Fine Arts Commons^™

Drawing As Continuance: What Insists On Being Heard, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article extends She-Hero through an inquiry into drawing as a creation-centred practice of continuance. Five drawings are engaged as aesthetic encounters through which relational and perceptual shifts become perceptible, allowing inner authority to emerge as a cultivated capacity to remain responsive to what is unfolding. Drawing is approached as a site of metramorphic reconfiguration where imagination, memory, and embodied sensing participate in the decolonizing of perceptual habits and the restoration of relational ways of knowing.

Brightly Slacked Tight, It Sways, Molly Brooke Martin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Brightly Slacked Tight, It Sways is a body of work that investigates unpredictability and process-based making through collage and materially hybrid forms that combine natural and synthetic elements, operating between drawing, painting, and sculpture. Using familiar, readily available materials gathered from the studio, hardware store, and my surrounding environment, the work embraces improvisation as a generative force. Unpredictability keeps me in relation to the work, interrupting certainty, requiring responsiveness, and mirroring the shifting conditions of the natural world. I break, cut, and recombine sticks gathered from my yard and athletic tape from gymnastics, along with scrap drawings and paintings. Shaped …

Tracings, Masie Sophia Love

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, the artist wonders what it means to remember a time and place that she has not experienced- what would this look like visualized in a painting? Love studies the histories and similarities between cartography and quilting using the two as a kind of channel to understand, record, and remember land. She explores inherited memory and the clues left behind in the form of quilts made by ancestors to create abstracted landscapes and maps of Tennessee where they lived for generations.

Foundations Of Art: Materials, Methods, And Meaning, Elizabeth Mellott

Art OERs

This course provides an introduction to the tools, materials, and processes used across a wide range of artistic media. The focus is on understanding how different materials shape the way art is created and experienced. Attention is given not only to what artists make, but also to why particular media are chosen to communicate specific ideas, emotions, or perspectives. The physical qualities of materials, the methods used, and the cultural meanings attached to them all influence artistic decision-making.

The course surveys several major categories of artistic media. Pigment-based practices include painting, drawing, and printmaking, where color and mark-making form the …

Fallow Ground, Eli Kerns

Theses and Dissertations

Fallow Ground refers to the agricultural practice of intentionally leaving a field unseeded for a year or more in order to restore fertility and interrupt cycles of depletion. Although fallowing is a beneficial and necessary practice, the term has also come to signify waste or a lack of productivity. This double meaning is central to the work, reflecting a central contradiction: that withdrawal can be as vital as effort, and that rest, like labor, can function as a deliberate and sustaining act. The question I explore in this work is how to organize, understand, and live with these contradictions. Through …

Harnessing Irrationality, Jennifer E. Smith

All Theses

My thesis work considers the presence of objectifying gazes in representations of women in Western visual media and pop culture. I reference film, television, short form content shared on social media, and pornography to identify and repurpose tools of objectification in my large scale drawings and animated GIFs. I compare the objectifying tropes present in contemporary entertainment media and pop culture to those present in the Western art historical tradition of the reclining female nude, mythology and folklore, and pornography. Using these comparisons, I discuss objectification in terms of passive and active, consumption and appetite, and idealization and devaluation. I …

What Is Lost When Time Is Saved: Drawing In Collaboration With The Urban Periphery, Carmen Ribaudo

MFA in Visual Art

I pay attention to the overlooked spaces where land and industry meet, prompting me to wonder what can be gleaned in the oily and cracked urban periphery. With a focus on my hometown St. Louis, this industrial city is my subject matter. And so, I draw in a neighborhood bisected by a highway. I animate with sand near the river confluence on land preserved after a historic flood. I make my own bricks in this Brick City, setting up in locations of former terra cotta clay mines. I sit in the tension of what author Michael Martone calls the “midwestern …

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.

Big Blue, Caitlin Mae Ramos

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Big Blue is a record keeping system of sorts- to show the story of my relationship with the tallgrass Big Bluestem as an Oglala Lakota tribal citizen of The Sioux Nation. It’s meant to question the idea of binaries, what is valued, how verticality is only powerful if supported horizontally, and the legacy of the remnants that remain. Big Bluestem is a reminder of our linked survival as humans with the land and the importance of knowing the individual names of the leafy and legged beings who exist equally on it.

