Works of art often refer to one another. Perhaps a closer examination of this relationship occurs if they are theoretically displaced from the sequence of events that contextualise them. Placed side-by-side, they may take on a fresh meaning that might identify artistic intention as universal — as a 'redemptive' statement of Being. Both Piero della Francesca and Stanley Spencer painted 'Resurrection' pictures. The five hundred years that separate them notwithstanding, the reasons for their so doing must bear some comparison. Each made a statement of belief in their depiction of a metaphysical world created primarily in the imagination but housed in cultural milieus that would identify them as 'visionary' amongst their peers. Yet, in many ways, one picture is the antithesis to the other, the first deeply religious, the second highly personal. Regardless of their differences, each work might perpetually and simultaneously strive toward 'the spiritual' in an individual and universal sense. As an artist whose work ostensibly denies any lofty 'spiritual' aspiration whatsoever, Frank Zappa's dismissal of authority, whether couched in religious, musical or sociological terms, marks a valid juxtaposition to current acceptance of artistic form. Not only was it legitimate to invite a musician into the affray, for me it was a vital continuation of my earlier exploration. Zappa seriously challenges the notion of 'feeling' as little more than a pre-set conditioned response to music. I hoped to establish that Zappa's own quest for musical perfection flew in the face of his notorious cynicism, proclaiming his output as 'redemptive' — alongside that of Piero della Francesca and Stanley Spencer. It is the main contention here that as the human predicament requires that the artist should attempt to re-present his vision in order to redefine reality for himself and his peers, the role of artist as 'visionary' is worthy of perennial consideration.

Undergraduate, Interactive Games Design (IGD) courses offered by technical universities in the UK recruit students who are not required to have art or design backgrounds. However, they need to be able to represent their creative ideas. Observations at the University of Gloucestershire have shown that many students find difficulties in expressing their ideas in a visual manner as they do not have adequate drawing skills and eventually some focus on coding and some withdraw. This thesis investigates the links between game design and drawing skills, examining concepts of creativity, learning, design communication and education. To establish the basis of this problem, it was necessary to gain an insight into students‘ and tutors‘ viewpoints and interpretation of this course. Using an interpretive philosophical framework, a mixed method approach was chosen to allow for greater opportunity to understand the phenomenon. Within an action research paradigm, the research was carried out in an evolutionary manner. The extent of the problem was established by eliciting tutors‘ insight from other institutions both arts and technical based. A case study was set out to study two cohorts of students. This identified the problems reported by students and the impact of these on students‘ attitude and motivation. The nature and necessity of drawing skills for sketching storyboards were explored by gaining views of students, tutors and industry professionals. The effect of the tutor-led Art interventions at UoG was investigated. The research identified criteria to assess the quality of storyboard communications and finally a framework for an e-learning object to develop storyboard communication skills was specified. This study revealed that obtaining visual skills is fundamental in order to be able to draw or use rapid prototyping techniques for storyboarding. This needs to be addressed in a specified module or several sessions. It appeared that the design of an art intervention (tutor-based or e-learning object) for IGD students, needs to address the issues of confidence and teamwork alongside with the learning materials in a constructive and gamified style and as interactive as possible in a structured goal-based manner. It would also benefit from Active learning teaching style.

This dissertation presents a fresh approach to the study of Haitian art through research conducted in the emerging interdisciplinary field of exhibition history. In a deliberate attempt to move away from existing notions of Haitian art as a formal or aesthetic style of art practice associated with primitivism – based on mid-twentieth-century art historical narratives – I have opted to explore the display of works by Haitian artists outside of conventional museum and gallery settings. Taking a broader cultural studies approach centred on three case studies, I examine the exhibition of artworks within the transitory sites of national cultural display at two world’s fairs and an art biennial: the Haitian pavilion at the World’s Columbian Fair of 1893; Haiti’s “Little World’s Fair” officially titled Exposition Internationale du Bicentenaire de Port-au-Prince of 1949-50; and the Haitian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. These exhibitions overlap in the sense that they all claimed to present an official representation of the Haitian nation-state and therefore an authoritative vision of Haitian culture. However, when we peer behind this veneer of official national rhetoric it becomes clear that at each of these sites there were numerous images of Haitian nationhood, as well as notions of a national cultural essence referred to throughout as Haitian-ness, being produced by various agents. Across the course of this study these include: Haitian and foreign state representatives, curators, artists, academics and cultural professionals drawn from Haiti, Haiti’s diasporas and elsewhere, as well as NGOs and other international collaborators. In each case those curating Haiti’s national displays at these events balanced assertions of national sovereignty against international marketability: delicate negotiations that, I argue, can be discerned through analysis of the forms, aesthetics, subjects and contextualisation of the artworks displayed. Across the course of this dissertation therefore I chart a shift in the substance of these Haitian cultural displays, and the artworks presented within them, from a fin de siècle expression of Francophile neoclassicism, through an uneasy post-war coupling of folkloric exoticism and western modernity, to a fragmented picture of contemporary Haitian-ness articulated with reference to poverty and cultural otherness as well as cosmopolitanism. Through an examination of these case studies I have sought to explore how the visual arts intersected with expressions of Haiti’s postcolonial nationhood at exhibitions staged within events scattered across the Atlantic World. Further, by charting shifts in the production and projection of Haitian nationhood and art across these three sites I have attempted to grasp a fuller picture of how entangled ideas of nation and culture have had a bearing on exhibition histories, international institutional engagement with and the marketing and perception of the work of Haitian artists through the long twentieth century.

