This essay analyzes a sampling of Xavier Gonzalezs paintings and murals, and examines the connections between Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso through journals and notes by Gonzalez himself. Gonzalezs career as an artist spanned decades, during which he explored many different types of media. His watercolors draw upon a Cubist legacy and integrate geometric elements within his realist subject matter. Gonzalezs murals for the New Orleans Lakefront Airport feature sweeping scenes of flight that capture the modern experience. The murals represent the apex of Gonzalezs career as an artist working in public spaces, though they later faded into oblivion as the airport lost its luster. Gonzalezs later paintings from the 1940s and 1950s engage emotionalism and humanism, and operate on multiple levels of meaning. From Gonzalezs own notes, one can gain insight into how the influences and observations of Pablo Picasso aided him to define his work and his approach to art in general. Both natives of Spain, Picasso and Gonzalez shared an aversion to reading about or critiquing art. Instead, Gonzalez relied on his observations of other artists, such as Picasso and his wife Ethel Edwards. In lieu of a definitive biography or catalogue raisonné of Gonzalezs art yet to be written, this essay should serve as starting point for further Gonzalez research to be undertaken in the future.

I want my audience to experience awe. I use this to express my view on the argument of reality. Can reality truly be known? I further explain the use of nontraditional and traditional painting techniques to produce my paintings and drawings. My thesis entitled The Expedition is an abbreviated journey through my life.

This thesis explains the thoughts behind the body of art work that the artist produced for the MFA program. These three large paintings (72"x40") will lead viewers through a seventy-year-old woman's personal journey from the East to the West. The paintings display compositions in a bio-epic representation of traditional oil on canvas. The thesis not only expresses the artist's thoughts through formal means, but also the manner by which the emotions evolved.

Recollections of Paradise Lost is both a memoir and a fictitious account. While the images in this series are based on actual people and events from my childhood, they are nonetheless implied narratives. Through the employment of universal symbols of childhood nostalgia such as tricycles, tire swings, toys, etc., these photographs are intended to implore the viewer to make connections with their own pasts. These narratives are meant to captivate and enchant and at the same time, disturb and haunt. Ultimately, the objective is for the audience to reconsider and re-experience the joys, fears, losses and traumas associated with childhood experience and memory.

Yours, Mine, & Ours utilizes found object assemblage, textiles, art multiples, and installation to present the theme of discovering personal identity through collecting, ownership, affiliations, cultural context, and transformation. This work presents to viewers a tactile experience to be investigated, touched, and transferred to their own lives. Centered on domesticity, the familiar and ordinary becomes transformed through labor-intensive processes into unique and personal works of art. Viewer participation, in all aspects of the making process, emphasizes the universal human experience of searching for comprehension of our culture. Each artwork is a metaphor for this search and how we are constantly altering our surroundings and ourselves to better understand our identity. The objective of this work is to inspire the viewer to re-examine what comprises their self-concept and to bring new awareness to what we may take for granted.

This thesis examines the crossroads between printmaking and digital technology as our culture shifts towards a more digital media focused existence. As technology shifts art-making more and more away from the analog creation process towards a more digitally mediated one, printmakings history stands out among other traditional mediums as well suited to embrace the transition whole-heartedly. By using the analogies of the matrix, the map, and the building, this body of work creates a bridge from the historical and time-tested approaches of printmaking towards the future of the art form; a chimera of technology and tradition.

