After studying both Oriental and Western paintings, I became interested in many different approaches involving composition, color harmony, design, texture, and form. It was my main purpose to explore various painting media by means of combining materials, techniques, and processes used in the Western and Oriental paintings. The source of my paintings is the sum total of my experience in both Oriental and Western paintings. Most of the Oriental paintings were either sketched or painted out of my imagination. They are clear realism in the Oriental sense of the work. Most of my Western paintings are either abstract or semi-abstract. Some of them were sketched in the Portland area; especially the diptychs and triptychs of my work reflect my feelings of nature: the cycles of the season, the rich autumn colors in the fall, and the times of the day. It is not a record of my feelings about a particular place or moment. Rather it is an accumulation of all the things I have seen, abstracted and organized to express all I have ever felt and learned about nature. History shows that new forms of art have always been found absurd at first and then condemned out of hand by the public at large. Hence, I do not feed on a single dish, do not limit myself to a single cuisine; I am on no diet. I merely like it all. Therefore, as an art teacher with a combination of Western and Oriental art backgrounds. I hope I can teach Korean high school students by means of mixed media in expressing their own ideas for their creative work. Here, I would like to define what my mixed media mean. By it I mean techniques, materials, and processes used both in Western and Oriental paintings. In the mixed media I used masonite board, rice paper, canvas; oil, ink, tempera, pastel; sharp pointed Oriental and wide Western bristle brushes. I tried to figure out the most economical materials for the Korean student, but it was almost next to impossible to do so. It was simply because some materials easily attainable in my country may not be available in this country and vice versa. They, if any, may be more costly. For instance, rice paper is much more expensive in this country than in Korea; masonite board is more expensive in Korea than in the United States of America. Therefore, I decided to leave it to my future planning. Also contained within my thesis are my education objectives for Korean high school students. In Korea the art education in high school is still tradition-bound, although the trend is changing gradually toward an improvement in thinking and imagination concerning art. In this sense I would like to emphasize creativity which comes whenever the individual searches for a new solution which is novel, and unique, representing the culmination of a creative act.

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This creative project consisted of four figurative paintings and a paper centered on whether the artist could incorporate convincingly the oil techniques of the past with contemporary content. Several popular techniques used by old masters were researched, documented and adopted for use in the paintings of this project. Techniques discussed included early Flemish egg tempera with oil introduced by the Van Eycks, methods of Durer, the Venetian style of Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, and the methods of the Dutch and Flemish Baroque, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer.In addition, the techniques and intentions of three contemporary figurative painters, Jack Beal, William Beckman, and James Valerio were discussed.

Contained within my thesis is an analysis of my paintings in relation to paintings that are being done in this age and area. Thus, I have discussed the geographic and atmospheric environment which necessarily affects the artist’s work. The paintings which have been chosen to comprise my thesis are two views of the Steel Bridge and four views of an old barrel mill in North Portland. They have been executed in Polymer-Acrylics, a Hy-Plar product. This medium, plus the subject matter, compositional and technical problems are given consideration. Lastly,I have briefly summarized what I believe painting to be.

The theme evolved into one aspect of a specific city. Portland, Oregon is famous for its bridges. In actuality, they are the hinges that make it a metropolis instead of two middle-sized urban cities. Thinking along these lines, most sketching was concentrated around these connecting links. Eventually the Broadway, Steel and Hawthorne proved to be the most interesting as to line, pattern, and shape as well as most important in the history of the city. These three were combined into a triptych with a different bridge occupying each panel. The most difficult problem was one of composition – how to present each bridge with equal importance in an individual way, yet unifying all so that the viewer would see the three single panels as one entity. I tried to solve the problem of variation and importance by placing each bridge at a different angle and on a different perspective plane, yet drawing each one on a large scale so that it became the dominant area in the panel. Line and color are the unifying factors. Black is the important color in each bridge and also in the beams in the foreground. These beams are not contained within each panel, as are the bridges, but go beyond and into all three so as to form one composition. Much knowledge has been gained personally through this thesis – most of it in the area of compositional planning. It has emphasized the need for detail in preliminary work (line, value, and color). It has shown that there is no substitute for the exhaustion of all approaches to the subject. The learning process here should apply to all works and to the teaching process as well, for these two general ideas of exploration and planning can change the mediocre into something worthwhile.