Painting Commons^™

Cartography, Botany, And Violence In The Codex Rodriguez-MondragóN, Maria Davison

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Sandy Rodriguez deploys the visual language of the Florentine Codex and other sixteenth-century Mesoamerican sources to examine the persisting effects of colonialism on people and land in Mexico-U.S. borderlands in Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón (2017-present), her ongoing series of maps, botanical illustrations, and landscape paintings.

Through A Mother's Eyes: The Psychology Of Color, Katie Kutz

Theses

This project investigates the intersection of color psychology, maternal experience, and visual perception through a series of five artworks. Using a qualitative methodology, this project draws upon interdisciplinary research such as neuroscience, marketing, art history, and personal experiences as a mother. This work explores how sensory changes during pregnancy and postpartum influence the emotional perception of color, and how this can be represented in art. Inspired by artists that have explored the theme of motherhood such as Mary Cassatt, Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Jenny Saville, and Alice Neel, this project uses an emotionally charged approach to depicting motherhood. Color changing …

Little Changes, Jessica Wolfe

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

This collage is made of hundreds of small pieces of paper cut from old magazines and junk mail. As I worked on it, I thought about how each tiny piece of paper alters the canvas in a nearly imperceptible way, but the shapes and colors could shift completely in the course of an hour. This concept of making small changes is something I think a lot about in my work as a psychiatric nurse as well. Even though it doesn’t always feel like it, we become wiser each day. By looking for these small opportunities to evolve, we can build …

Garden Of Rust: Conversations With The "In-Between Space", Kristen M. Poore

University Honors Theses

Garden of Rust is a series of five oil paintings that explore the mental and emotional changes she calls the "In-Between Space," that occur in the artist’s mind as she undergoes a major life change. The artist uses traditional oil painting techniques on a variety of canvas sizes in order to record her emotions, which include anxiety, and grief. Her intent with this series is to highlight the "In-Between Space," and to start a conversation with others experiencing it. The artist finds that creating Garden of Rust has been beneficial for her own mental wellbeing to work on, because she …

Rewilding, Hanna Kaye Sosin

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

Rewilding attempts to bridge the distance between humanity and nature through play and embodied play. To speak to the permeability of humans to their environment, Hanna Sosin references a wide range of inspirations from Biochemistry and population dynamics to poetry and folklore. Each work is an exploration between medium and substrate to make an open ended narrative; they are improvisations based off of the surface of a panel, the expansion and contraction of a tunnel book, or a series of indelible marks made in balsa wood. Characters and symbols such as the match or candle people repeat throughout her work …

Parallel Worlds, Mary J. Connell

Masters Theses

When I start a painting, I’m never sure how the painting process is going to go or how the painting will be resolved. I don’t plan things out or make sketches in preparation for the paintings. Each decision is intuitive. I typically have a question, a response from a prior painting. As a result, all the paintings in the studio become related as they respond to each other.

Doubt and curiosity steady my hand, balancing one another out. Through hard work, time, mistakes and the occasional success, a painting gradually emerges from the surface. Sometimes it is lost again for …

The Terror Of The Threshold: On Impermanence, Enclothed Hauntology, And Rest, David M. Legrand

Masters Theses

My artistic practice explores the intersections of impermanence, enclothed cognition, necropolitics, and rest as intertwined acts of decolonial resistance. Through a studio practice rooted in transient mediums—charcoal, chalk, and erasure—the work confronts neoliberal and anti-Black demands for coherence, productivity, and permanence. The ephemeral drawings, layered and dissolved on my studio walls, embody a fugitive aesthetic inspired by Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity[1],” rejecting colonial logics of legibility and commodification. These impermanent gestures mirror Haiti’s silenced revolutionary history[2], as theorized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, while invoking Vodou’s vevè symbols as counter-archives of survival.

Enclothed cognition[3] is reimagined …

Ib-Adat, Anum Naseer

Masters Theses

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Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

To Stain The Soul, Shaoqing Chen

Masters Theses

The process of art-making is a BDSM activity. Painting doesn’t start from the brain. It starts from the hands. Most of the time, painters move through muscle memory, not thought. So, who is in control? I believe there is a higher being—the God of Art. Not a person, not a legend, but something beyond exciting. It loves to see the artist sacrificed, suffering, twisted. It wants something beautiful and painful.

My art practice in the studio is like a BDSM moment in a dungeon. I am the submissive. The god is the one who gives orders. The more I suffer—both …

A Personal Manual Of Escapism, Qing Wen

Masters Theses

In this fast-paced, information-saturated era, avoidance has become a common mechanism of self-preservation. Confronted with global crises and structural instability, the current generation increasingly adopt a pessimistic stance toward the future: some retreat into virtual worlds, others find themselves unable to bear the weight of real-life responsibilities, and many turn to art as a private sanctuary. But is avoidance only a pejorative term?

