I am a painter and a printmaker. My imagery consists of houses, barns, birds, trees, hands, and gloves. On the surface these items represent home, nature, and female identity. On another level they symbolize an inner world of dreams, wishes, and losses. My paintings contain aspects of collage, they combine paint, paper, and low relief. I paint layers of transparent and opaque images and colors in order to achieve a dreamy and ethereal effect. In printmaking, I combine my imagery in layers by printing small plates and stencils next to and on top of one another until a dense, multifaceted image is achieved.

Lightness and darkness pervades much of my work which is visible in images of abandoned, secluded spaces. Light symbolizes hope and joy. It can also reference the spiritual connotation of new life as well as the end of life. The physical movement of light, its ephemeral quality, and its reflectivity is the deciding factor in my choice for using a camera without a lens and using traditional painting techniques. In my photographic mixed media work, I am drawn to the unique qualities of the pinhole camera, the exposure of light on the surface of film yields imagery that blurs the line between the familiar and the ethereal. Exposures from a pinhole camera materialize over time, perhaps seconds, perhaps minutes. There is no viewfinder to preview the image, which makes capturing an image pleasingly accidental. In my oil painting, I use photographic references and a limited palette. Much like my photographs, I create areas of light juxtaposed against deep shadow. The processes of using overlapping layers of transparent glazes over a warm-toned ground are used to achieve this chiaroscuro effect. By using these approaches, a sense of the dramatic is conveyed sometimes in contrast to the quiet nature of the subject.

I head to the ocean for inspiration. Diving deep, the diverse organic shapes and fluidity of the flora and fauna inspire me to create modular pieces that incorporate intricate line work. This repetitive line and patterning gives me peace and helps me meditate. This self-exploration has opened up a stimulating world that pushes me to produce prints and silver jewelry that are individual and introspective. I have learned that the journey has become the aspiration and the production, a gift.

In my paintings and prints, I create to understand my experiences. I make layered, repetitive marks and gestures that consist of spherical masses, orbits, and cellular forms. The shapes represent aspects of reproduction and symbolize my thoughts and ideas about procreation. In making pieces, I employ a mathematical system that describes growth patterns found in nature. I use this system as a way of echoing natural structures, as well as a way of focusing my attention. I create multiple small pieces and present them in large, gridded formats. These pieces are abstracted narratives of my thoughts and feelings.

I think of my paintings as pop songs. My aim in the work is to embrace a complicated femininity, championing and questioning the aesthetics of girliness, cuteness, and whimsy. This is the realm of the Young-Girl. The text that follows will chart a path from the cliché to the empathic—holding hands with philosophical comrades in that same territory, ranging from Taylor Swift to Kaja Silverman—seeking the way in which the paintings relate to the grand tradition of the love story.

The path through life is filled with light and darkness but light casts shadows and can darken one's life. With this metaphor, I use light to symbolize the positive and shadows to represent the negative things that every one of us encounters. In my landscape paintings, the combination of light and darkness symbolizes my journey through life. There is a predominance of light in my paintings. Therefore, my intention is to portray the positive over the negative. In other words, I want to portray the light at the end of the tunnel.

This thesis is a multidisciplinary project, drawing on the discourses of Visual Cultural Studies, Latin American history and Critical Theory. Insights from each of these disciplines interact to investigate the representation of the indigenous peoples of Mexico in the mural triptych entitled History of the Mexican People painted by Diego Rivera in the National Palace, Mexico City between 1929 and 1935. The main focus is an exploration of the mural as a cultural text, which is formed through socio-political structures and homogenising nationalist visions. The artist is seen as partly a product of history who acts, both consciously and subconsciously, as a conduit for such historical structures. The investigation requires a multi-dimensional approach as it includes emotional, aesthetic, sociological, political, cultural, philosophical, biographical and material elements. A close-reading of the National Palace mural as a cultural 'text' is undertaken in order to deconstruct certain culturally-specific political myths. The production of the fresco triptych is inextricably interlinked with the construction of the post-revolutionary Mexican nation and socio-cultural mythologies regarding the 'Indian' which are central to nationalist imagery and the post-revolutionary, anthropological theories of indigenismo. Certain distinctive racial strands of nationalist mythology which are represented in the mural are analysed within the framework of Anthony D. Smith's (1999) theory of historical ethno-mythology. I argue, following Smith, that what gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, can be and is rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern, nationalist intelligentsias. Smith's universal theory has not previously been applied in depth to a complex concrete situation. This thesis relates the insights of the theory of nationalist ethno-mythology to the tangible cultural text of History of the Mexican People.

