A few nice arts degree images I found:

Art in Embassies – Nathan Huff, Negotiating Place, 2011


Image by US Embassy New Zealand
Nathan Huff (born 1981)
Negotiating Place, 2011
Gouache on paper
42 x 78 in. (106,7 x 198,1cm)

******************************************

Negotiating Place is a gouache on paper that utilizes the structure of the dining room in which it sits in to comment on place. Site specific to the red walls and chandelier, it opens the roof to reveal the passage of boats sailing across the ceiling of the room. Like the relations that might exist around this table, the boats offer fantastical representations of those present or long absent.

“I wanted to create a work that would both represent my rich experience of travel to New Zealand and engage with the history of the residence.

“My recent drawing and painting installations create freewheeling narratives: personal stories of suspending gravity, traversing emotional vertigo, and sorting reservoirs of memories.

“I am fascinated by visual conversations that can occur between images and objects that tangentially relate yet lack a linear retelling.
“Exploring the gaps between visual perception and modes of representation, and possible interpretation of these objects, provides a rich and fertile arena for my art making.

“In my studio practice I leave space for interpretive play and experimentation. I collect meaningful images, imagined experiences, or emotional conundrums.

“My initial responses take the forms of gouache drawings; sculpture made from altered found furniture, creative writing, an enacted dialogue, an Internet search and collage, or colliding personal mythology with actual objects.

“It is in these chance combinations that objects take on potential beyond what I might have immediately recognized. New visual observations, personal insights, and metaphorical links are discovered in the process of this exploration.” – Nathan Huff.

Biography:
Nathan Huff earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach; a degree in art education from Azusa Pacific University, California, and has also studied art in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Actively exhibited in Los Angeles and abroad, his work has been collected throughout the West by universities, public collections, and private individuals. He enjoys working in his art studio above the beautiful cliffs of San Pedro and is privileged to work with art students at Biola University and at California State University, Long Beach as an adjunct lecturer.

www.nathanhuff.com

newzealand.usembassy.gov

Art in Embassies – Nancy Voegeli Curran, Lacemaker’s Sky, 2010


Image by US Embassy New Zealand
Nancy Voegeli Curran (born 1955)
Lacemaker’s Sky, 2010
Oil on panel
46 x 48 in. (116,8 x 121,9 cm)

**************************************

Nancy Voegeli-Curran spends months on her intricately composed paintings, which become a physical stage for her painting narrative. Similar to Jae Hoon Lee in his photomontage, Voegeli-Curran relies on the process of accumulation to form her abstract paintings.

Place, in its potent physicality, is developed within the surface of the work. Begun with pours of paint and gravity, the piece is harnessed in as she traces and retraces the forms, spills, and colors of the subtly controlled painting, Lacemaker’s Sky.
Through interweaving, multi-layered structures, she creates micro and macrocosms that resemble a phenomenological event such as a cosmological dust storm with inter-stellar bits or a spatial galaxy. Shimmering, mineral-like colors add subtle nuance to her work.

Themes of chaos and order, flux and movement as affected by gravity, and the passage of time are all present in her work. She observes that a single shift of a chance event within our natural world, such as an earthquake or the birth of a star, can cause extreme change or chaos in a seemingly stable environment.

This occurrence then generates reverberations or repercussions from which a new structure or order emerges.

Biography:
Following a first career as a speech-language pathologist, Voegeli-Curran returned to school to pursue a degree in studio art. In 1994, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting and a Master of Fine Arts degree at California State University, Long Beach in 2011.

She has also studied art in Florence, Italy, and at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, and is included in public and private collections. Her current residence is in Los Alamitos, CA.
Her studio practice has been influenced by living in the northwest for several years and by subsequent travels to Alaska where dynamic natural forces combined with an overall sense of vastness are evident.

www.nancyvcurran.com

newzealand.usembassy.gov