Painting Commons^™

Reconnecting The Body With Nature: Inspired By Advances In Biomimicry, Elyse M. Orosa

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Reconnecting the Body with Nature: Inspired by Advances in Biomimicry will visually address the symbiotic relationship between nature and humans. The drawing series is inspired by the growing design field of biomimicry and its technological and architectural innovations influenced by nature’s systems and physical adaptations. Just as nature is limited by human misuse, humans are physically and neurologically limited by the state of the environment, and with this, form and function of both nature and humans will be equally represented and explored throughout the body of work presented. Biomimicry can help solve environmental issues such as rising CO2 emissions and …

Intersections Of Art And Medicine, Lina Adwer

EMET Projects

No abstract provided.

Light And Unseen, Daša Kulikova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a body of paintings and two poetic fragments. Shaped by distance and displacement, the work finds its ground in the tension between the desire to be free from the past and heal, and longing for home and connection. Painting practice becomes an event of contact with what is lost, or unclear, or in the process of becoming through accumulating layers, marks, erasures, and traces of the process of its making.

Sensory Constellations, Madaline K. Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates neurodiversity within the field of fine arts by integrating disability studies, institutional critique, and material practices in painting and printmaking. Through visual analysis and studio-based research, the project examines how tactile engagement, color relationships, and repetitive mark-making can articulate embodied experiences of neurodivergence. It challenges dominant institutional frameworks that pathologize neurodivergent behaviors by reframing stimming as a generative and communicative practice. The resulting body of work includes both image-making and the creation of tactile objects designed to facilitate sensory interaction. The thesis proposes alternative ways of understanding artistic practice and accessibility within art institutions.

Come And See: Exploring Complex Dynamics And Abjection Through A Southern Gothic Family Portrait, Lenee N. Peterson

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

“COME AND SEE: Exploring Abject Theory Through a Southern Gothic Family Portrait” examines the artist’s complex familial upbringing through the visual and narrative traditions of Southern Gothic art. Drawing upon abject theory and the cultural references of folk horror and Southern Gothicism, this thesis positions the family portrait where intimacy, trauma, and cultural inheritance collide. The project argues that direct confrontation with abjection can foster recognition, shared experience, and the possibility of collective healing. Grounded in practice-based research, this work functions as a critical and creative response to familial strain shaped by scarcity, social oppression, and emotional precarity. Through a …

Mirroring Memory: Material, Reflection, And Becoming, Nila Mojaveri

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores how memory shapes identity through material, reflection, and tactile processes. Drawing from my personal experience of migration from Iran and the emotional distance from home, the work examines memory as a shifting, layered, and embodied phenomenon rather than a fixed narrative. Through the use of mirror, clay, fabric, and paint, I investigate how materials can hold, reflect, and transform lived experience. Each material carries specific meaning: mirrors introduce fragmentation and reflection, clay records touch and grounding, fabric evokes softness and domestic memory, and paint creates atmosphere through layering and tone. Together, these materials form a visual …

A Community Affair: An Exploration Of The Queer Community, Nightlife, Performance Art And Their Adjacent Qualities, Tatiana M. Castro

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the importance and roll of community in queer artwork, such as drag and burlesque and retroactively also all the work that I create. This paper aims to express this importance by exploring my personal relationship with building community. By interviewing performers selected through a customized-for-savannah voting process, I allowed the community to directly influence my thesis, as well as directly referencing photos of the hands of community members as a continued motif used throughout my work to represent community. This culminated in a two night thesis performance and installation  exhibition that explored performance and how its environment …

Spieltrieb, Edward F. Newcomb

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis investigates the creative and pedagogical intersections of nostalgia, play, and neurodivergent experience through a mixed-media studio practice. Grounded in Friedrich Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb—the human drive to play as a balance between sensual and rational impulses—this work explores how childhood memory, instinct, and impulsive mark making inform both artistic production and art education.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Susan Sontag and John Berger, the work resists overinterpretation in favor of sensory immediacy, inviting viewers into direct, embodied encounters with material form. Sontag’s critique of mimetic representation and Berger’s analysis of reproducibility and context inform a practice that …

Orogenesis, Timothy Ryan Butcher

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis and accompanying exhibition explore the translation of panenhenic mystical experience and the collaboration with Appalachian natural spaces into abstracted landscape images. This work aims to “map” a sensation of fundamental unity and gesture toward the ineffable by utilizing found-object stamp printing, and automatic mark-making. Inspired by practical mystic traditions and contemporary landscape painting, this body of work, entitled Orogenesis, combines intricate, abstracted ink landscape drawings and photographs to create images suggestive of the mystical patterns in the process.

