Focusing on the prints of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro, my dissertation explores the development of the belle épreuve, or the fine print, in relation to the Impressionist movement. I firstly consider the commercial tactics of the Impressionists in the face of the evolution of the modern art market and the decreasing relevancy of the Salon and expound on previous scholarship by demonstrating how the Impressionists' modes of presentation proved especially conducive to showcasing works on paper and how we might apply observations about the speculative nature of the Impressionists' formal innovations to their prints. Additionally I highlight contemporaneous observations about the heterogeneity of the Impressionist exhibitions that reveal meaningful insights into the nineteenth-century perception of the artists' relationships to each other, thus questioning the tendency to divide the exhibitors into two groups, the Degas-led realists and the Monet-led colorists. Then I consider the printmaking practices of Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro individually, elucidating how each artist's attitudes toward work, craft and business manifest formally in a small selection of examples from their printed oeuvres intended for exhibition or publication. Among the core members of the Impressionist group, Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro represented those most enamored with printmaking, even collaborating to create prints for a never-realized journal during the winter and spring of 1879 and 1880. I posit that the artists' shared compulsions for regular work, fascination with artistic processes, technical flexibility and curiosity and forward-thinking disregard for the traditional hierarchy accorded to media rendered them particularly suited for making rarified, laborious prints. A final factor that connects Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro is that all three artists had complicated relationships with the business of art or the need to sell. The dichotomy of art making versus art marketing manifested itself in their prints. While printmaking as a process implies multiple pulls of an original image for commercial reasons, by emphasizing handicraft through idiosyncratic techniques, Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro accentuated the artistry and labor of their prints. Because of the complicatedness of their practices, printmaking did not turn out to be particularly lucrative for any of them, yet the artists' efforts correlate to a concurrent vogue for intimate exhibitions and works, in terms of both size and technique, and Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro seemingly undertook printmaking with the progressive clientele already established for Impressionism in mind. I thusly connect my discussions of biography and personality to a consideration of Impressionism's relationship to the changing art market of the late nineteenth century, in which facture, as a record of artistic temperament, became a sought-after commodity for collectors of avant-garde art. Despite superficial differences with regard to their subject matter and approaches, an examination of Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro's printmaking practices reveals the assumed draftsmen and the colorists of the New Painting as kindred spirits, for whom the how of art-making proved just as significant as the what and for whom marketing was important but making was vital. The artists' uses of combinations of etching, softground, drypoint and aquatint demonstrates concerns for both design and tone, and each artist accordingly strove to achieve in their prints a balance of personal sensations and decorative artifice.  / Art History

My artwork represents my admiration and criticisms of car culture I have gathered throughout my personal experiences beginning at a very early age. The work exists in the form of drawings, paintings, prints, collage and sculpture. This work is created through the elements of personal narrative, desires, obsessions, and questions surrounding car culture and its influences. My intention to refurbish the icons of this culture has involved creating work that is both obsessive and critical for personal exploration and understanding of past memories.

Existence Stories is an interactive activist art project that gathers personal narratives from people about the ways in which their lives have been impacted by the current political climate in the United States, particularly surrounding the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath. The project harnesses first-person narrative and audience participation as tools for humanizing the “Other” and building connections between people through the act of sharing stories. As the project has progressed over time, it has evolved in multiple directions and come to incorporate a variety of media, primarily comics, animation, printmaking, and zines. The roles that reproduction, distribution, and communication play in all of these media are also explored within this body of work.

The Printmaking of Czech Art Informel Author: Jiří Krtička Abstract The thesis deals comprehensively with the printmaking of Czech Art Informel: explores its sources, principles and themes, evaluates contributions of individual artists and analyses the technique of "structural printmaking". The first artworks in Informel style in Czechoslovakia were created during World War II by Josef Istler who belongs to European protagonists of Art Informel movement. In post-war years Istler engaged mostly in painting and monotyping. For this reason it was Vladimír Boudník who became the leading personality of Czech Informel printmaking. In 1949 he declared in two manifestos of "explosionalism" his vision of a new art that he followed and carried out with admirable consistency till the end of his life. In the middle of 1950s Boudník started to elaborate "structural printmaking" - innovative printmaking methods that became a way to fulfil his vision. His work influenced strongly the whole generation of Czech artists and essentially helped to introduce Art Informel to Czechoslovakia against the ideologic resistance of the communist regime. Czech Informel achieved excellent qualities in Europe-wide comparison and "structural printmaking" became its original contribution to the world fine art. Keywords Art Informel,...

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This research was initiated by questions raised from the researcher’s professional activities in fine art printmaking and examines, through contextualised artistic practice and critical enquiry, redefinitions in the physical and temporal parameters of digitally mediated fine art printmaking caused by developments in digital media; specifically the impact of digital culture, Web2.0, social networking, augmented and virtual reality. Grounded on critical contextual review the research explores, through contextualised research probes, the notion of post-physical practice and the impact of new modes of collaboration, distribution and consumption on contemporary printmaking. It includes the findings of an international, digitally mediated, participatory and collaborative exchange survey of contemporary digital print, developed through direct enquiry using social media as a research tool. Philosophical questions about the impact of eculture, post-physical working and new modes of print-based artistic practice were examined, as well as the indexicality of the print itself in augmented and virtual contexts. The research employs dynamic triangulation between critical contextual review and direct qualitative and practice-based research; to develop a taxonomy framing the contextual precedents of digital printmaking, pinpointing key markers of transition between traditional and new printmaking. It uses post-studio methods and explores the conception, production, editioning, collection and ownership of print in an increasingly networked digital age, providing proof of concept and exploring virtual immersive surfaces in printmaking. These lead to the development of new models for a second generation of printmaking practice or Printmaking2.0 expressly founded in post-physical practice in a poststudio context and embracing the lingua franca of contemporary digital practice in the production of born digital virtually imprinted forms. In both, the technical practice of post-physical printmaking and the significant artistic implications resulting from the cultural shifts following digital participation and post-physical embodiment.

In my work, traditional printmaking techniques are pushed to their limits as a foundation for cut-paper installations and sculptures. The work reflects on notions of interiority and exteriority in relation to the body and nature, drawing from my experiences in meditation to create a two and three-dimensional visual play primarily using paper. Because of their illustrative looseness, the biomorphic structures convey a variety of sensations, shapes, and movements that are related to the interior of the body and exterior forces in nature. In this report, I plan to discuss topics of process, materiality, sensation, objecthood and phenomenology within the context of my work and as these topics relate to other artists such as: Lee Bontecou, Francis Bacon, Oskar Fischinger, Richard Serra, and Judy Pfaff. I also plan to indicate a contemporary and art historical context for the work, placing my pieces within a specific canon of visual culture. / text

Master of Fine Arts thesis by Mackenzie Browning

My works evolve from a concrete vision but tend to lack recognizable imagery. Color and texture are central to my process. By isolating the element of color, I strive for purely formal qualities in my color field paintings. Working on textured suraces, such as burlap, allows me to capture textural elements, which further adds to the aesthetic components of my art. The lack of realistic imagery provides an opportunity for the viewer to personally interpret the visual elements. It is my objective that during the aesthetic experience, the viewer becomes captivated by the unique ways that colors play within tiny sections of the composition.

My personal life experiences are reflected in my art. I use symbolic and expressive marks in developing my abstract imagery, which acts as a visual language. The combining of my past and current art work, fused together, has become what I call a creative matrix. I see my images as choreographed compositions using a mixed media approach. The open-ended interpretation of my art have expanded the never ending possibilities of creation.