This thesis provides a cultural and historical context for Simone Martinis painting, St. Louis of Toulouse Crowning Robert of Naples, a landmark of Early Renaissance Sienese art. It offers a detailed analysis of the paintings style, themes, and unusual iconography based on an examination of the political and religious climate of early fourteenth-century Angevin Naples. In particular, it investigates the motives of Robert of Naples, the probable patron, in commissioning the work. While ostensibly intended to commemorate his brother Louis of Toulouse on the occasion of his sanctification in 1317, the painting nevertheless served Roberts own political agenda: the validation of his much disputed claim to the Neapolitan throne. This goal was accomplished through a complex iconological program which emphasized the Kings exalted lineage, in particular his dynastic connections to Hungarian and French royal saints. The painting exploited the belief in beata stirps, inherited sanctity, to imply that Robert was not only the legitimate ruler but that, having inherited his ancestors virtues, also an enlightened one. The thesis also analyzes the way in which Louis of Toulouse is represented, both in the main panel and in the five predella scenes. The altarpiece presents Louis primarily in his role as Bishop of Toulouse, diminishing the importance of his true Franciscan vocation. The insistence on Louis humility and obedience to papal authority, rather than his poverty, reflects the bitter debate raging between Spiritual and Conventual Franciscans at the time the painting was created. Cognizant of the necessity to preserve good relations with the Pope, a committed Conventual, Robert downplayed his brothers Spiritual sympathies. Thus, the painting is more a portrait, both literally and figuratively, of Robert of Naples than of Louis of Toulouse. Robert has cleverly adjusted his brothers image in accordance with his own political exigencies. The painting therefore becomes both a monument to Angevin power and prestige, and an affirmation of his right to rule.

Moppet*Sense is a hybrid collaboration between my adult self and a fictionalized version of me as a young girl, or moppet. Through use of craft, textiles, sound, light, color and narrative the work describes a space where both woman and moppet can join to engage with one another in a playful exchange of knowledge and experience. Saturated hues, exaggerated scale and a playful approach to the handicrafts offer the viewer an overwhelming, hyper-realistic experience of girlhood and play, which they can each physically explore and navigate throughout. The work refers to the nostalgic and domestic through its employment of familiar domestic objects, materials, space and craft. It seeks to uncover ways that the seemingly disparate worlds of girlhood and womanhood can meet, question and better understand the desires, aesthetic and interior worlds of one another.

This thesis is based on the accumulation of old objects found or given to me within the past year. Many are everyday general items that are considered to no longer have a purpose because they are now rusty, used and worn. This thesis is about the search to uncover my infatuation for these objects, as well as, transmit to the audience their aesthetic beauty that generates a similar appreciation.

Entitlement to burial in a wall tomb with sculpted effigy, the Florentine tomb-type above all others in honor and prestige, belonged solely to members of the ecclesiastical elite throughout the Trecento and into the Quattrocento, but that changed in the mid-1440s with the inclusion of the most illustrious laymen among those memorialized by this type of monument. This modification of patronage, however, does not signify a major reform that allowed unmitigated access to the tomb-type for all laymen of high repute. On the contrary, eighteen of the twenty-two known effigial wall tombs erected in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commemorate individuals of religious prominence, such as popes, cardinals, bishops, saints, beati, and founders of religious houses. The remaining four tombs and their interredLeonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Giuliano Davanzati, and Bernardo Giugniconstitute the subject of this thesis, which aims to understand these exceptions to centuries-old Florentine burial customs from a sociological perspective, viewing them not merely as independent funerary monuments, but as part of a broader and richer context. It examines the biographies of each man, revealing that devotion to the greater good above all else represents the common thread running through the lives of all four. It then analyzes the iconography of their tombs, which memorialize each mans qualities and accomplishments that made him worthy of Christian salvation as well as perpetual fame. This thesis also explores the function and context of the four tombs as a collective. The visual references to the intellectual, social, and civic aspects of the interred and their lives evoked the classical past by publicly honoring and commemorating to the highest degree men who exemplified the ideal citizen, in the same manner as their ancient forebears, which the classicizing architectural forms and imagery reinforced. In breaking with tradition to allow the burial of these four men in Florences most honorific tomb-type, the state found an effective means of rewarding those whose active civic pride and devoted public service significantly benefitted or glorified Florence, inspiring others to the same and connecting the Republic and her citizens to the ancient past.