Painting Commons^™

On Canvas: The Origins And Implications Of A Common Phrase, Kerr Houston

Art Inquiries

Why do modern art historians and conservators describe paintings executed on cloth in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as works on canvas, when late medieval and early Renaissance sources never do the same? This article answers that question by tracing and analyzing the evolution of canvas as a term in the history of painting. Until the late 1400s, it will be argued, the term canvas and its regional variants connoted coarse woven fabrics made of hemp that were associated with rugged, utilitarian needs and rural poverty—but not with painting. By contrast, artists and related texts relied on …

On Stage: Startling Visibility, Operatic Drama, And George Tooker’S Un Ballo In Maschera, Alex Del Dago

Art Inquiries

As a part of its centennial advertising campaign, the Metropolitan Opera in New York commissioned the American figurative painter George Tooker (1920-2011) to create a fine art image inspired after Giuseppe Verdi’s 1859 opera, Un Ballo in Maschera. Within the artist's composition, themes around masquerading, skepticism, and surveillance arise, all of which are common threads within both Tooker’s and Verdi’s work. Primary questions that can be asked from looking at this type of subject matter include: who is truthfully themselves, who may be someone other than they initially say they are, and most importantly, how does the ambiguity of gendered …

Art Beyond Magnolias And Pillared Porticoes, William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The article is a reflection on antebellum portrait painters, including those associated with the Forks of Cypress, such as Edward Troye, Thomas Sully, Sr., and William Frye. Notably, Troye created a portrait of Parson Dick, an enslaved blacksmith at the Forks of Cypress. The Parson Dick portrait is on display at Pope's Tavern Museum in Florence, AL and visible on their website. Additionally, portraits include those of the James Jackson and Sarah Moore Jackson, and the Jackson racehorses.

Delirious Pink, Reuben Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

How to enliven a tradition as accomplished as painting? With the spirit of New York City and the techniques of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting as my backbone, I look to my friends, lovers, and fellow artists to form a thesis defined by love, color, feeling, and individuality.

Aesthetic Relationship Of The Female Character Design And Peacocks In Art Nouveau And Art Deco, A.L Rawan Reda Atef Elzeky, Prof. Dr. Manal Abdel Rahim, Prof. Asmaa Abu Bakr El-Nawawy

Journal of Art, Design and Music

The Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements (1890–1940) produced a rich visual vocabulary in which the female figure and the peacock emerged as recurring and symbolically charged motifs. Despite extensive scholarship on both movements, the specific aesthetic and symbolic relationship between these two elements, and their collective contribution to the development of character design principles, has received limited scholarly attention.

The aim is to enhance understanding of the visual diversity presented in the selected works, despite the shared fundamental elements represented by the woman and peacock. The complementary relationship between them, whether it is a spatially intertwined and harmonious relationship …

The Significance Of Abstract Art In Self-Expression: A Study Developed By Analyzing Kandinsky's Black Lines And Producing Visual Juxtapositions, Keturah K. Bowles

Theses

This paper will contemplate how the creation of abstract art, a creative style born from the Avant-Garde movement of the 20th century by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, was imperative in the pursuit of artistic freedom. Additionally, it will seek to prove that abstraction is one of the unparalleled genres to utilize for self-expression in comparison to genres that uphold traditional art techniques, such as realism. This theory is further emphasized when considering abstract art in juxtaposition to the art standards maintained by the academy. Moreover, the research conducted to support the proposed theory falls into various categories, such as …

Fine Arts Gallery: Hannah Singleton, Hannah Singleton

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

No abstract provided.

Mic, Shanna Mcnair

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Reiss Hall, Caden Ide

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Dolmen, Keehan White

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Viewing Machines, Janos Cseh

Theses and Dissertations

By sifting through personal memories, the contemporary media landscape, and seeing the world through the lens of painting, Cseh asks what it means to understand information through images.  The artist unpacks the interwoven relationships between images and memory, feeling and seeing, and the difficulty of seeking truth through an analysis of his paintings.

