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How can we gain a deeper understanding about the emotional affects of painting with respect to temporality by working with the mechanisms and languages of the moving image? This practice-based doctoral research aims to add to our understanding of the perception of temporality in painterly surface and to investigate the relationship between subjective perceptions and emotional 'affect' in encounters with painting which offer an expanded and enhanced sense of lived temporality. The project sets out to do this by devising art works using the processes, apparatus and structures of 'experimental' film/video and photography. This work seeks to question what can cause the passing of time to become 'elastic' in the perception of the spectator encountering the 'strangeness' of painterly surface as an intense experience and asks how this phenomena may be connected with perceptions of time and vision for the embodied painter engaged in practice. In addition to painting practice within the project, works by Frank Auerbach are taken as examples of 'painterly' surface with which to consider temporality and spectator experience. The written thesis is used to document and reflect on the development of this practice-based work; in particular, insights derived from the two photo/video installation works Que Sera (2010) and Is It You? (2012) which juxtapose material made with high speed filming and long exposures and which engage with the 'frame' as a marker of time passing. The reflective thesis draws on theoretical material, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty's essays which propose painting as a form of metaphysics and a way of understanding how we see; Gilles Deleuze's work on the phenomenology of painting; the experimental film theory of Peter Gidal and recent neuroscientific work by Antonio Damasio, investigating vision and consciousness. This material is used in conjunction with observations from experimental and expanded film works as they deconstruct aspects of subjective temporality and visual perception.

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My work as an artist takes an image on a journey beginning with a photographic source image and ending in a painted image, passing through the remembered, imagined and perceived. It is important for me that the images in my work are encountered physically through the materials constituting the surface of the painting and mentally through the 'language' of images. Each viewer uniquely completes the image's journey of becoming a painting. My paintings explore and realise the materiality of an image through the layering of paint, varnish, pebbles, gravel and found objects. Through the activity of painting these 'textured' images acquire particular material, photographic and ocular traits. The primary concerns of my painting practice are how the 'material image' arrests and textures our sensations, the reading of images and the implications of those experiences for ourselves, as receptors, repositories and generators of images. An exhibitiono f paintingsw ith the abovet ide constitutest he findingso f this practiced riven research, which together with the definitions and critical reflections contained in this accompanyingte xt, form my PhDt hesis.T he first stage of making a painting is to identify one'sm aterials.T he materialsI havec hosent o use in this text, which explores,d efinesa nd locates my 5 year enquiry into a practice of painting, are: my practical research itself (my paintings); the work and voices of other painters working in a similar field; three primary and many secondary texts. The three primary texts I used were: Eye and Mind, by Maurice Merleau-Pont(yM erleau-PontyM In Johnson, A. G. (1993) pp.1 21-149); Closure,b y Hilary Lawson (Lawson, H. 2001); and Francis Bacon: Sensation and Painting, by Giles Deleuze (Deleuze, G. 2003). This text begins with 15 reproductions of the paintings forming the exhibition, followed by a framing statement. The text then describes the evolution of the practical research through the creation of the individual paintings. My practical research under went four stages of development; these are evidenced in the curation of the exhibition and in the structure of this text. During these stages of my practice's development four central themes emerged - image, meaning, material and layering. Finally the text reflects on "A Practice Of Painting" using the four central themes of my practice together with the themes identified in the three primary texts. The voices and images of the painters float alongside the body of the text as an illustration of the visual dialogue between my own work and theirs. The text closes with a final reflection and appendices containing my own surveys of the three primary texts. My painting practice is primarily concerned with the different modes of image reception and generation. "It is a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain. "(Bacon in Deleuze, G. (2003), p. 35)

