people see things differently; I’m just trying to make you look. Call it theatrics but with a history of various performance experiences, I am not above pulling a cheap trick to get your attention. Nor will I shun the lingo and logic of decoration since I am …

All The Things Left Unsaid, Philip Kim

CGU MFA Theses

I search in my paintings a state of constant glide; meditational state by flooding my senses as my eyes wander from scene to scene onto a daze of perpetual visual stimuli.

They are the frozen amalgamation of its transient state – A crosscut of fog condensing into honey. And the burning shadows of a golden hour vaporizing into electric haze. I try to keep the image in perpetual limbo, confused by their nature, wondering if they will be pickled in the vinegar of the web as digital ghosts or finally disintegrate from being a substance. I want to capture in …

Indefinability2013c.E., Clayton T. Ehman

CGU MFA Theses

I am a multidisciplinary artist; because I am committed to art that engages a broad array of subjects and ideas. This is reflected in my works which consist of diverse mediums and processes including graphic design, digital imagery, printmaking, painting, sculpting, poetry, song composition, clothing, website design, drawing, video, lighting, installation art, abstract art, Op art, conceptual art, political art, black light art, maximalist art, and various combinations of these.

Kind Of Blue Artist's Statement, Leslie Love Stone

CGU MFA Theses

Leslie Love Stone is a conceptual painter whose work often focuses on the models we build to make sense of the world and ourselves. The beauty of order is exemplified through the geometric abstraction of statistical information; complicated content is eloquently transparent with her use of negative space, repeating patterns, and color.

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 …

Being-There, Atilio A. Pernisco

CGU MFA Theses

I blend figures with backgrounds to define pensive areas of focus and delve between figuration and abstraction. These paintings connect the viewer with the strangeness of the ordinary world. This is the moment of unconsciousness. It is then where elements of a narrative emerge. I depict the figure in movements of awkwardness. Images of the familiar environments of children involved in some kind of work-play activity, the inheritors of generational trauma, reoccur in my work--a parade of daydreamers in direction to witness the uncertain.

The Darkness Is Passing, Grace Heeeun Park

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the interplay of light, darkness and space. I express illumination of space and penetrating light with abstract painting. I use the white of canvas and thick application of black paint to create frames and to break rules of defined dimensions. Through my paintings, I challenge the perception of space and question the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

Spatial Phases, Eric Schott

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Sculptural Inquiry Into Geometric And Organic Forms, Gregory Christopher

Senior Scholar Papers

In my Senior Scholar project I manipulated simple geometric shapes in an attempt to construct organic forms using transparent planes, created areas, and implied volumes. The sculpture, which was influenced by my interest in the Renaissance, Russian Constructivism, and the Minimalists, can best be divided into five series; each series is identified by a physical and a conceptual change of ideas. The first series focused on the conceptual ideas of each piece and expressed a lack of concern for the physical properties of the objects. The work progressed during the project; the focus of other series shifted from a purely …