Fine Arts Commons^™

Optimistic And A Little Flawed, Christian Schultz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The accompanying exhibition to this paper, Optimistic and Flawed is a body of drawings and objects that explores the liminal space between playful and intended actions. Inspired by the landscape of the yard and the actions that take place within, the goalless play of a child and the laborious maintenance of an adult. The value of play exists within labor and labor exists within play. The drawings observe this through the theoretical framework of telic and paratelic motivational states as they relate to drawing. Abstracted yards and landscapes provide a space for the labor of the hand. A history of …

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

Tomorrow Is The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Matthew Carlson

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

Susan Sontag wrote: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other space”.

This work addresses aspects of that citizenship. I used my experiences as a person living with a disability and as a parent to a son with Autism to explore the dichotomy of this dual citizenship. The …

I Wasn't There, Lily Wong

Theses and Dissertations

My work reimagines personhood at the moment it becomes undone and investigates how an amplification of visibility can also function as a severing of humanity. A personal navigation of fracture and the forging of self through artificial extensions and distensions of the body.

Mythology Of Uncertainty, Connor Johanson

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I think of my work as a mythology under constant revision that reevaluates our human perceptions of the natural world. The root of mythology comes to us from ancient Greek mythos. The original meaning of mythos was simply an account from memory–your mythos could be what your day was like, what happened and how you felt. We are all in the continuous process of building narratives of our individual lives, our cultures, and the world around us.

Human stories and values–mythos–underlie metaphors and analogies, meaning that no discussion of scientific ideas can be free of cultural bias. Discussion of symbiotic …

L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones

Theses and Dissertations

A meditation on my painting and drawing practice in relation to the work of Philip Guston, Nancy Spero, and Frank Moore, among others, just before and during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

San Juan Mountains Outside Of Silverton, Colorado, Joy Kiefer

The Hilltop Review

No abstract provided.

Bitter Fruit, Ronald J. Green

Theses and Dissertations

Pain is a phenomenon like fear, belief, and love -- among the forces that determine the course of our lives long before we are born. These conditions generate the layers of the human soul, marrying one life with others past, present and future.

There is an unconscious consensus on the linearity of time. Our lives, memories, dreams and reflections constantly present a challenge to this general agreement. Life, like time, is a series of interlocking awarenesses. Paths intersect, the actions of individuals deposit change into an internal pool of collective experience. Freud once believed that the past is not fixed …

Turning And Turning, Nicola Stephanie

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores Nicola Stephanie’s works in painted and shaped canvas, which investigate sensation and visual awareness of motion. Inspired partly by clothing forms, her vocabulary of color, shape and surface articulates a sense of the body and its boundaries. These spatial drawings evoke perceptions of gravity, rotation and orientation.

Light In The Dark, Nichole Schiff

The Messenger

Cover illustration for the Spring 2020 issue of The Messenger.

Observation, Beth Ann Hamilton

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

We have been conditioned by past generations in our understanding of portrait importance. On the contemporary side of portraiture, most pictures are concealed within tech devices. Among common society, these personal phone portraits of oneself are considered tactless, and taboo. Most do not exist in a tangible context. It is my mission to display these portraits with a sense of grandeur and appreciation. My work is a retaliation to the boundaries of what was and what is portraiture.

My work consists of heavily decorated mixed media portraits set in a domestic realm, focusing on blissful sensuality. My art projects range …

Tenacity, Angela Stevenson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Creating my exhibition, Tenacity, was a labor of love that took place over the year and a half that I was a student in Stephen F. Austin State University of Texas’s Graduate Program. I explored new processes in painting, including the use of transfers, and did extensive research into the lives of female historical figures. This exhibition was born of a wish to share knowledge with others as well as to remind society that anyone can elicit change.

Heather C. Lou Interview, Katie O’Reilly

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: heather c. lou, m.ed. (she/her/hers) is an angry gemini earth dragon, multiracial, asian, queer, cisgender, disabled, survivor/surviving, depressed, and anxious womxn of color artist based in st. paul, minnesota. her mixed media pieces include watercolor, acrylic, gold paint pen, oil pastel, radical love, & hope. each piece comments on the intersections of her racial, gender, ability, & sexual identities, as they continue to shift and develop in complexity each day. her art is a form of healing, transformation, and liberation, rooted in womxnism and gender equity through a racialized borderland lens. heather works in education as an administrator. …

Amalgamations, Brennan Probst

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

I explore time, memory, and the artist’s ability to convey experience through autobiographical photographs and drawings. In my compositions, I provide an intimate look into my life, while making wider observations about how my mind processes the world. My work is concerned with circumventing the objective, static qualities of photography. I attempt to create images that convey how experiences feel, instead of how they look through the lens of an optical apparatus. With my work, I do not wish to take from the world around me, but rather to create from the world within me. By utilizing multiple exposures and …

Defense In Desolation, Dounia Bendris

Theses and Dissertations

This paper discusses different forms of defense strategies in architecture throughout history as well as how a building’s function morphs over time in relation to the political and social climate that surrounds it. Both of these concepts provide a framework for understanding my thesis drawing, “Defense in Desolation,” which uses bunkers in abandonment as a reference to the psychological impact of architecture outside of functionality.

