Painting Commons^™

A Meditation In Three Parts, Brent Nakamoto

Graduate School of Art Theses

I’m interested in the way we read images—they way we see through an image’s surface in order to perceive its illusion, in the same way that we see through words in order to understand their meaning. I’m interested in this relationship, in both images and texts, between surface, illusion, and meaning. In Buddhist philosophy, the source of suffering is in our attachments to the self-as-image. The function of Zen meditation practice is to bring attention to this process of perception and, in doing so, to help see through the illusions of self-hood and ground our understanding in the reality of …

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 …

Proxy, Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Studio One

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is a writer, poet, artist and lecturer in English Literature. He is the art instructor at Kishlaya Outsider Art Academy. He has edited a collection of poems by various poets - Pearls (2002) and written a professional guidebook -How to be (2016) and a collection of poems and art-Feel My Heart (2016).

Polaroid Access, Becky Jane Rosen

Theses and Dissertations

In her thesis statement, Becky Jane Rosen discusses the relationships between photography, family, and the psyche through her recent paintings and artistic influences.

Surveilled, Rachel Swetnam

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Debord's "Society the Spectacle" and Delouze’s Deleuze's "Society of Control" both imagine a dystopian future for humanity in a world governed by excessive self-advertisement and mass surveillance. This thesis begins with the observation that, sadly, their two visions have become a reality. Current technologies log our movements through GPS satellite data, and photographs taken by closed-circuit security cameras, or by passers-by on a public street, are constantly cross-checked against databanks of previously-compiled biometric profiles. Every movement and transaction is digitized and recorded, accessible to ever-widening networks of information exchange and surveillance. These data-networks are altering the manner by which people …

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations, Lynda Bostrom

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations is a written document accompanying the culmination of my three years painting at a graduate level. The result of which is an autobiographical body of work navigating the tension of being a human with an invisible disease, while straining to understand Western societal constructs of women. I simultaneously reject these fairy tales as a standard recipe for happiness, yet identify with its visual language that is rooted in the vernacular of my generation. Redefining the elements I reject or embrace helps me to look beyond the boundaries of these constructs, and adopt an attitude of curiosity …

Snapshot In A Squiggle: How Painting Terminology Illuminates Short Fiction, Jennifer Pretzer

Senior Honors Theses

This paper will demonstrate that painting terms can offer a helpful avenue to understand short fiction, particularly abstract short fiction. After defining abstraction, realism, and the short story, it will trace relevant stages in the evolution of both painting and short fiction to show how and why the media share similar elements. In this examination, the paper will discuss which features of painting correspond with certain features of short fiction. Based on the essential elements of short fiction, as well as the features mentioned above, the paper will analyze examples of short stories that exemplify how painting parallels short fiction …

Subject To Change, Alexis Kurtzman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Subject to Change is comprised of a series of self-devised, ritually practiced free-associative action-mark-making strategies. Each procedure explores various degrees of chance operations and seeks to question and explore the roles of intuition, intention, interpretation and human participation. A hybrid of fixed method with variables of the unknown explores and investigates performative mark-making methodologies, in-person and internet collaboration, control and working under pre-fixed intervals. Alongside chance, time-based procedures are concurrently determined to achieve work on paper whose marks are not initially foreseen. This practice of working addresses the disconnect between the maker engaged in active activity of doing versus the …

Making Process: The Search For A Personal Language Through A Shared Vocabulary Of Painting And Design, Callie Fleetwood

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As designers, everything we make is personal. The act of making is a learning experience, as well as a personal act. We learn through this act of making. Making spans many mediums, including painting and architecture. Every designer has a language that is unique and personal to them. There is however, a shared and fundamental basis, or vocabulary, for these languages that span mediums and designers. To better understand the making process, a careful study of the architectural work and personal paintings of two architects has been done. Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto are two architects who practiced in the …

Art For All: The Artistic Journey Of Julia Elizabeth Tolbert, Julie L. Woodson

Student Scholarship

Progressing from a student, concentrating on absorbing foundational skills and techniques to an intentional, expressionistic painter, Julia Elizabeth Tolbert spent twenty years of her life creating art. Using formal educational opportunities as a way to escape the life intended for her, she found art to be a freeing and meaningful endeavor. She experimented greatly in both style and medium, working with movements such as the Ashcan school, Regionalism, and Cubism and creating works in watercolor, oil, encaustic, pencil, clay, and more, all in pursuit of a professional artistic career. Though physical and visual limitations ultimately prevented her longterm success, Tolbert …

Hortus Conclusus 囚, Lantian D.

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The Work of Lantian D.

