Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Humor And Allegory, Christopher Goodale

Masters Theses

This series of works proposes the merging of aesthetic interests that undermine the self-seriousness of the artist and the idea of labor in painting. Painting’s slowing of time can hopefully extinguish the peripheral noise of the outside world and provide space for thought. These paintings propose different ways to help the viewer understand visual depth, narrative, and formal decision-making. The optical depth of red, the spatial depth of glazed paint, and the spiritual depth of the figure can provide multiple meanings and possibilities. Another metaphor for the development of this series of paintings would be one comedian telling a joke …

The Past Is Today, Afra Al Dhaheri

Masters Theses

Process is a vital element to construction and deconstruction. Yet, materiality serves as a vehicle to expose the aesthetics developed by the process. However, without memories, the construction of these bodies of work would have never been conceived. Rapid change was the initial experience that formed memories in the first place, it was inevitable. Hence, an adaptation method had to be examined. The trees had proven to be worthy of the investigation. The trees required materials and the materials demanded a process. Process developed the work and the work had to have context. Context evolved from memory and required more …

Art Loser, Laura Jasek

Masters Theses

In my work, I aim to historicize the mechanics of misogyny. Through appropriation and re- authorship, the work interrogates and exposes the discreet erasure of contemporary gender inequalities and the societal attempt to obscure the historical origins of these inequalities.

My thesis work has been focused on Frederick W. Macmonnies, a predominant beaux-arts sculptor responsible for many early-twentieth-century American fountains and monuments. Many of his sculptures were embroiled in controversy, on grounds ranging from their aesthetic competence to their alleged misogyny. Macmonnies’ staunch academicism ran parallel to the birth of modernism, effectively expelling his name from the contemporary canon of …

Anthro/Post/Cene, Sofia Ortiz

Masters Theses

My project proposes a ‘deep-time’ lens, both in geological as well as cellular terms, as a strategy for dealing with an anxious contemporary world. By practicing the contextualizing of self within a multiplicity of worlds, one is able to be humbled, empathetic and (hopefully) conscientious. My work develops across multiple mediums, and seeks out different paths for creating immersive experiences that both highlight and promote interconnectivity. I endeavor to find dynamic systems that can accommodate multiple subjectivities, ideally fostering consensual indeterminacy between the work and its participants. With this in mind, my work unfolds as series of reconfigurable fragments, where …

The Little Girl (Kinda), Hanna Kim

Masters Theses

My work has always been about the personal relationships I've had in the past. It is driven by the

nostalgia of what was, and how it came to be within the present. It is not the act of languishing in a better time or the need to replay a scenario from when life was thought to have been easier. It is replaying the past that makes me chuckle, even if at the time the said event was not so hilarious or amusing. While I am heavily influenced by the psychological workings of the human mind and sociology, I ultimately decided …

From Florine To Flocking : Observations Of A Painter - Printmaker - Embellisher, Elizabeth King

Masters Theses

I am a painter-printmaker-embellisher. The hierarchy of these labels shift to best suit the needs of each piece. Making an image that encourages looking takes precedent over how it is labeled. A quickly read painting is the enemy. I weave together complex passages on the surface to function as a speed bump, to slow down the viewer’s navigation of my paintings. I value color, pattern, and texture above a narrative. Borrowing the palette of Florine Stettheimer and the repetitive touch of Edouard Vuillard, my paintings teeter dangerously between being about the idea of decoration and being decorative. Domesticity, femininity, and …

Surface, Object, Space, Susan Doe

Masters Theses

Considered primarily a form of painting, my practice adopts the languages of sculpture and installation to explore abstract constructions of personal and societal hierarchies. In this current body of work, I am crocheting architectural forms that blur the distinctions between surface, object, and space. Whether occupying pictorial space or actual space, simple patterned units coalesce into emergent forms through repetition and accumulation. I am drawn to malleable materials that allow for an indexical registration of the force of my hands and body. Working in a wide range of materials including paper, mylar, fabric, foam, plastic, sheet metal, wire, monofilament, and …

A Theatrical Life : Negotiating Biracial Identity, Timothy Lai

Masters Theses

My paintings and drawings use autobiography, fiction, and theatricality to examine biracial-identity formation and the negotiation of different cultural ideologies. The personification of these ideologies in narrative accounts pose questions to which the characters must answer and respond. This leads to humorous, sad, problematic, empowering, and chaotic compositions that become an intimate chronicle of my own endeavor to find those “perfect” answers.

In my practice, painting and drawing are ways to explore a broad range of topics that stem from personal and familial stories. Using allegorical personifications, symbols, and metaphors derived from my family, I see the home as a …

Interior Mountains & Distant Clouds, Ping Zheng

Masters Theses

Painting allows infinite scope for imaginative freedom beyond the ambiguity of the inner landscape. Painting connects the natural world outside to the inner natural world, allowing me to exist in the present while also reconciling childhood meanings. It brings me alive, allowing me to find a new identity. No longer trapped within the repressive structures of family, rigid schooling, and culture, the language of sky, land, mountain, and water become living metaphors of limitless possibilities with forms and color. My paintings are abstract, but they also present me as a character, independent and emerging from the environment. The work explores …

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.