Shapes That Hide Their Shadows, Jennifer Blaine

Theses and Dissertations

shapes that hide their shadows concerns itself with the mutability of memory. The complexities of girlhood to womanhood, and the way we are shaped by place and space, are explored through the artist recounting childhood memories connected to her grandparents' hometowns. Divided into three different sections, the artist discusses drawing as medium, creating a lexicon through using visual symbols, and the logistics of building your own archive.

The Alienated Self: A Solo Exhibtion, Kade Winterton

2025 Fall Honors Capstones Projects - Archive

Exhibiting works is an essential step for every artist; this capstone is a creative research project that explores feelings of alienation and otherness, as well as the multiple causes they stem from, resulting in a body of work ready for exhibition. First, research was conducted on exhibiting and curating works. Next, works by contemporary artists who also explored the same topic were examined. Completed works were curated, and an inventory of what was needed to create an exhibition-ready body of work was defined. After this was done, new works were uniquely created, each starting with an idea and a sketch. …

Drawing 1 Course Syllabus, Fall 2025, Jennifer Sullivan

Open Educational Resources

This introductory drawing course offers an immersive, practice-based exploration of observational drawing from life. Emphasizing perceptual skills, students will engage with key visual principles—such as proportion, space, perspective, and composition—through projects focused on still life, the human figure, and portraiture. Working with graphite, charcoal, and ink, students will develop both technical fluency and expressive range, learning to convey presence, mood, and memory through mark and form. The course blends rigorous studio practice with critical looking and discussion, encouraging students to cultivate their own artistic voice through sustained attention, experimentation, and care.

Surgery Day, Cara M. Macdonald

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

I have been drawing since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I love creating medical art and frequently make cartoons or illustrations of procedures, but I also use art as a way to show appreciation for fellow colleagues, surgeons, and other health care professionals by creating their likenesses on the cards from surgical gowns. My goal is to draw all of my colleagues at the 3 HCA Healthcare hospitals in western North Carolina where I work.

A Handful, Prathna Nirav Patel

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Artist Statement

I created this drawing for my Drawing I class, where I was introduced to the cross-hatching method. Through this technique, I aimed to physicalize emotion through the beauty and expressiveness of the human hand. The title, A Handful, represents not only the literal handful of hands shown, but also the handful of emotions and experiences behind each one.

In The Performance Of A Lifetime: Pepper Plinkett, Lily Camille Hollinden

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This narrative depicts a caricature of the human experience through the eyes of my alter- ego character, Pepper Plinkett. Pepper is a symbol of my personal philosophies of what it means to be human, and serves as a protagonist and guide through an infinite, ambiguous natural world. This exhibition is a celebration of the vibrancy, curiosity, and ridiculousness of a lifetime. The uniqueness of humor as a specifically human trait and its use as a tool of communication, particularly in expressing authenticity, is the driving force behind my use of clowns in my work. I take an absurdist approach to …

Passages, Arden Carlson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Passages is a collection of wood sculptures and drawings by Arden Carlson, exploring a mesh of southern intimacies and queer musings; underpinned by the logics of belief, grief, and love. The result is a tender field of angelic birds fixed in flight over gnawed surfaces of grain and graphite. The following dissertation details the artist’s logic during the construction of the visual art thesis exhibition, Passages. The writing is composed in an autoethnographic format, backed by supporting anecdotes and creative methodologies that help to route the operational modes used. Near the end of this writing, you’ll find an additional addendum …

Closet Space, Savannah Hope L. Andries

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Closet Space is an exhibition investigating what makes a home. Through the creation of six drawings and seven prints, I investigate the relationship between isolation and companionship. This body of work explores the concept that a home is not simply a physical structure made up of walls and doors. Instead, it is about the emotional connections we create with places and people. Through fragmented memories, imagined environments, and a desire to connect with others, I address that the true meaning of home lies in our emotional attachments to inhabited spaces and the people we share them with. Being queer in …

Pan Shot!, Samuel Robert Gaston Mattax

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Mattax's practice is aimed at working through what he has lived and what he is living. They are self-involved diaristic building blocks of marking time and release. The layered drawings negotiate Sam's history and his day to day, distorting one another into a place of unrecognizable space and condensed energy. It is a process of attaining a loose understanding of his life and forgetting it all at once. Sam's work is survival.