Foundation Of Our Former Houses, Jeanne Ciravolo

MFA Statements

An investigation of forms of visual expression, inspired by narratives of female family members and influenced by art historical representations of women and the relation of gender to power structures. The research explores themes of illness, abuse, sexuality and identity and results in mixed media and painted paper collage works on drop cloths, and stitched drawings on domestic textiles, such as mattress pads and kitchen towels. The research methodology is inquiry and process based and is supported by works by Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Kiki Smith and Kathy Wilkes.

Waiting Room., Helen Payne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Waiting Room is an installation of drawings and monotypes that re-envision everyday printed materials common in medical offices. The brochures, poster, bulletin board and children’s ABC book in this Waiting Room offer guidance suggest invasive and dysfunctional policy. A door opens onto a further room, where a hundred ultrasound images cascade onto the floor. This work, called Transducer Phosphene is the product of a fictional character’s encounter with a cruel (and not fictive) abortion policy. Waiting Room is the fruit of an inquiry that spanned my three years of study at the Hite Art Institute, a probing into the politics …

Painting Intimacy: Art-Based Research Of Intimacy, Michal Lev

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This art-based research explores whether — and, if so, how — the process of painting, together with witnessing and reflection on the process and imagery, further an understanding of intimacy. The research also examines the conditions that favor intimacy, the obstacles to intimacy, and the particular features of artistic media, processes and reflection, through the editing of video footage, that can further the intimate experience. The participants in the study were five adults (including the researcher) between the ages of thirty and eighty who were familiar with the creation of visual art. Among them were three women and two men …

Roses & Thorns, Stephanie Alaniz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis has been created alongside the thesis exhibition shown in the Laura Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University (displayed March 18th to March 22nd). The work presented consisted of drawings, bookmaking, and various forms of printmaking and collage. This body of work is meant to create an analysis of insecurities and body positivity we associate with our physical selves. This work is a collective experience that has been a collaboration with over 80 participants. The number of participants help to create a larger overall collective voice. By creating this collective voice, we can experience these feelings together and …

Contour Line Self Portrait, Thomas A. Thayer Mr

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Invisible Territories, Lydia Seaman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Layering geography, space and time, my work urges viewers to embrace the equivocal and create a desire for the impossible. To explore this notion, Invisible Territories is an analysis of my practice, examining how I mediate specific references into abstract and universal interpretations. My work employs subjects that document the world by analyzing the layers and simulacra that form our visual information; focusing on the intervals between “things” as the subject matter themselves. Looking to the words of Italo Calvino as a conceptual guide, this paper discusses the practice of mapping through drawing, etching and painting.

A Shift In Silence, Bailey Idom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Shift in Silence is a body of work that emerged because of a key shift in my life. Using the formal components of line, shape, and value, I create a space representing an intimate moment in time. Physically, the medium can be any material, but I process all of this as an expression of line. Each piece shares the commonality of lines and lineage, while the layering embodies the record of my relationships from the past that directly affect the present. The abstraction and unpredictability within my own relationships require openness and vulnerability. This honest dialogue sustains and informs …

A Race Of Angels And Their Nameless Longings, Andrew Van Dinh

Theses and Dissertations

I use drawing methods to navigate my diasporic perception and conjure narratives of displacement. This indecipherable distance between self and Other, Vietnam and I, has formed into enigmatic desires, which informs the use of the imaginary in my works as temporary solutions to issues of self-hood and nameless longings.

Title., Douglas Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Title is a series of drawings that explores the aspects of failed projects and the complications of representation within literary and visual practices. This series is informed by preliminary drawings, marginalia, and written notations that are inherent in the formulation processes of both visual and literary compositions. Through an investigation of the 19th Century Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished novel Dead Souls, I situate this series of drawings as a means to conflate literary theories with visual representation. In this way, the Title series presents fragmentary images, texts, and digressive narratives that demonstrate intermediaries between propositional states and reconciled …

It Can't Leave You The Way It Finds You, Kyle Nobles

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

There’s a beautiful innocence in childhood where, although the world is large and new, it feels as though your place in it and the roles that you play are stable and unchanging. In our youth, outside of extraordinary circumstances, we are unburdened by the awareness that everything and everyone is subject to radical change—including our own sense of self. As we grow older though, looking back it becomes clear that this was never the case. In a matter of years, you can change so dramatically that you did not even notice as you became an entirely new person. For me, …

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …

Mythology And The Black Female Body, Zatara Mcintyre

Theses and Dissertations

Mythology and the Black Female Body is an in-depth examination of the work of Zatara McIntyre. In this research, the personal, cultural, artistic, and religious underpinnings of her work are further investigated, with consideration given to a selection of artworks.

Between Rock And Breeze, Lena Schmid

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis project consists of a series of works on paper and songs about the collusion of the body and nature. I use a lens that both distorts and makes clearer the ineffable ways our bodies shake their boundaries, moving without us and within us.

Remembering Virtual Worlds: Painting And Video Games, Nathaniel M. St. Amour

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Video games create the feeling of great achievement and place the player into a role that turns them into a great hero. These experiences feel significant because they require great time and emotional investment. The monumentality of these experiences, however, are at odds with the transience of the electrical virtual worlds. The medium of oil painting helps overcome the sense of transience because of oil painting’s durable permanent way of image making and stillness. Painting’s inherent nod to history also creates a dissonance between the newness of the video game medium and the antiquity of painting, a contrast exacerbated by …

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 …