Contemporary Art Commons^™

The Seeming Beginning: The Drawings Of Dorothy Hood, 1942-1986, Natalia Lopez

Art History Theses and Dissertations

The notable career of American artist Dorothy Hood (1918-2000) spanned nearly six decades which she witnessed, and contributed to, the transformative shifts in art history from the 1940s through the late 1990s. Today, Hood is known as a cult figure in her native Houston, celebrated for her large-scale abstract paintings that are said to evoke the expansive Texas skies. While these paintings create a large portion of Hood’s oeuvre, they represent only a fraction of her prolific artworks. Equally significant are her meticulously detailed and surreal drawings, which form a substantial, often overlooked portion of her legacy.

Hood’s drawings embody …

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.

The Cosmicomica, Corinne Bernard

Theses and Dissertations

My drawings are a reconciliation of multiple, coexisting truths. They are a practice of creating a new relationship with this world and myself in it; creating a system of symbols that give substance to the same primordial gunk we swim in daily.

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.

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 …

Build-Up, Kate Lund

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Build-up is based in an appreciation for quietude within the landscape that is interrupted by a sense of urgency and distress. The renderings, gestural drawings, and sculptural work are the result of allowing my studio process to mimic my analytical decision making and sensory observation as a wildland firefighter. The research investigates my work in relation to Romantic painters such as JMW Turner and Sublime philosophy, particularly Edmund Burke’s 1757 Sublime theory. Burke emphasized the emotional and psychological response to the Sublime experience of terror and awe. My research also discovers connections with contemporary artists, Robert Smithson, John Peña, and …

The Biomorphic Grotesque In Modernist And Contemporary Painting, Audrey Howell

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper looks at the concepts of the biomorphic and grotesque in art from the start of the 20^th century to the present with a focus on painting and drawing. Included in the discussion of the grotesque throughout history are the works of Dadaist Otto Dix, painter Georg Baselitz, and feminist artists Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. Each used grotesque imagery to comment or react to a larger sociopolitical issue. Biomorphic artworks from the 20^th century are mentioned as well, with specific examples of work by Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, and Hans Bellmer. These artists together …

Brian Fay Contribution To The Lismore Castle Arts Public Discussion- Painting As A Dream, Friday 25th Of April, 2014, Brian Fay

Other resources

Brian Fay contribution to the Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Public Discussion- Painting As A Dream, Friday 25^th of April, 2014

Bleach, Kim E. Alexander Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

The work in this exhibition investigates the unique potential for drawing to articulate the ideas and attitudes of architecture and objects. Accepting drawing as operating in conceptual space, I explore experimental loops within the visual logic of that territory. The work asserts the material fact of drawing and its connection to forms of fabrication in other materials like wood, paint, metal, and plastic. Like painting and sculpting, the drawings occupy an intangible state between objects and ideas. I embrace this irresolution. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Casting A Net: Contemporary Drawing Practices And Strategies, Brian Fay

Other resources

Casting a Net: Contemporary Drawing Practices and Strategies is an overview of national and international drawing practices and considering these in relation to the work of John Beattie.