This thesis contributes to the study of portraiture by delivering an appraisal of female portraits produced in the urban areas of Italy and Flanders in the fifteenth century. Scholarship on individual and selections of these items exists, but it is fragmented and influenced by Marxist-feminist views about genders and their roles in the system of patriarchy. The term ‘patriarchy’ describes a socio-political and economic organization that is male-controlled. By applying patrilineal rules of patrimonial and political transmission through social stabilisers such as the institution of marriage, it disenfranchises women from decisions that affect their life directly, and ultimately their sense of entitlement. However, in order to function successfully, it creates forms of compensation that diminish the risks of uprising by the marginalised. Concerning women, this could be seen as their feminine experience of these conditions, which feminist analyses tend to overlook. With an original survey of one-hundred and four individual female portraits dated c.1400-c.1500, this thesis explores the relationship between the image and such experience during the rise of entrepreneurial communities, because these groups relied principally on this system to prosper individually and collectively. For the task, this thesis uses a legal-anthropological method that eschews the Marxist-feminist trappings. Its results show that female agency in the domestic environment and the dowry-system produced a binary relationship between men and women and forms of public and private recognition that challenge the basic notion of female marginalisation. Secondly, the Christocentric practices developed by evangelical groups from the early-thirteenth century proved very popular amongst women because they offered varieties of autonomy and public intervention that were otherwise precluded to them. Thirdly, humanism affected a small but important group of women, whose desire for learning challenged conventional propaganda about female inadequacies. This thesis explains the ways in which these facets are integrated in the likenesses of this survey. It demonstrates that fifteenth-century spectatorship received two types of stimuli. One that invested on an affinity of appreciation of the social values of female beauty, fashion and domestic skills, and that articulated ideas of commonwealth and kinship. One other that sought affinity that was more intimate and consistent with the sitter’s psychological condition. These strands ramified into social and ethical discourses that this thesis charts and examines. The one-hundred and four portraits featured in this survey originated predominantly in Flanders and central-northern Italy, the early strongholds of European mercantile groups. Current scholarship compares Netherlandish and Italian portraiture in terms of modernity versus obsolescence because the former developed naturalistic portraits in located backgrounds in c.1430, whilst the latter preferred the profile format until the end of the century. This thesis contests this polarisation because visual and contextual evidence together suggest that sociocultural interests informed choices of formats and the circulation of likenesses to the effect that modernity in portraiture cannot be measured in mere technical terms. Fifteenth-century Netherlandish portraits are, indeed, the earliest examples of modern portraiture but this phenomenon must be understood, this thesis explains, as the product of concomitant conditions that include new media and new attitudes towards the self, caused by the secularisation of culture and the revival of Greco-Roman literature. This thesis also contributes to the knowledge of the genre because it uncovers types of female portraiture that are new to the existing assessments, thereby setting the parameters for a classification of the topic from the perspective of the feminine experience of her own mimesis.

Lifeline: Expressions of Intimacy Through Paint is a body of paintings that seeks to bridge physical distance by sensually applying layers of oil paint to recreate the physicality of my husband. I allow the viewer to enter into a private exchange by the use of intimately charged spaces, like the bed, which demonstrates how paint can be a conduit for touch in absentia. By intensely remembering my partner in these works, I reconstitute my knowing him through paint and seek to move beyond mere representation to know and express him better. Therefore, these paintings not only bridge the physical distance between my body and his, but search for meaningful expressions of my internal conversations as I make visual discoveries that expand my understanding of him. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

周俊輝. / "2006年9月" / 論文(藝術碩士)--香港中文大學, 2006. / 參考文獻(leaves 34-35). / "2006 nian 9 yue" / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Zhou Junhui. / Lun wen (yi shu shuo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2006. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 34-35). / Chapter 1. --- 引言 --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- 互文性一開放的文本 --- p.2 / Chapter 2.1 --- 克莉斯蒂娃 --- p.1 / Chapter 2.2 --- 巴特 --- p.3 / Chapter 2.3 --- 德里達 --- p.4 / Chapter 3. --- 悠久的文本一藝術史中的經典 --- p.7 / Chapter 3.1 --- 經典構成經驗 --- p.8 / Chapter 3.2 --- 經典之重讀 --- p.11 / Chapter 3.3 --- 與經典建立個人關係 --- p.14 / Chapter 3.4 --- 經典在當代環境中 --- p.18 / Chapter 4. --- 結語一經典的挪用合法化 --- p.23 / Chapter 5. --- 附錄一我的作品 --- p.26 / 圖片來源 --- p.32 / 參考書目 --- p.34