Radiance After Exile: Visionism And The Art Of M, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This essay introduces and critically examines Visionism, the artistic philosophy developed by contemporary Australian painter M. Emerging from a practice shaped by early success, prolonged creative exile, and eventual return, Visionism is presented not as a stylistic movement but as a visual philosophy concerned with atmosphere, symbolism, transcendence, and the persistence of intensity after critique. Situating Visionism within contemporary debates surrounding postmodernism and metamodernism, the essay argues that M's work occupies a distinctive position within a broader cultural shift toward renewed engagements with meaning, affect, and sincerity.

Drawing on the artist’s own reflections, alongside theoretical perspectives from David Sudnow, Timotheus …

Darkness Seen By Candlelight: Painting To Discover Feeling, Shelby Feltoon

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

This thesis discusses the ways that a phenomenological experience can translate itself through the medium of painting. This translation evokes deep feelings through physical considerations of materiality, light, context, distance, and time. Through a series of intimate and abstracted oil paintings created in thin layers, the work conveys an interdependent relationship between light and darkness. This project draws from research on art movements like Suprematism, Minimalism, and Expressionism, as well as larger practices and philosophies about photography and the sublime. The body of work draws direct reference to Junichiro Tanazaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows. Ultimately, the work described …

A Northwest Perspective: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sally Haley's Life And Career, Mary Timbrook

University Honors Theses

Sally Haley is a successful artist who built a long career in the second half of the 20th century as a painter in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been part of several solo and group exhibitions within museums and galleries across the country and she was awarded the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts in 1989. She is best remembered for her unique still life paintings, frequently painted in egg tempera, which sold immensely well during her lifetime and after. Haley trained at the Yale School of Art in the late 1920s and early 30s, where she learned to paint …

Post Desire, Lucy E. Luckovich

Masters Theses

Post-Desire comes from my personal take on and continuation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire (2016)[1]. There, Fisher imagines an alternative to the capitalist consumption machine, one where desire is redirected back towards ourselves rather than to profit-driven, accelerationist motives. Fisher had a vision of a future both through and beyond the chains of capitalism. He pointed out in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism that “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”[2] This perspective is realistic—we are in the midst of a crisis of material reality and of imagination—but it is …

Held In Sediment, Kati Lowe

Masters Theses

This thesis examines time as a durational, non-linear condition shaped through emotion and perception rather than a sequence of forward-moving events. Through painting and related material strategies, the work focuses on aftermath, residue, interruption, and return. Throughout this thesis, terms such as misalignment, double vision, fragmentation, interruption, and recurrence function as a conceptual vocabulary for describing instability within memory, embodiment, and lived experience. Blurred edges, doubled forms, and punctures in the surface register a lag between experience and comprehension, especially in relation to grief, trauma, depression, memory, and embodied perception. Neon color functions as a counterpoint to delay, signaling persistence, …

All The Hours Of Light, Isabel Horgan

Masters Theses

My wisdom teeth were extracted in November 2025. I put it off for 5 years. In 2019, my first wisdom tooth emerged as a blood blister. It grew through a vein. I attempted to pop the blister, but instead pulled on the vein, which was so viscerally disturbing that I almost fainted. Every night that followed, I stood at the mirror over the bathroom sink and poked at it. Eventually, enough of the tooth showed that I needed to scrape stuff out of the crevices. It resulted in about a year of having a hole in my mouth that I …

The Root Over My Eyes, Shiyeon Monk

Masters Theses

What does it mean to have a body? To touch, to breathe, to taste, and perceive all the things that make up a person, how does it feel to recognize the physical bounds your mind is enclosed in? To me—a woman, a bisexual woman, a biracial bisexual woman, an immigrant biracial bisexual woman, a Black and East Asian immigrant biracial bisexual woman—each of these markers feels heavy with its own context of history, location, and interpretation. Too many times have I wondered what it is like to be within a body accepted as a midpoint.

I make work out of …

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …