Academic literature on the topic 'Art of painting'

[Abstract]The point of this thesis is to undertake a critical engagement with the art and life debate. This debate involves, in particular, the question of the location of art. Does art belong to an autonomous field removed from ‘everyday life’, or is art located amongst the objects and daily activities of our lives? Contributors to this debate usually defend one or the other position; either defending autonomy or arguing that art is, or at least should be, part of life. The debate is located through three historical points: the avant-gardes of the early 20th Century Europe; the neo-avant-garde of North America in the 1950s – 1970s; and American formalist art and criticism of the 1930s – 1970s. The thesis then engages the debate through more recent examples of art where the binary art/life is again the principal issue. Minimalism, Installation art, Site-specific art and Wall Painting are examined in the context of the ‘end’ of modernist painting. The argument presented by the thesis will be informed by a recently emerging theoretical frame which engages the reception of Kantian and Hegelian forms of aesthetic judgment. This critical context includes the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek; the Marxist-Hegelian theory of the German critic, Peter Burger, and the U.S. formalist critic, Clement Greenberg. The positions held by these theorists and critics will be examined through examples of art from both the modern period and more contemporary works. Through this context, the thesis positions the art and life debate within a structural analysis, arguing that art, including objects of ordinary life understood as art, occupy places within an art structure. The thesis argues that the choice between art and life is not so much a positive choice of one or the other, but rather a choice between one and the same thing seen differently; that is, the one thing seen in parallax.

This study examines how a particular kind of Indian painting comes to have value. The focus of analysis is on the social life of paintings rather than the purely aesthetic. This is explored through a detailed examination of perceptions of the paintings amongst producers, consumers and art critics. The study is an attempt to apply the sociological institutional theory of art on Orissan patta paintings by developing the sociological approach into what I consider to be an anthropological approach. The Orissan patta paintings, with which the study is concerned, are circulated not only within India but also abroad and thus move through different cultural milieus. Following Arjun Appadurai (1986) pattas can be said to have a social life, whose value and meaning change through time and place (1986). The paintings are located in several value systems. These systems will often meet in the very transaction which moves a painting from one sphere to another. One of the central questions raised in the thesis is how particular kind of paintings come to have value and whether they are endowed with different layers of value. The model I have developed is of an art world consisting of interpenetrating layers with different semantic registers. The differences in evaluation and interpretation of the paintings at different points in their "social life" lead me to argue that the layers have the character of separate yet interacting worlds.

 This thesis explores the various roles of food in Impressionism by examining paintings of food so as to sort out their relationship with one another and their linkage to modern life in Paris in the 19th century. Food was related to spectacle, class reconfiguration, gender relations, consumerism and capitalism, and leisure, all of which were part of the revolution of modernity in Paris. By analyzing Impressionist images of food production, display and consumption in relation to these modern social and historical developments, the thesis explores the relationship between food and people, meaning the social dimension of food culture. In addition to standard art historical approaches, two research methods are especially important. First is to understand the general historical context of food imagery by examining 19th-century cookbooks, novels and treatises related to food, and popular visual culture including posters, menus, and prints. Second is to identify and analyze particular food motifs by studying recipes, statistics, and dictionaries of food. Five chapters deal with five aspects of food. Chapter one talks about the crystallization of food into spectacle as a result of the conspicuous consumption facilitated by the construction of Les Halles, the central food market. Chapter two examines two different kinds of food production – rural agriculture and urban artisan cuisine – as expressions of two dissimilar attitudes towards labor, linked to competing conceptions of time as continuous and discontinuous. Chapter three raises the issue of sociability, where the pleasure of eating can only be obtained through the engendering of a semi-private space linking private eating to public identity. Chapter four shows how the coalescing of food and women in Impressionism intensifies the pleasures of visually and physically consuming the female body, while paradoxically entrapping male viewers in desire. Whereas these first four chapters emphasize social aspects of food, chapter five shows how food affected the interiority of particular artists, demonstrating the embodiment of psychological traits in Impressionist still lifes of food. Overall, the thesis shows that Impressionist paintings of food actively interpreted and defined modern food culture as a continuous process of spectacularization and systemization, and that they consciously draw parallels between food consumption and visual consumption as similar processes of pleasurable consumption. By revealing that Impressionist food imagery sometimes does not comply with other Impressionist genres in interpreting modernity, the thesis opens new ways of thinking about both food culture and Impressionism.<br>published_or_final_version<br>Fine Arts<br>Master<br>Master of Philosophy

The human figure, allegory, myth, and the appropriation of other artist’s compositions are elements in my work. I aim to update traditional stories to conform to contemporary times and culture. In addition, I am striving to create a new method to visually express figurative storytelling. Breaking from the traditional flat painting surface, I use multiple shaped panels. The surface is broken into different shaped panels at varying distances from each other and from the wall. This allows for more exploration into shape and negative space while depicting the dramatic height of a story. As part of this method, my paintings explore the discrete nature of human vision, or how we focus on individual parts of a scene while the brain filters the gestalt.

Thesis (M.A. (Hons.)) -- University of Western Sydney, 2003.<br>"A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Honours) Creative Arts, December 2003" Includes bibliography.

My primary focus in my paintings is the male figure. These paintings have evolved in a non linear progression. I went from representational to partly abstract and back to representational infused with sequential art. During this development, I decided to paint my figures to resemble comic book characters of my own creation and paint them to represent emotional qualities of spontaneity and dualities of my psyche.