Preferred Name
Nathaniel St. Amour
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
School of Art, Design and Art History
Advisor(s)
Lisa Tubach
Mark Rooker
Kathryn Stevens
Abstract
Video games create the feeling of great achievement and place the player into a role that turns them into a great hero. These experiences feel significant because they require great time and emotional investment. The monumentality of these experiences, however, are at odds with the transience of the electrical virtual worlds. The medium of oil painting helps overcome the sense of transience because of oil painting’s durable permanent way of image making and stillness. Painting’s inherent nod to history also creates a dissonance between the newness of the video game medium and the antiquity of painting, a contrast exacerbated by the rapid pace of modern media. I investigate how the feeling of painting and playing video games are related, and what one gains from the other. This paper and body of work seeks to find out what happens when labor-intensive forms of painting are connected to electronic virtual worlds.
Recommended Citation
St. Amour, Nathaniel M., "Remembering virtual worlds: Painting and video games" (2017). Masters Theses, 2010-2019. 513.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/master201019/513
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Game Design Commons, Interactive Arts Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Painting Commons
