This thesis primarily deals with two concepts in painting that I explored during my Graduate studies at the University of New Orleans. Both concepts are similar in execution but have two distinctly different results.

This paper will explore classical and contemporary methods of painting applied to the portrait. It will emphasize the metaphor of paint as flesh and the connotations of the breakdown of the painted form that stands in for flesh as it relates to our preoccupations with our own mortality. Borrowing from influences like Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, and Francis Bacon, the artwork explores the creation of a form that is physical and confrontational, and is intended to provoke a psychological response in the viewer. This series of figuration bases its processes on traditional methods, while borrowing from modern art devices to interpret intangible human characteristics that clarify the representation of the subject and the moment being captured. The ultimate product of this two-fold approach is an image that is a tightly rendered representational portrait that simultaneously lends itself to gestural study.

AURAL REGENERATION by MYRNA LEE PRONCHUK Under the Direction of Craig Dongoski ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to survey the abstraction of the human experience obscuring the confines between form and expression, sound and visual, experience and imitation. In establishing multiple levels of communication, I began with gathering discarded found objects, which I repurposed through building hybrid musical sculptures. The act of mark making mapped out systems and direction, and escalated into a form of hybrid musical notation. Both forms of hybrids informed each other in its development process. When the hybrid instruments and notation were placed in an environment together with the elements of Digital Signal Processing (DSP), it created a natural progression for performance. The objects required interaction: to be hit, tapped, bowed and plucked, with their sounds processed through DSP, and projected back into the audience, who participated in creating interactivity. In producing mechanical musical instruments, along with mark making, installation and experimental sound recordings, a platform is established allowing for a dialogue between audio and visual elements, and human experience.

My drawings contemplate the unfixed nature of my experience. I draw from a state of uncertainty about the relationship between self and space, between a moment of experience and the one that follows it. My process involves intuitive mark-making in which instances of perception are indeterminate and discontinuous. I draw from the experience of unhinged moments, from silence and stillness, and from the indefinable, inarticulable, interstitial moments of perception between those that can be concretely described. The immediacy of drawing, the direct engagement with the mark on the surface, is central to my work. Intuitive mark-making is a way of engaging as directly as possible with the indeterminate nature of my experience. As the drawn marks allude to a once-fleeting present, the layers of marks interact to remind me of the non-linear nature of time and the unfixed nature of experience. The making of the mark punctuates a fragment of experience, dividing it into before and after the mark. The esoteric nature of drawing, the variety of marks engaging on and within the surface, the ethereal traces, the engagement with the space implied by the panel, the discontinuities revealed between adjacent drawings on panel, and the implied experience compressed in the seams between the panels address multiple and unresolveable ways of experiencing a moment in a space.