Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Long Story Short, Hannah M. Varghese

Graphic Communication

Long Story Short and is a vintage up-cycling art brand. Our mission is to breathe new life into vintage pieces, crafting them into modern wearable art. As the name suggests, each creation tells a story while being revitalized for today’s fashion forward community.

Fast fashion and trend cycling has been a growing problem in today’s society. Things are going ‘in’ and ‘out’ quicker than they ever have. Trend cycling usually operates on a 20-year timeline. But, today’s sped up cycle encourages people to constantly over-consume in chase of the next cool thing. It’s unsustainable and an impossible chase. With a …

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

Sulfur And Sage, John Swincinski

LSU Master's Theses

Sulfur and Sage is a body of abstract paintings created out of memories of time spent immersed in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains and the Yellowstone Caldera during the summer of 2020. The paintings reflect specific places, experiences, and insights, which occurred as I sought solitude by returning to the one place where I feel most at peace with the universe – the woods.

Each painting is augmented by a written vignette, describing the occurrence it is based on. Should the viewer choose to include these short stories as they encounter the artwork, they provide the jumping off point …

Raphael Soyer And His Responses To The Ascension Of Abstract Art, Eric Matthew Friendly

Theses and Dissertations

During the 1930s, Russian-American artist Raphael Soyer (December 25, 1899 – November 4, 1987), a committed realist, was one of the preeminent artists working in the United States. However, with Abstract Expressionism superseding American Scene Painting as the dominant mode of expression during the 1940s and 1950s, Soyer and his contemporaries went from enjoying the esteem of the New York art world, to being outmoded by abstract artists. Reacting to the ascendancy of abstract art, Soyer sought to restore himself and his fellow representational artists to preeminence, attempted to dismiss abstract art as being antihuman while asserting the humanism of …

Hilma Af Klint's Divine Commission, Paintings For The Temple : Modern Western Esotericism Embodied And Art Historical Norms Redfined, Hilary Cianciolo

MA Theses

Swedish occultist, scholar, and artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), produced a series of 193 paintings after receiving a commission in 1906 from a divine spirit who offered complex iconographic insight into human ontology. The resulting series of colorful abstract paintings would not only alter her life, but also redefine contemporary perceptions of the Western art historical canon. Although all works of art are inherently spiritual to a degree, af Klint’s, commission Paintings for the Temple, is an example of Modern Western Esotericism. The commission maintains the six principle characteristics the construct is defined by, including: Role of Mediations and Imagination, …

Classically Formal, Biotic Subjectivity: Moderating Plastic's Relation To The Viewer, Tirza Jo Ochrach-Konradi

Scripps Senior Theses

Due to its cheap, pervasive, and disposable nature, post-consumer plastic has no subjectivity in its relation to the consumer. My thesis project examines the material’s inherent destructive narrative and question its ability to have extrinsic value beyond the assumptions of trash. In my research, I found that humans instinctually seek to conserve and treat biotic material with care. This fact has become a catalyst for the works in this project, which aim to not only increase the material’s value through animate biomorphic transformation, but also counter our disposable tendencies.

At the onset of this project, I was fixated solely on …

Meditative Art: A Diversion From Stress And Anxiety, Hannah T. Justis 4239670221

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I wished to present a body of work that visually represented my own meditative process of managing stress and anxiety. Towards the end of studying for my undergraduate, I began preparing for my Final Exhibition Show, and with these preparations, my life, as well as my work, changed drastically. Within the past two years, my drawings began to take on a meditative therapeutic process. It was this development that then helped manage my growing stress levels and well as the symptoms that stemmed from high levels of anxiety and bloomed from losing control in my day to day life. It …

Nature, Essence And Spirit: An Artistic Process Of Space, Lines And Color From The Level Of Cells To The Large Oceanic Water World, Odra O. Arriaga

Theses and Dissertations

The methods, experimentations, philosophies and influential artists mentioned in this thesis all form part of my artistic exploration and art from the level of cells to the large oceanic water world. As an artist of Fine Arts at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, my main emphasis is to associate these concepts with my personal experiences, cultural traditions and artistic perspectives with my likes for lines, colors and spaces in what I called, Nature, Essence and Spirit. Furthermore, my artistic approach was mostly influenced by the views of artists such as, Vasily Kandinsky, Frank Stella, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, …

( D I S E M ) B O D Y, Jessica Leigh

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

A Portrait Of The Artist As Sisyphus, Jared N. Crane

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis statement, contemporary artist Jared Nathan Crane uses the French philosopher Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus as a framework for discussing meaningfulness in art and life, and reflects on how his own experimental creative process evolved during his graduate studies.

The Art Of Charles H. Reinike : Lagniappes Of Louisiana's Landscapes And People, Lauren J. Barnett

LSU Master's Theses

For Louisiana artist Charles Henry Reinike II, environment acted as a stimulating force and stirred his artistic emotion. Although he began his career in New Orleans during the shock of the Great Depression, Reinike managed to thrive and was a leader in the arts community from the early 1930s until his death in 1983. Although most widely regarded for his watercolors rendered in the plein-air tradition, Reinike worked in an impressively varied range of mediums and excelled in many of them. As a poetic artist, Reinike held great passion for Louisiana, and his lyrical paintings read like odes to the …

Kandinsky's Nonrepresentational Art: Finding Meaning Through Aesthetic Experience, Kandice Nikkole Diaz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The art world is not one in which much scholarship has been conducted from a communication perspective. As such, this study attempts to add to the very little body of work that exists in the realms of both art and visual rhetoric. Abstract art, such as that of Wassily Kandinsky, is full of meaning despite the fact that it is nonobjective, and therefore considered meaningless. Using a rhetorical method, I argue that by examining the artwork of Wassily Kandinsky in certain contexts, it is possible to discover the meaning embedded in his abstract paintings, in particular his Compositions and Improvisations.

Visual Stamp, Jeanay Fullerton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I create images in a painterly manner illustrating a visual dialog, which suggests simultaneous moments, yet are actually a separated collision of moments and time. I have stretched these ideas from a slowed manipulation of time, to a calculated capture of segmented moments. My work undermines the importance of the decisive moment theory. This theory was the catalyst for my new series, VISUAL STAMP. "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." - …

Play Pretty, Brad Wreyford

LSU Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Finding Flow In Photography, Cynthia Olsen Mcconkie

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The associations I bring to an image are unique to me and my life experiences. I did not fully appreciate this until, as a photographer, I began to produce a body of work about activities that provide a refuge for me from the challenges of everyday life. I am an avid runner. For me running is a spiritual experience that renews my spirits and gives me hope. I took photos of the physical act of running and I was very disappointed with the results. The images failed to capture or recreate the sensations that I experienced while running. They elicited …

The Formal Language Of Nonobjective Art, Gwen M. Erickson

Dissertations and Theses

A thesis report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Painting.