Un Lugar A Donde No Puedo Volver: Perteneciendo En La Distancia, Alberto J. Alonso

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

“A Place I Cannot Return To: Distance and Belonging” investigates how home is not limited to a fixed place, but instead a reconstruction sustained through memory and longing, which focuses on personal experiences of being away from Puerto Rico. I contribute to this broader dialogue by offering a deeply personal perspective shaped by the complexities of cultural belonging. Through photography, collage, and painting, my art practice reconstructs fragmented visual narratives of lived experience to explore homesickness, nostalgia, and displacement, examining how personal and shared histories become anchors to what continually slips away. Although I can physically return to Puerto Rico, …

Reclaiming The Self: A Visual Narrative Of A Process Of Individuation Through Artistic Practice, Stacie Becker

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Reclaiming the Self: A Visual Narrative of a Process of Individuation Through Artistic Practice features a multidisciplinary practice that uses visual narrative, metaphor, and symbolism to reconcile the complex intersections of internal and external identity-shaping experiences, informed by lived experience as a woman. Working across painting, mixed media, printmaking, book arts, sculpture, and restorative medical tattooing, the artist dissects the tension between internal identity and external expectations, addressing themes of gender roles, relationships, trauma, and agency. Various artistic methods serve not only as a process but also as a parallel for reclaiming, healing, and restoring an authentic, unashamed sense of …

Nontoxic Paints Using Cornstarch As Binders, Maile Prater

Honors Projects

For this project, paints were created using different metal compounds which interacted with cornstarch and pectin to determine whether the metals would coordinate with these polysaccharides to create new types of watercolor paints. The paints that were created were ran through an RGB analysis to determine how much of each RGB color is present in a solution and then were ran through a rheometer to determine how the viscosity differed between each solution.

Dwelling / Knowing / Loving: Imaging The Immanent Present, Joel Pasquarelli

All Theses

This thesis serves as an attempt to articulate, understand, and testify to my experiences within the immanent present. Defined as moments where the world impresses itself upon my awareness with such a force that it eclipses all else, the experience of immanence is necessarily undeniable and ephemeral. These moments are accompanied by a combined sense of exultation in the world’s existence and poignant longing for something beyond. I feel as though I am embedded within something great and meaningful, as the material world acts upon me, yet I remain ever unsatiated by this experience as the world inevitably returns once …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

In Flux, Gavin G. Gilmore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores my practice of non-representational, mixed media painting as a way to consider the passage of time and the shifting nature of memory. Working in layers of paper, pigment, paint, and other materials, I build and disrupt surfaces that mirror the instability of short-term memory and the gradual erosion experienced during my father’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease. Each painting becomes a palimpsest where gestures accumulate, fade, or reemerge, reflecting how memories surface, distort, or disappear.

Through this layered process, the work intertwines personal narrative with broader questions of how time is felt rather than measured. The paintings act …

The Art Of Movement, Payton Hedderman

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

I wanted to do this project for my Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone to showcase some of my skills and to articulate what I want to do with my degree. I want to go into Medical Illustration, and I want to make science easier for people to learn. To do this I want to take complicated subjects and remake them into simpler terms. For my capstone, I decided to take anatomy of the arm, leg, and abdominal organs and draw them on professional women athletes. I thought that expressing this anatomy in less of a clinical way is one strategy to make …

Molding The Mass Viewer: New Insights Into The Early Soviet Art System, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"Monographs on the visual culture of the Soviet period are infrequent enough that the appearance of two in one year is a cause for celebration. Chicago University Press has published long-awaited books on El Lissitzky (1890–1941) and Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969), contemporaries who occupied very different spheres in the early Soviet art system and different niches within the historiography of Soviet art. Designer and architect Lissitzky was an acclaimed member of the international avant-garde, while the figurative painter and graphic artist Deineka is still relatively little known outside the context and cliches of Socialist Realism. Only rarely did their paths cross …

Floridians, Michael Anglim-Lindros

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

The purpose of this piece is to explore species present in Florida by depicting native species alongside commonly seen non-native ones. I decided to focus on mammals, specifically those I have personally observed while living in North Florida. By illustrating their unadorned skeletal remains, I hope to inspire viewers to consider the similarities, differences, and relationships among these organisms, as well as the lives they lead on shared land.

The species depicted in this piece are (clockwise from middle) Homo sapiens (human) - non-native; Tadarida brasiliensis (Mexican free-tailed bat); Dasypus novemcinctus (nine-banded armadillo); Sciurus niger shermani (Sherman’s fox squirrel); Odocoileus …

Professor Pop-Up Gallery And Printmaker's Pin-Up Exhibition, Donald Keefe

Achieve

2025 Professor Pop-Up Gallery and Printmaker's Pin-Up Exhibition. Hosted and curated by Kai Lin, owner of Kai Lin Art. The gallery is located at 999 Brady Ave NW, Suite 7, Atlante, GA 30324

The exhibition contained artworks from Art Professors in various regional colleges and universities. Donald Keefe's work "Memento Mori" was featured in the show.

Here is the text from the promotional material:

It’s the POP UP PIN UP https://www.kailinart.com/news/professor-pop-25

OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 2025 7:00 - 10:00 PM FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC EXHIBITION RUNS THROUGH AUGUST 30

Professor Pop-Up/Pin-Up

KAI LIN ART is proud to …

Tenzing Rigdol’S Biography Of A Thought: A Mandala In The Heart Of The Met, Sarah Magnatta

Art and Art History: Faculty Scholarship

In 2024, artist Tenzing Rigdol created an installation - titled Biography of a Thought - spanning the entirety of the atrium in the Robert Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His larger-than-life mandala included twenty painted panels on four walls, a central podium with a panel on top, and carpets on the floor mirroring parts of the painted shapes on the walls. Complete with bright sunlight streaming from the above skylight, the room transformed into a modern mandala - a walkable, meditative, transformative space. Even with its multiple traditional Tibetan Buddhist components and organisational structure, many of the …