Where The Under And The Over Meet And Disappear, Louisa Owen

Theses and Dissertations

Vignettes of light: light disappearing, light contrasting, light directing, light wandering, and light uncovering.

Value And Form Exploring Wrinkles And Folds In Clothing In Drawing, Jackson Venski

Senior Art Portfolios

Portfolio of Jackson Venski, Senior Art Exhibition 2024.

Drawing As Process: Expansiveness Through Constraint, Ciel Miao

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This paper explores the concept of drawing as a time-based practice, where the process is the core of the artwork rather than the finished product. I divide my artistic concerns into four chapters, each advancing on the previous one, to discuss my drawing practice, which allows for exploration of time and space across a wide array of media and styles of representation. I embrace impulse and intuition in the mark-making process, letting go of control while prioritizing the form of depicted figures over their image. This paper highlights the importance of my inner contradiction and how the process reflects my …

Shade, Jonathan Bolton

All Theses

SHADE is an exhibition of graphite pencil drawings that place viewers on the precarious edge of meaning. Techniques of representational drawing such as form and perspective vaguely allude to latent, traceable narratives, then destabilize the viewer’s search with confounding two-dimensional spaces, and loosely defined forms. Small, mundane scenes such as campsites, diners, and bars, are enveloped or obscured by dense, graphite expanses of skin-like surfaces. These elements destabilize viewers’ convenient categorizations of darkness, fog, or space. The identifiable scenes have reduced contexts: facial expressions, interior décor, and landscape features. These are obscured or withheld to reduce visual justifications for the …

Fourpaintingsomedrawingsandaprintbehindapillar, Sam R. Brown

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

My work is about the interest of communication and visual story telling through the mediums of drawing and painting. This comes from my earliest artistic education through comics. My exposure to comics has informed my decisions on composition and visual language. The reason why I chose to work with this in mind is because I see a general lack of this sort of visual storytelling in contemporary art. The process of telling stories through visual media is something that had been done for millennia. Through my work I wish to take this issue and utilize it to a contemporary viewer. …

Meditations, Alyssa Hennigar

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Artist Statement

Meditations is the second piece in my Meditations Series. I was introduced to meditative or “automatic” drawings in my Drawing II class with Professor McGalliard at the University of North Florida. What resonates so much with me about meditative drawing is the complete freedom in creating art that comes naturally to the movement of a body, the practice of mindfulness, and being in the present. There should be no plan, no thought, no calculations, and no rules when it comes to meditative drawing. It is purely expressive mark-making and therapeutic to the artist’s mind, which often gets tied …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

I Still Love You, Despite Everything, Amy Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice seeks to reconcile the family—be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Addressing ancestral conflict, the complications of US/Cuba relations and my physical and cultural distance from the island I hail from, my work offers another world for communing with those you cannot physically reach.

I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris

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

The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. I Want to Go Home is a body of work that explores this idea through a collection of sculptures and drawings depicting my childhood home. This house holds meaning to me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions.

I have constructed scaled down sculptures of rooms for these memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, …

Dream/Reality, Mercedes Llanos

Theses and Dissertations

Mercedes llanos explores the surreal aspect of dreams as they concern with waking life issues, mainly focusing on power-roles in domestic partnerships embedded in a South American patriarchal upbringing. In her dreams, she subconsciously navigates the repression of freedom firsthand experienced, and that of the transgenerational woman collective.

Clean Fields, Lindsey E. Creel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Clean Fields is an exhibition consisting of 3 anthotypes and 11 drawings on paper mounted to panels. The work is part homage and part documentation of the emotionally restorative properties found in gardening. It is a contemporary view of a timeless activity. While the work references realistic content, the artistic outcomes are non-objective. Modifications in composition and scale provide variation throughout the series. The large-scale of the works and the use of economy and movement in the composition move the viewer into a meditative state.

Missing, Murdered, Indigenous, Matthew Bollinger

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

The missing and murdered Indigenous women epidemic is an issue currently affecting Indigenous people in North America. To articulate my concept visually, old photographs that showcase American culture (predominantly white) are drawn on, cut-up, and recomposed into portraits of missing Navajo women.