The thesis is in the form of a commentary on the development of my work from the beginning of this year. The studies have followed a general pattern of closed to open, or linear to painterly. Numerous changes in attitude towards the basic elements of composition, and their use, have taken place. Among those most frequently mentioned are: line, dark and light, intensity and warm-cool color relationships. In connection with these compositional elements, surface texture, subject matter and various media are discussed. Some consideration is given to conflict between conceptual and media orientations. The effect of this conflict in a teaching situation completes the general outline of the thesis.

The main purpose of my work was to explore the properties of various painting media, principally those of synthetic composition and at the same time to explore and extend the color range of my palette in order to reflect attitudes of the theme. The subject was selected because of the unlimited possibilities in composition through the use of the contrasting active and quiet aspects of the city. The paintings are representational abstracts which I have tried to make function as well-organized compositions without completely destroying the realistic content. Working with a subject-oriented theme makes each painting a new problem and, therefore, each painting is discussed separately in terms of compositional elements, color relationships and materials employed.

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This thesis is a visual documentation of my story. In it, I discuss the urgency which drives the creation of my work. Unable to speak the same language, my grandmother and I used food and paint as means of communication, thus instilling my love of food, my desire to paint, and my need to investigate my Cuban culture. As a former professional pastry chef, my understanding of the physicality of food informs how it is portrayed on a two-dimensional surface for visual indulgence. I explore loss, objectification, transculturation, and the pandemic through images of food, while experimenting with the properties of paint.

My body of work includes five series of paintings: Family Portrait, Unpacked, Corners, Fractured Spaces, and Day to Day. Throughout the creation of this body of work, I have explored and implemented various techniques to create paintings that suggest an intuitive sense of time and place. These paintings aim to convey the experience of domestic space from multiple points of view, depicting imagery that reflects the dependability of the mundane and the daily experiences of cohabitation. My thinking and methods are informed by the writings of Sam Harris, J. Macgregor Wise, Rosalind Krauss, and Jordan Wolfson, as well as the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, and David Hockney. My work is a meditation on how small moments in our lives reveal that which is essential and meaningful.

This project report explains my MFA show of landscapes presented at the Woodbury Museum in Orem, Utah. Referencing source material from my 2008 trip to the Middle East, Bible narratives and contemporary scholars, I created mixed media paintings around the themes of traveling and migrations (peregrinations) and some significant stopping places in Syria, Jordan and Israel. More importantly, this report also speaks to my personal peregrinations as an artist and relates my painting methods to my subject matter.

This thesis examines the concepts and ideas that pervade my body of work in painting. These concepts include immersion and scale, interactions in space, harmony and disunity, flat and dimensional space and perhaps most importantly, ambiguity. I intentionally use these formal devices to create immersive environments that appear as a familiar but skewed version of reality. By forcing together disparate languages of visual representation into the theoretical space of a painting, I strive to expose some of the humor and decay of our social institutions. In using the format of collage, my paintings have the opportunity to incorporate a wide array of iconography and imagery, while adding commentary through their juxtapositions. This thesis further explores the notion of oversaturation of images in media and how it has resulted in a clashing of imagery in the public space, akin to the format of collage in art-making. By using more easily readable or accessible iconography like cartoons or digital images to draw viewers in to the work on a visceral level, I discuss how the audience becomes witness to something sinister or something in the process of decay. Since I do not fully understand my own position as an artist and consumer of images, painting serves as a way to examine and question my relationship to society and culture as a whole. The artworks are inevitably questions in themselves: Who is to blame? What does it mean to be American? What is my duty as an artist?

Focusing on the combination of multi-cultural and historical influences from my personal life experiences, my creations of odd juxtapositions of space, complex pattern and new iconography in my paintings, reveal more than merely a representational image to a viewer. Although my subjects may vary from the anonymous to media celebrity, it is their relationship to me that influences the creation of my static animation and visual noise.