What are the elements (marks) that support a melancholic narrative in painting and in particular how can they be harnessed to heighten the feeling and create an 'authentic' melancholic work from a painting of simple and natural motifs? summarise the changes in the meaning of the term melancholia, especially in the last two centuries, and discuss the validity of melancholy painting today. I summarise the key developments to the debate in the 1980s between the artists and the theoretical art critics and hypothesise that paintings that refer to this 'death of painting' are inherently melancholic. I seek out the "language of marks" for expressing melancholy by extrapolating from an examination of 100 paintings but fail in my attempt to quantify them objectively. The assumption that feeling is grounded in the formal properties is tested through detailed examination and subjective analysis of key extant works, concentrating specifically on how colour and expressive mark-making can be used by the artist to enhancing the emotional content. I use examples of extant paintings to show that it is possible to use context as a way of adding to the melancholic content of a contemporary painting. Practical Study The practical research takes the form of painted samples, copies of extant contemporary works, explorations of melancholic motifs (metaphors) and finally a body of work testing the integration of the theoretical analysis with the practical work. Conclusions In addition to melancholic meaning being grounded in the formal properties of a painting, expressive marks can be appropriated and re-presented but the requirement for them to be authentic is open to conjecture. However, referencing the 'death of painting' can enhance melancholic content without the use of irony or becoming kitsch.

This thesis examines paintings of everyday life in Ireland from c.1780-c.1840. Primarily, it investigates how the construction of an everyday reality in images by George Grattan, Nathaniel Grogan, John George Mulvany, Joseph Peacock, George Petrie and William Turner de Lond was used as a means to project the identities and ideologies of those that were viewing, buying and commissioning them. Thus, it challenges current perceptions of paintings of everyday life as documents of social history and material culture and instead focuses on how much these images can reveal about the lives of their spectators and patrons. By placing a series of artworks in the social, political and economic contexts in which they were produced, the approach has been an interdisciplinary one and many of the arguments are based on close visual analysis of the images themselves. Comparisons with similar traditions in the art of everyday life in France and Britain, and with the portrayal of Ireland in contemporary novels and travel literature, have also been used as a means to better understand their underlying tone and intent. An important focus is the notion of the everyday itself and what it meant during the period in question. Theoretical texts by Henri Lefebvre, Mikhail Bakhtin and others have been useful in this respect and provide clarification when trying to locate definitions for what the term 'everyday' actually incorporates. It has been revealed that paintings by Grogan, Mulvany and their contemporaries are characterised by a sense of artistic opportunism and variety itself becomes the most dominant structural variant. The patrons of these images are exposed as a diverse group of educated (largely urban) people who were intent on using the everyday aesthetic to propagate their own ideologies of improvement, social order and community pride. Consequently, paintings of everyday life become about projecting the personal, civic and cultural identities that their patrons wanted to be associated with. Ultimately, this thesis provides a significant intervention in the field of both Irish studies and art history because it establishes the everyday as a serious and important aesthetic category in Ireland in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The aim of my research is to investigate how my practice as a painter is situated within codes of class and gender as they relate to questions of aesthetics in painting. This has involved an interdisciplinary investigation into the significance drawn from the background of my own history in terms of the aesthetic decisions that have previously, and continue to inform my practice as an artist. Life writing at the intersection of class and feminist politics is the framework used to position my understanding of Aspirational Beauty. The concept of Aspirational Beauty is traced and articulated through a process of writing through multi disciplinary perspectives that incorporate and link painting, history, material culture, literature, sociology and fine art practice. The concept of Aspirational Beauty is to understand creative endeavors and practices that are outside of, or marginalized from, established theoretical conventions and definitions. Aspirational Beauty is, I argue, a creative resistance to conforming to socially inscribed ideals of respectability. My research considers Aspirational Beauty as an aesthetic resistance to class shame and a reaction to ascribed and legitimate routes of attaining cultural capital, personified by painting, the most aristocratic of art forms. My research has involved an extensive investigation of painting, by reviewing three decades of international painting survey exhibitions from 1980 to 2010. I have focused on national painting exhibitions in the 1980s to provide a perspective on the changing contexts of painting and subsequently, relations to and considerations of 'Britishness'. The choice of survey exhibitions and related exhibition catalogues as a process of review and analysis provide an extant proper record of painting; that have over time become a legitimized authoritative source of reference. I have considered my practice-as-research, exploring overt transformations of shame in relation to vulnerability and beautification within my practice as a painter. I unravel habitual acts of concealment and aesthetic cover-ups and how this functions as a veneer of respectability.

This thesis explores aspects of contemporary women's painting practice. It investigates cultural, geographical, social and pictorial space across representations of class, gender and race. It begins with an examination of modernist histories through the language of paint. Modernist codes of sexual and cultural difference are interrogated and disrupted allowing for alternative readings of gender, culture, race and painting practices. I examine concepts of space and time found in modernist and postmodemist theory. I propose strategies in paint that collapse boundaries and categorisations, creating a space in-between canonical meaning and definitions allowing for oscillating feminine positions and perspectives. This research focuses on two women painters as case studies - the African-American painter Ellen Gallagher and the Pakistani-born, American-based painter Shahzia Sikander. Selected works from their practice are analysed alongside my own painting practice where links are established and variances highlighted, thus reflecting a contemporary understanding of women's painting in a global context. Significantly my thesis proposes feminist strategies in painting whereby cross-cultural exchange and multiple visual strategies are employed to signify new terms and conditions for contemporary women's painting. I examine hybridity and its relationship to feminine painted space where the complexities of cultural identity are interrogated. I conclude by analysing the position of contemporary women's painting within the framework of the global exhibition. This research uses a feminist methodology and works across art practice, art theory and art history. It creates a space from which contemporary women's painting can be understood as a materially and theoretically expanded practice.