It wasn’t until recently that I realized, nearly all of my creative work has stemmed from a place, or an action of escape. The imagined worlds I’ve built, the spaces I created to flee from reality—without knowing …

Considering The Ethics Of Conserving American Art: White Nationalism And The Evolving Meanings Of Nineteenth-Century Genre And Landscape Painting, Evan M. Crocker

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the stylistic and conceptual qualities of American genre and landscape painting from the antebellum period and how these qualities acted in service to establishing white nationalism before the Civil War. The intricate and calculated system of typing in genre painting presented carefully crafted idealizations of quintessential Americans, defined by their whiteness and maleness. Landscape painters of the early- to mid-nineteenth century endowed their compositions with a sense of wondrous opportunity which justified and upheld westward expansion under Manifest Destiny. At the intersection of genre and landscape practices sits plantation paintings—specifically house portraits—in which the plantation serves as …

The Art Of Dreaming: A Surrealist Approach To Dream Analysis, Shelby Wright

Honors Thesis

Over the past two years, I created a series of paintings to explore the meaning of my nightmares. This study analyzes the themes and symbols in these dreams through the psychological frameworks of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud’s causal approach focuses on repressed desires, while Jung’s method relies on mythological symbols and archetypes in the collective unconscious. Drawing on the ideas of André Breton and the Surrealist movement, I examine how art can bridge dreams and waking life. By painting my dreams, I aim to better understand my unconscious and invite viewers to question their perception of reality. This …

Trans-Pacific Connections: Chinese Porcelain And Aztec Motifs In Colonial Mexico, Natalia Ramirez

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This research explores artworks within the Global Baroque as visual and ideological evidence through which colonial power, trade, and cross-cultural influence shaped the material culture of the early modern world. Centering on blue and white ceramics as a key medium of transcultural and trans-local exchange, the study analyzes how global motifs, particularly those drawn from Aztec and Chinese traditions, were reinterpreted, aestheticized, and circulated in Aztec and Novohispanic artistic practices.

Through a close observational comparison of Aztec and Chinese decorative systems, the study recognizes contrasting systems of cultural documentation embedded within similar visual forms. Aztec motifs, rooted in ritual, calendrical, …

Art In Itself: The Vision Of Three Female Mississippi Artists, Jane E. Thomas

Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of longform, narrative-style journalistic profiles on artists in Northeast Mississippi. These artists include Carol Roark from Enid and Hannah McCormick and Coulter Fussell from Water Valley. Each profile highlights an individual artist’s work, from her background, inspirations, process and distinctiveness as a creator. These profiles required studio visits and extensive interviews, as well as secondary interviews with clients, gallery owners and art curators. An overarching theme between the three artists is their ability to recognize artistic potential in their immediate surroundings; Roark paints landscapes from her own backyard, McCormick paints scenes from everyday life and …

The Estuary, Maureen Alsop

Studio One

No abstract provided.

Veils Of The Unseen, Shinwoo Song

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the dynamic interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness and how this relationship influences visual language in my art practice. My research investigates how unconscious impulses and conscious choices intersect in the creative process, shaping artistic expression and viewer interpretation. I examine how visual art can serve as a medium through which hidden emotional and psychological states, such as memory, desire, and internal conflict, emerge and take form. Rooted in the practice of automatism and influenced by Surrealist strategies, my work engages with theories by Jacques Lacan, particularly his notion of the gaze, and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of extraction …

Garden Of Fragments, Justin Muegge

Theses and Dissertations

Justin Muegge's paintings take the aesthetic experience of garden spaces as a vehicle to explore abstraction. Referencing his research in traditional Chinese Scholar's Gardens, Muegge explores the conceptual premises of their design philosophies, raises questions on the history of abstraction and his own work, and expands upon themes in his painting.

All Ego Must Die, Meredith Bakke

Theses and Dissertations

Using plasticity as a central framework, this thesis explores painting as a site for radical transformation of the self. Through symbolic engagement with sadism, ego death, and material play, it investigates how fantasy, fear, and imagination coalesce into a generative force—one that dismantles rigidity and opens space for discovery.

Cuentos De Barro, Daniel Anthony Vasquez

Theses and Dissertations

Cuentos de Barros addresses the complexities of creating art and processing indigenous heritage and personal history as a Salvadoran immigrant within a neo-colonial society. Centering ritual, care, and healing, the artist imbues sculptures with tenderness using abstract forms and the tactile manipulation of unfired clay and graphite.