My motivation for my research stems from my practice as an abstract painter whose interests centre on form, pictorial space, surface quality and beauty in painting. For a long time I have been interested in the need for both freedom and restraint in the production of painting. In my practice I use an unusual material, containing translucent silicon polymers, because it provides a beautiful surface quality for my work. This is difficult to use; it cannot be applied with brushes, and so I developed a simple semi-autonomous machine for producing an image on canvas. The machine enabled me to paint with silicon polymers, to achieve a beautiful surface, but it imposed very severe restraints on the form of the images. This difficulty compelled me to consider the problem of the conflict between autonomy and freedom at a practical level and that in turn led to a reflection on the nature of this problem at the intellectual and emotional level. This thesis is, in large part, my response to this conflict. I begin my enquiry with a critical discussion of Greenberg's essay Modernist Painting in terms of the Kantian authority that he claims for it. I then turn to a critique of that Kantian authority itself. Common to both Greenberg and Kant is systematic argumentation in terms of wholly autonomous entities that makes a resolution of the conflict between freedom and necessity very difficult. In the second half of the thesis I use the concepts and empirical observations of affective neuroscience (which does not deal in autonomous entities) to develop my own theory of the beautiful and to use it as a critical tool in relation to both Kantian aesthetics and my own painting practice.

This research project uses an exploratory painting practice to examine a melancholic shadow cast by the First World War. The mode of inquiry is predicated upon the persistence of the past in the present, and upon a personal need to purge a persisting familial grief. To inform this stance there is systematic engagement with cathartic and redemptive artworks of the twentieth century, and with the poetry of the First World War. Developments of process and emotional register are specifically prompted by the writings of William Morris, Edmund Blunden, and Ivor Gurney, and reflections on practice are sub-divided accordingly. Wilfred Owen’s ‘internal reciprocity of tears’, whereby an act of expression traces memory and mourning, remains a central theme throughout. An initial site-based interrogation into desecrated landscapes, using sketchbooks and notebooks, develops into painterly strategies of defacement, compulsive excoriation (the ‘dermatillomania’ of the title) and eventually the deliberate deformation of the picture plane itself. A deep emotional immersion in accounts of the war is sought in order to to establish mindscapes of trauma, to which the radical actions of painting respond. Constant self-reflection is used to consider new areas of research and idiosyncrasies of process as they arise through the practice. The completed body of work explores a trans-generational connection to a legacy of embodied grief, in which the desire to counter the risk of forgetting is mediated through the obligation of the artist to express empathy. The methodology thereby confronts the paradox of catharsis through active mourning in the face of an unresolvable continuation of grief, and tests how narratives of loss may be repositioned and reconfigured in retrieval through the practice of painting.

Winifred Knights, 1899-1947, was a student at the Slade School of Art from 1915, where she developed a decorative manner of rhythmic, repetitive forms, one form of cautious modernism. In 1920 she was the first woman to win the Rome Prize in Decorative Painting. The award was for three years at the British School at Rome. Knights often chose to base her paintings on biblical subjects, or the lives of saints. She was not religious and I argue that these stories, which were well-known in Britain at the time, were vehicles to represent the lives of women and families in the unsettled years during and after WWI. Many women artists have depicted domestic scenes, but Knights chose the exterior and multi-figure compositions, including many self-portraits. She used these compositions to explore women‟s vulnerability, rebellion against male control, maternity and the self-sufficiency of a women‟s community. Personal material is present in all her work and much of it deals with the traumas she suffered. My thesis argues that her paintings‟ engagement with the viewer is not restricted by this material: the themes she explored resonated with contemporaneous viewers, as they do today. The argument closely examines Winifred Knights‟ paintings, including their art historical sources. It draws on her correspondence and on the social conditions of Britain and Italy. The small number of her oil paintings is no measure of Knights‟ success as artist and woman. Indeed, the many dimensions of life as artist, woman, mother and wife were important to Knights. While previous studies of women artists have regarded biography as artistic source material or distraction, I argue that it is central to understanding Knights and her contexts. This thesis therefore argues that the many aspects of a complete life fed into Knights‟ painting and can be seen in her sensitive depictions of women‟s lives.

This research project presents a number of approaches towards the surfaces produced within my own practice. In this sense it is a reversed critique, a meditation upon the practice of considering artworks shaped by the structures of the works themselves, rather than an attempt to align the works with other existing external structures of explanation. The surface of the picture plane presents the researcher with grave difficulties. It is silent and fixed, and necessarily complete unto itself. It has a defined border that divides it from the flux of the world around it. Meditation upon such a site would seem to produce only a stream of interpretive reflection. Without the precise definitions of language, images might only appear to offer the opportunity for highly subjective responses, becoming material for textual metaphor. This approach overlooks the possibility that the site of the painting does not just represent ideas, but actually can be an apparatus to generate and contain thought. The ‘surface’ becomes not the hard unyielding face of the image, but a shifting border that must account for the movements of time and the mechanisms of perception. The surface is an object, and a series of events collapsed into this object. To explore this possible ‘event’ in my own practice I undertook the exploration a number of different forms of organising and presenting works, combined with simultaneous investigations into other artist’s work and methods. This mimics the way in which I construct my own work; allowing a group of image/ideas to coalesce around a projected ‘surface’, which here would be a defined space of production (a canvas, a exhibition space, a live performance). The danger of this approach is that the clumps of thought/image will remain singular and disconnected, and the surface will not exist as anything more than a collection of things. For the works to succeed as sites to generate specific thought they must also reveal some kind of method of investigation to the viewer. This project examines some particular instances where such methodologies can be seen in operation.

Since John Ruskin and William Morris's protestations against mass production in the nineteenth century, critics of mass consumption thought that it not only reduced the necessity, but also the desire, to make things for personal use and enjoyment. The history of leisure painting in art societies and adult education, and of the amateur artist’s consumption of art materials and self-help literature, shows that, on the contrary, affluence both inspired and facilitated a quest for self-actualisation amongst the rank and file. Creative activities such as drawing and painting served this quest at little financial cost to the individual. Following the Second World War, a significant increase in the take-up of leisure painting was encouraged by the state as part of the broader postwar settlement. The pursuit of personal wellbeing through creative activity was regarded as a public good, of benefit not only to individuals but also to the communities of which they were a part. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, state support for recreational pursuits such as leisure painting was pared back: in the shift from collectivist social democracy towards individualist market liberalism, personal enjoyment was recast as a private affair for which the consumer must pay. Painting continued to grow in popularity, supported by expanding consumer markets in self-help literature and affordable art materials. Yet while consumerism sustained the popularity of amateur art-making, the ways in which amateur artists participated in the arts changed. Personal creativity emerges here as an inherently social activity: the private experience of creativity is mediated and structured by society. Consumerism was not bad for personal creativity per se, but the replacement of a communitarian approach with a consumerist model restricted the breadth and reach of creative aspiration nurtured as part of the postwar settlement. By the end of the century, most amateurs were painting alone.