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 …

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 …

Kwanseum, Risd Museum, Linda Heuman

Channel

14th Century

Still Life With Lemons (Whose Forms Correspond To A Drawing Of A Black Vase Upon The Wall), Risd Museum, Ellen Mcbreen

Channel

Matisse used solid, vivid colors to render the simple forms and geometric background segments of this still life. Roughly outlined and intentionally flattened, each element shows evidence of the artist’s brushstrokes and his manipulation of pigment. An extended title, Still life with lemons whose forms correspond to a drawing of a black vase upon the wall, points to intentional relationships between shapes. The ovoid form of the pitcher echoes the curves of the plump lemons below; those of its neck and base are repeated in the foot of the blue glass compote at lower left. A book entitled “Tapis” (Carpet) …

The Supper At Emmaus, Risd Museum, Butch Rovan, Horace Ballard

Channel

In this biblical scene Christ breaks bread to bless it and give it to his dining partners at Emmaus on the third day after his Resurrection. Jan Cossiers depicted the two companions of Christ at the moment when Christ’s divinity is revealed to them. The man at the far right throws up his hands in surprise, while the man in the center points in a gesture of identification. The cockle shells, crossed staffs, medal, and tall hat of the man at right designate him as a pilgrim to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, the most important and popular pilgrimage …

Self-Portrait, Risd Museum, Fritz Drury

Channel

This representation of an elegantly dressed lute-player is an intriguing variant on an artist’s self-portrait. It identifies the subject as the painter, seated before his own easel and palette, and expands on his cultural achievements by emphasizing his musical abilities. Although unsigned, this portrait has been attributed to Paul Bril (1553/4-1626), a Flemish artist who forged a highly successful career in Rome. The scene tacked to the easel is typical of Bril’s early compositions which were distinguished by small figures, deep, shaded foregrounds, and masses of silvery foliage, attributes that he shared with other Flemish painters. Bril’s Netherlandish roots helped …

Rain On The River, Risd Museum, Fritz Drury

Channel

George Bellows was critically acclaimed for the frank, even brutal manner of the urban landscapes he painted in the early years of the twentieth century. His view from a rockly ledge above Riverside Park surveys a freight train making its way along the New York Central’s famous Water Level Route. The string of railcars echoes the rushing diagonal that marks the near bank of the Hudson River. Aggressive brushstrokes indicate reflective surfaces that are animated by graphic observations: a lone pedestrian scurries acros a rain-slicked path, and a horse-drawn cart awaits a delivery of scavenged coal. Bellows called Rain on …

The Creation Of Tate Modern Has Been As Important To British Life As The National Health Service, Risd Museum, Bob + Roberta Smith

Channel

No abstract provided.

Portrait Of Antoine-Georges-Francois De Chabaud-Latour And His Family, Risd Museum, Robert Babigian

Channel

This handsome portrait was subtitled “filial piety” when it was exhibited at the 1806 Paris Salon. Set in the gentle landscape of the département of Gard, in the south of France, it depicts Antoine-Georges-François de Chabaud-La Tour who is seated on a marble bench with his daughter Rosina perched on one knee and his son James-Hippolyte posed on the other. His wife, Juliette Verdier de la Coste, stands at their side holding her infant son François-Ernest-Henri to her breast. Their attention is directed to a herm bearing a bust of the children’s grandfather, Antoine Chabaud, a distinguished military man who …

Dan Walsh | Uncommon Ground, Judith Tannenbaum

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 40, 2012. Dan Walsh has been devoted to abstract painting since he arrived in New York in the early 1980s. Naturally his work has evolved over the past three decades, but he has remained consistently attached to Minimalism’s basic language of geometry and grids.

Edgar Degas: Six Friends At Dieppe, Maureen C. O'Brien, Linda Catano, Anna Gruetzner Robins

Books

The lives of the six men depicted in Edgar Degas' Six Friends at Dieppe - as well as Degas himself - are explored. The history of the painting's placement in the RISD Museum's collection is traced back to Degas' relationship with one of the men featured in the painting. The narrative is interspersed with paintings, photographs, and excerpts from various memoirs, autobiographies and correspondences.

Great Pictures, Esther Singleton, Alice C. Morse, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Painting

xvi, 317 pages frontispiece, plates, portraits. "Curated title for Fleet Library Special Collections book cover exhibition Bound to Please, fall 2022. CONTENTS: Fisherman presenting the ring to the Doge Gradenigo: Bordone /rThéophile Gautier -- Birth of Venus: Botticelli / Walter Pater -- Queen of Sheba: Veronese / John Ruskin -- Last judgment: Michael Angelo / Alexandre Dumas -- Magdalen in the desert: correggio / Aimé Giron -- Banquet of the Arquebusiers: Ban der Helst / William Makepeace Thackeray -- L'Embarquement pour L'Ile de Cythère: Watteau / Edmond and Jules De Goncourt -- Sistine Madonna: Raphael / F. A. Gruyer -- …