Painting Commons^™

Breaking Wind, Todd William Pentico

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breaking Wind is a research project and thesis exhibition composed of a series of ceramic objects in conjunction with paintings that explore the systems that dictate belief, the motives that drive curiosity, and biological connection to our surroundings. The work uses the context of the gallery and devices used in museums such as plinths, shelves, and wall text to reinforce the idealized and fictive into something believable.

In the work, Breaking Wind refers to a clumsy breakdown and rethinking of the seemingly simple natural phenomenon, wind. Wind is understood as a natural occurrence that has no origin or any innate …

2015 Forces, Scott Yarbrough

Forces

No abstract provided.

Dreaming In Chiapas, Eileen Smith-Cavros

Quadrivium: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship

A painting inspired by the girls of Chiapas, Mexico.

Minnie Adkins: Against The Grain, Minnie Adkins, Kentucky Folk Art Center

Kentucky Folk Art Center Exhibition Catalogs

2015 Kentucky Folk Art Center exhibition catalog of artist Minnie Adkins.

A Place Called Home: Frank Lundahl And The Quad Cities, Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

2015-2016

Frank Lundahl (1858-1932) was a Swedish-American artist born in Rock Island. A painter of interior murals by trade, his works in Augustana’s collections focus on the world around him, calling our attention to the everyday beauty of our region, this place we call home.

‘Fuchsia Lipstick’: The Domestication Of Lee Krasner In Post-War Criticism, Aleisha E. Barton

Richard A. Harrison Symposium

After the Second World War, the art world shifted from Europe to New York and a new form of painting that defined itself as distinctly American demanded attention from the public. This style, abstract expressionism, created an inability to survey clear subject matter allowed critics to imply gendered metaphorical resonances within works, as meanings were fluid and inconclusive to the viewer. Coupled with instability in the social sphere, artistic abstraction served as motivation for critics to seek out gendered aspects within an artwork, identifying and constructing difference to preserve order and control in a society that had dramatically changed from …

Path To Phd, Muthanna Yaqoob

The Hilltop Review

This painting depicts two young couples flying in the garden of life on paths of their dreams to reach their goal seen as a bright light in the top right corner of the painting. The couple here resembles myself as a graduate student following my aspirations to graduate and take my PhD resembled in the bright light along with my wife that is my supporter and soulmate.

Flow, Christina G. Collins

The Hilltop Review

No abstract provided.

Little "Sister", Raina Khatri

The Hilltop Review

My mom always called our family poodle my "little sister." Last fall at the age of sixteen she had to be put down, and I was unable to get away from school to be there for her. Instead I took time from my science education PhD work to draw this tribute to her. This portrait, in marker, shows her grey hair, cataracts, and playful stance, even at the end. Life events happen during PhD work, and it is critical to find balance between honoring the past and respecting your future.

How To Trace An Erased De Kooning, Ian Gonsher

Scholarly Research

This essay describes a series of paintings made in the early 2000s that investigate art history as a process of sous-rature (under erasure); signified by what is both present and absent in the work.

Land Of Enchantment: New Mexico As Cultural Crossroads, Jonathan Frederick Walz

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

This exhibition foregrounds Sheldon Museum of Art’s collecting strength in fine and decorative arts with connections to New Mexico, and, more broadly, to the desert Southwest. For thousands of years this corner of the United States, situated on the north-south trade route between Colorado and Mexico and at the western edge of the Great Plains, has hosted human habitations, each with its own distinctive material culture. The area’s diverse topography and population have inspired countless visual responses, from petroglyphs to photographs. The state’s relative isolation—at least before the mid-twentieth century—provided a backdrop upon which the movement of goods, practices, ideas, …

Commonthought (2015), Commonthought Staff

Commonthought

This issue features works created by Lesley University students and covers a broad range of topics. The work itself crosses many disciplines from creative writing to visual arts.

Ua1c11/61 Gary Ransdell Photo Collection, Wku Archives, Virginia Brothers, Aaron Shuford

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Photographs pulled from WKU President Gary Ransdell's papers.