One of the most basic things to understand about Lantian D.’s work is that it is born out of an acute awareness of the weaknesses inherent in contemporary art. The sorry state of the contemporary artworld is even the theme of one her earliest paintings, Crime and Punishment, which contains some suggestive depic­tions of artists and intellectuals who may bear some responsibility for the present situation: Jacques Derrida, Marcel Duchamp, Tracy Emin, Michel Foucault, Clement Greenberg, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Charles Saatchi, and Andy Warhol are all depicted as witch-like creatures from one of …

Bird Symbolism In Italian Devotional Paintings From The Thirteenth To The Seventeenth Century, Sarah Poisner

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Madonna and Child images represent a significant portion of the paintings produced during the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Italian painters began to embed symbolic birds into these works to create further points of reference and significance. This paper will examine the long history of bird symbolism and why Christian artists used different species of birds to create specific meanings. Hundreds of Madonna and Child paintings which include a bird were made between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there has been no in-depth analysis of this motif in over seventy years. Since the publication …

Experience Bobo Experience, Sara Smith

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Experience Bobo Experience -by Sara Marie Smith (Artist Statements and Images of work)

Spring 2018-CSUMB Undergraduate Capstone Project/ Visual Public Arts Department

My Senior Capstone is about using inspirational wisdom from acknowledged sources to address the quandaries of our human experiences. I have chosen a cognitive clown, named Bobo, to investigate Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Watts. Bobo, my character, goes on a journey of learning. Bobo is a line drawing, rendered in marker, with a circular head, two dot eyes, three puffs of hair with a clown smile and clown clothing. Experience Bobo Experience speaks to …

Title., Douglas Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Title is a series of drawings that explores the aspects of failed projects and the complications of representation within literary and visual practices. This series is informed by preliminary drawings, marginalia, and written notations that are inherent in the formulation processes of both visual and literary compositions. Through an investigation of the 19th Century Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished novel Dead Souls, I situate this series of drawings as a means to conflate literary theories with visual representation. In this way, the Title series presents fragmentary images, texts, and digressive narratives that demonstrate intermediaries between propositional states and reconciled …

It Can't Leave You The Way It Finds You, Kyle Nobles

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

There’s a beautiful innocence in childhood where, although the world is large and new, it feels as though your place in it and the roles that you play are stable and unchanging. In our youth, outside of extraordinary circumstances, we are unburdened by the awareness that everything and everyone is subject to radical change—including our own sense of self. As we grow older though, looking back it becomes clear that this was never the case. In a matter of years, you can change so dramatically that you did not even notice as you became an entirely new person. For me, …

Lumumba’S Iconography As Interstice Between Art And History, Matthias De Groof

Artl@s Bulletin

How does Congolese art and artistic representations of Lumumba “mediate past, present and future”? How do they relate to historical narratives and to the dialogues within the Global South? This contribution proposes Lumumba’s iconography as a case in point of the interstice between art and history. It positions the image of Lumumba as mediating between past, present and future for both the Congo and the Global South more broadly.

The Us’S Economic Promises Are Over: An Interview With Miguel Luciano, Marisa Lerer, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. The island was left without electricity and clean water for months. However, the natural disaster was not the only cause of this lasting devastation. The financial fall-out from predatory loans, which led to Puerto Rico’s inability to invest funds in its own infrastructure, caused an enduring humanitarian disaster. Artist Miguel Luciano (b. 1972) in this interview discusses his work in relation to the 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis and the legacy of the over 100-year span of Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a US territory, which gives the US disproportionate control over …

The Significance Of Cloth In The Narrative Of The Life Of Christ As Represented In Dieric Bouts' "Life Of Christ Altarpiece", Mary-Margaret Mcleod Pilling

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the materialistic importance of cloth in the life of Jesus Christ and relates it to the disassembled Life of Christ Altarpiece painted by the Renaissance artist Dieric Bouts. References to cloth in the scriptural accounts of Christ’s life support the claim that there is deep theological significance to fabric. The medium of each of the paintings that comprised the altarpiece is a flax linen canvas, which, combined with the references to cloth throughout the compositions, parallels these references to cloth in the scriptures. The entire artwork serves as a metaphor for the Eucharist resting on linen on …

The Rhetoric Of Landscape: Through Oil And Water, Alexandrea Davis

Honors Theses

“The Rhetoric of Landscape: Through Oil and Water” analyzes five water resources—Lake Erie, Lake Powell, the Aral Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Barrier Reef—and uses the visual rhetoric introduced by an accompanying series of oil pastel illustrations to compare how the beauty of the landscapes equates to their true states. This project discusses the harmful effects of human activities on water bodies, first through direct pollution and ultimately through anthropogenic climate change. Furthermore, a final summary covering the history of environmental initiatives in the United States and the idea of “wicked problems” offers an overview of reasons …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.