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This thesis is structured around the dual scenarios of doctor/patient and artist/model. Having analysed the underlying politics of class and gender that structured the relationship between doctor and patient, and between artist and model, at the fin-de-siecle, it goes on to examine how these relations were transformed by two developments: the emergence of psychoanalysis in relation to hysteria, and the growing involvement of women as artists in the field of modernist painting. Its key research questions fall, therefore, upon identifying a historical method for understanding the impact of women’s self-enunciation in these scenarios that shifts the now classic image of masculinised modernism in both its psychological and aesthetic dimensions. It is centred upon a close reading of two case studies—that of ‘Frau Emmy von N’ from the Studies on Hysteria, published jointly by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer in 1895, and that of model-turned-artist Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938)—and examines the extent to which the scenarios of doctor/patient and artist/model underwent a radical internal transformation as a result of their reconfiguration by the women involved. Moving between psychoanalysis and modernism at the moment of their historical co-emergence, and re-reading their conjunction through contemporary feminist theory, it also interrogates one of the traditional blind spots of psychoanalysis: maternal subjectivity. In the first two chapters, I revisit Freud’s first written case history of ‘Frau Emmy von N’ in order to explore the significance of Freud’s belated acknowledgement of his patient’s ambivalent experience of motherhood to the history and theory of what would become psychoanalysis. Having tracked the shift in the relations between doctor and patient that occurred over the course of this early, proto-analytic, encounter, I go on to examine a corresponding transformation in my second identified scenario of artist/model. In the third chapter, I consider the social, artistic and psychic dilemmas faced by those self-consciously modem ‘New Women’ who sought in the early years of the twentieth century to participate in modernist art and culture not merely as mute objects of representation, but as creative subjects in their own right. In this chapter, I investigate how the question of the maternal might be processed in the being of women as artists in the modernist moment. Having analysed both the possibilities and limitations of those psychoanalytic theorisations that view feminine creativity as necessarily bound up with depressive mourning for the mother and the maternal body, in the final two chapters, I draw upon the Matrixial theory of Bracha Ettinger in order to consider how the traces of some different relation to the feminine/maternal may be otherwise inscribed in certain paintings of the female nude by Suzanne Valadon.

‘Figure-ground’ is about the production of meaning based on the perception of contrasts or binary oppositions and segregations. Viewers of my paintings, and of the kind of paintings that interest me, have the impression that the ‘figure’ subsides or slips or fades into ‘ground’, or that the ‘ground’ is more powerful or dominant than the‘figure’, or that the ‘figure’ is insecurely attached, suggesting it is incapable, unwilling, too acquiescent or complicit to fully differentiate itself from the ‘ground’. I address flux, mutation, indistinctness and complementarity within the visual field of painting. I develop and extend the heuristic context for the interpretation of my studio practice and for work of a similar kind, and then feedback this new context into my practice in order to generate new works, also in the process shedding a new light on my interpretative models. Beyond this, I also make a more general argument for the re alignment of the relationship between art theory and practice - one that can better incorporate a sense of in between-ness, indistinctness or liminality. My approach is comparative: I look at East Asian art and ideas and, in particular, deploy the writings of the French Sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, in whose work there is the attempt to expand Western epistemology, ontology, semantics and aesthetics via a discussion of Chinese thought and aesthetics. Jullien proposes a paradigm that draws the ‘in-out’ respiratory rhythm or pulse within the perceptual field towards the centre of a theory of representation, a theory that seeks to account for consciousness from the ‘inside’ rather than the ‘outside’. The consequence of this relocation of agency is an interpretative framework that is firmly grounded in a nondualistic and holistic approach, foregrounding affect and empathetic relationships between artist and work, viewer and work, and self and the world. Traditional East Asian thought begins with similar premises to poststructuralism in the West: the ‘self’ is an illusion and the possibility of knowledge of reality independent of thought is dismissed as untenable because there is no objective reality accessible to us. Everything depends on the bias of the mind, rather than on anything we can identify as an innate attribute of reality itself, thus there is no escape from our lived experience, and we are profoundly limited by the interpretive knowledge of our mind; we are trapped within the ‘prison house of language’. But within the different recursive orientations that characterize ‘East’ and ‘West’ the interpretation and consequences of these insights are understood in quite different ways. I explore why this should be the case and what some of the consequences are, both theoretically through the written text and performatively through my studio work.

The introduction aims to investigate both my painting and exhibition practice, and the historical and theoretical issues raised by them. It also examines different views on nature by comparing and contrasting 20th Century Western ideas with those of traditional Asian art and philosophies. There are two sections to this thesis; Section A contains an historical overview of Eastern and Western philosophy and art, Section B presents observations on my studio and exhibition practice. Section A is divided into two chapters. Chapter 1 examines concepts of nature in the East and West before the eariy 20th Century. It discusses examples of different approaches to nature and cross-cultural perceptions, especially Taoism and Buddhism, which emphasize harmony within nature and the principle of universal truth. It also gives pertinent and relevant examples of attitudes to nature in the Korean. Chinese and Japanese art of the 20th Century. Chapter 2 discusses new and changing attitudes to ecology, post 20th Century, and the environmental art movements of the East and West. Their ideas have a great deal in common with traditional Eastern views on nature and the mind, so have the potential t change both our identity and our relationship with nature. Section B draws together this material to establish the main argument of the thesis, concerning a connection between modem ecological approaches and traditional Zen Buddhist ideas which emphasize the interconnection of all natural forms. The section consists mainly of observations on studio practice divided into 3 chapters and a conclusion.