This is a practice-led PhD and the submission includes a written thesis and a comprehensive body of paintings made during the research period. The initial aim of this research developed out of an interest in what appeared to be a clear binary opposition between the structure and understanding of the picture plane within abstract and figurative painting. Traditionally a figurative picture plane tends to achieve pictorial depth through Cartesian perspective. Conversely, abstract picture planes were flattened within modernism. I am interested in creating a pictorial space in painting - image painted on canvas - that has the potential to accommodate a more active viewer. This is a pictorial space in which the surface and pictorial depth do not sit in opposition to each other and the viewer oscillates between the two. The research initiated with a historical survey of pictorial space specifically analysing the difference between Renaissance and modernist space. The research methodology then develops key concepts from Gilles Deleuze's philosophical writings. They are employed within the studio as a system of methods, which have enabled me to re-think the formal characteristic of painting towards creating a new pictorial model. The key concepts within this investigative methodology include: The Fold; Smooth and Striated space in relation to Beauty and Sublime; The Monad; The Figural; and The Virtual. A central premise of the research, both practically as a studio investigation in painting and theoretically, explores the potential of the internal pictorial plane of painting becoming a virtual, complex and plural space more akin to the cinematic. Giles Deleuze's concept of 'The Fold' is at the core of the research and provides a method of thinking through a studio painting practice that might reactivate painterly, abstract and pictorial space for a contemporary audience.

This thesis details a practice-led investigation into the potential for a hyperrealist rendering of the human face through painting. The primary objective of this practice is to ascertain the best means of conveying sensation and evoking experiences incurred when conducting a sustained visual analysis of the facial features. Traditional portrait imagery utilises the face as the most immediate means of identification in depicting the identity and personality of the human subject. This thesis examines the ways in which our familiarity of portrait conventions impacts on the way in which facial images, in general, are interpreted. Therefore, the conceptual framework underpinning the practical element of this project, aims to reduce the significance of the individual and the potential for physiognomic interpretations within the facial image. This study is informed by philosophical notions surrounding the way in which images function as communicative devices, in order to find possibilities for facial imaging that avoid the signification of individuality. This study presents an exposition of ideas examining the ways in which a lack of a prescribed meaning within a painting can accentuate the ability of a painting to generate sensations. The physical implementation of the conceptual framework combines hyperrealist methods with realist methods and techniques to achieve a visual approximation of the facial surface in order to recollect bodily experience of sight and touch within the viewer. An account of the techniques and methods used to implement this conceptual framework are detailed. In producing these facial images, my original contribution to the field of portraiture is to demonstrate that a reduction of individualisation in the process of imaging the face, in conjunction with an increase of surface information, promotes sensations within the viewer that connect to bodily experience of vision, touch and memories of flesh and skin.

My paintings are in the strictest sense representational and their subject matter is the child and childhood seen as the site around which certain psychological and social preconceptions are played out. This might be broadly stated as the child and child’s consciousness of ‘self and other’, versus the adult consciousness of child; the assumption of innocence as it is understood or is constructed by a knowledgeable, sexually oriented adult. In the context of my painting this can be crudely divided between ‘child’ as subject and the painter’s – therefore the viewer’s – gaze. In this respect it links to a wide range of references derived from post war art history and popular culture. It reengages with some of the stylistics tropes of Pop but very much after the theorising of the image which occurred in the last ten or fifteen years as part of the wider debate around representation. In this respect my paintings, that are always being constructed by my photographs, depend as much upon the applied rhetoric of ‘pulp culture’, lifestyle magazine, commercial photography etc. as they do upon the specifics of contemporary art practice. They also end up using many different language forms from the clichéd exaggerations and stereotypes of the cartoon to the most exacting forms and manners of representational painting. At a deeper sense, my paintings are engaged with memory and it is this element, which secures them against the charge of an untrammelled voyeurism. As well as looking at childhood as it is lived by the younger members of my family, I am seeking to recover some sense of my own childhood at one removed – as a process of introjections and as part of the ‘adult’ collective consciousness.

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This research study employs practice-based strategies through which material processes might be opened to new meaning in relation to the feminine. The purpose of the written research component is to track the material processes constituting a significant part of the research findings. Beginning with historical research into artistic and critical responses to Helen Frankenthaler's painting, Mountains and Sea, I argue that unacknowledged male desire distorted and consequently marginalised reception of her work. I then work with the painting processes innovated by Frankenthaler and relate these to a range of feminist ideas relating to the corporeal, especially those with origins in Irigaray's writings of the 1980s. The research involves three discrete bodies of work. The first, Inscriptions, explores the relation between visual processes and textual ideas. The second, Screen / Paintings, Is a re-enactment of formalist decisions that attempts to recover the body In the work. The third, Photoworks, is an attempt to 'jam' vision whilst redirecting process through the unconscious and touch. Each body of work gave rise to a practice text. In these texts, ideas that informed or were triggered by making are unearthed. Material processes are understood as a reiteration of themes (or issues) in relation to the feminine. These include: the relation between text and the visual, corporeality In making, the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, and control / uncontrol. These ideas are reformulated in each body of made work. My approach maps out a method of working that is non-predictive and deliberately situated on the margins of control.

No description available.