Beyond The Fields, Terry Rodnell Lynn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract: "an America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future." Ta-Nehisi Coates my work deals with the ideas of blackness and southern culture. Born in Memphis, Tennessee on the heels of the civil rights movement, I cannot help but to be shaped by the aftermath of integration and the ideals of equality. The south is more than a geographical location; it is a cultural distinction. My life has been shaped by these cultural experiences. Inspired by family stories, my art references a …

Annunciate Virgin, Risd Museum, Evelyn Lincoln

Channel

This scene from the Annunciation is all that remains of a commission for the Church of Santa Margherita, the devotional center of a hospital and monastery in the Tuscan city of Prato. Its daring color and figural exaggeration are aspects of a late-Renaissance Mannerist style for which the Florentine artist Mirabello Cavalori was known. Like many candlelit altarpieces, the painting was damaged by fire, destroying the figure of the Angel Gabriel. At left, his surviving hand draws the gaze of the Virgin Mary, who is seated in a 16th-century palazzo near a balcony overlooking a mountainous landscape. Her modest but …

The New Life Of Feathers, Madison Bradford O'Bagy

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

When a feather is no longer part of a living bird it is, in essence, dead. When I pick it, up it is reborn. My artwork records and constructs these new stories. The story may reflect where and when the feather was found, what I was doing at the time, my thoughts or feelings when I picked it up, or the character found in the feather itself.

To reveal these stories, I paint my three-dimensional feather collection into trompe l'oiel two-dimensional images using watercolors. The qualities of the paint lend themselves beautifully to the loose flowing lines and weightless quality …

Child In A Red Apron (L’Enfant Au Tablier Rouge), Risd Museum, Maureen O'Brien

Channel

This painting depicts Julie Manet, the seven-year-old daughter of the artist Berthe Morisot and her husband, Eugène Manet. She peers at a wintry landscape outside the family’s home in Paris, perhaps holding a prism to her eyes. The setting was Morisot’s bedroom, distinguished by a window whose small panes function as a compositional device that connects interior to exterior space. Across the canvas, a fluid net of slashing and spiraling marks rush through the room and animate Julie’s costume and pose. The vertical glint of a brass knob suggests that the window is ajar, introducing a breeze that lifts the …

Crucifixion, Risd Museum, Susan Ashbrook Harvey

Channel

In this depiction of the Crucifixion, the Roman centurion Longinus is shown lancing Christ’s side as Mary faints in the arms of John the Evangelist. Beside Christ hang two thieves, one repentant, the other offering his soul to a demon. The gilded and punched surface and lavishly costumed figures reflect a late International Gothic style, here dominated by Flemish realism. Although this altar panel once hung in the parish church of El Cubo de Don Sancho in Salamanca, it likely was commissioned by a wealthy donor for a more important setting. Unpainted upper corners indicate that its original frame had …

Chestnut Trees And Farm At Jas De Bouffan, Risd Museum, Deborah Bright, Eric Kramer

Channel

The Cézanne family’s country home outside Aix-en-Provence appeared often in the artist’s work. Called Jas de Bouffan (“sheepfold of the winds”), the property consisted of an 18th-century manor house with surrounding gardens and a farm. Just out of sight of this view, beyond the farm buildings at right, loomed another favorite motif: the shimmering Montagne Sainte-Victoire. In 1881 Paul Cézanne built a studio at Jas de Bouffan and for the next eighteen years spent much of his time painting nearby landscapes. This composition features an allée of chestnut trees seen from the garden behind the house. Cézanne massed the trees …

Synthetic Constructive, Jonathan Wade Mcdaniel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthetic Constructive is an exhibition of paintings and collages, both reflect the building and managing of synthetically constructed places and expose the human condition of struggle in both the physical world and the emotional world. I view these works as synthetically created arenas that inform my understanding and experience of natural forces that cannot be rationalized or neatly ordered. Though inspired by and constructed from the imagery of the after effects of devastation they become more than that as they explore these relationships. It is important that these works, both as collages and as paintings, reflect the search and process …