Little art-historical scholarship has been dedicated to fine art responding to the British home front during the First World War. Within pre-war British society concepts of sexual difference functioned to promote masculine authority. Nevertheless in Britain during wartime enlarged female employment alongside the presence of injured servicemen suggested feminine authority and masculine weakness, thereby temporarily destabilizing pre-war values. Adopting a socio-historical perspective, this thesis argues that artworks engaging with the home front have been largely excluded from art history because of partiality shown towards masculine authority within the matrices of British society. Furthermore, this situation has been supported by the writing of art history, which has, arguably, followed similar premise. This study will demonstrate that engagement with the home front inevitably meant that artists’ work could be interpreted as supporting different values to the pre-war period. However, the reintegration of ex-servicemen after the war resulted in the promotion of the wartime ordeal of male combatants. Not only did this restore the pre-war position of men, it inspired canonical values for British First World War art to uphold masculine authority. Consequently much art engaging with the home front has been deemed antithetical to established canonical values and written-out of art history.

Taking as it basis the longstanding alignment of men with an active, eroticised gaze and women with visual spectacle within Western culture, this thesis demonstrates the prevalence of this model during the Victorian era, adopting an interdisciplinary approach so as to convey the varied means by which the gendering of vision was propagated and encouraged. Chapter One provides an overview of gender and visual politics in the Victorian age, subsequently analysing a selection of texts that highlight this gendered dichotomy of vision. Chapter Two focuses on the theoretical and developmental underpinnings of this dichotomy, drawing upon both Freudian and object relations theory. Chapters Three and Four centre on women’s poetic responses to this imbalance, beginning by discussing texts that convey awareness and discontent before moving on to examine more complex portrayals of psychological trauma. Chapter Five unites these interdisciplinary threads to explore women’s attempts to break away from their status as objects of vision, referring to poetic and artistic texts as well as women’s real life experiences. The thesis concludes that, though women were not wholly oppressed, they were subject to significant strictures; principally, the enduring, pervasive presence of an objectifying mode of vision aligned with the male.

This thesis explores a number of interdisciplinary writings on the Italian past by later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistically minded critics and cultural commentators, with a view to recovering their historiographical importance. Beginning with an exploration of the parameters and scope of a genre defined as 'aesthetic history', along with some theoretical work grounded in current debates about the nature of historical representation, this thesis goes on to offer in-depth discussion of texts on the Italian past by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and Adrian Stokes. By offering a critical reconstruction of each author's thinking about the past, along with the cogent and ill-explored engagements they make with historiographical study, this thesis affords the reader a better understanding of some of the tensions present in historical writing - tensions surrounding issues of epistemology, visuality, psychology and materiality - during what were decades of great change in historical thinking. Moreover, this thesis offers a detailed investigation into the important role played by the Italian past in the aesthetic-historical canon, which in turn produces a more complicated picture of the connections between literature, aesthetics and historiography during this period.

The 1990s in the United States saw a particular cultural anxiety manifested in the crisis of masculinity, in which American men were perceived to be suffering from a loss of power and diminished authority. As President Clinton heralded a final push towards the millennium and the creation of a better, brighter future for the nation, concerns emerged over the ability of straight, white, middle-class men to access this same future. In this pre-millennial period, fatherhood is presented as the solution to this state of masculine crisis. Hollywood in particular invests in this notion of masculine crisis and the need for rehabilitation through fatherhood, indulging in one of the key tenets of Lee Edelman’s theory of reproductive futurism: that of the future being realised through an investment in the child. This thesis examines a number of Hollywood films produced between 1989 and 2001, with the aim of demonstrating how fatherhood is persistently constructed as the key to masculine survival during a period of considerable anxiety over the future.

The thesis has been prepared on the assumption that Hogarth's picture series are essentially narrative works. They are considered in the Introduction in the light of recent definitions of the narrative strip, a medium in which Hogarth was a considerable innovator. The first six chapters consist of an analysis of each of the pictures in Marriage à la Mode. The analysis was undertaken as a means of exploring the nature of Hogarth's imagination and to discover how coherent a work the series is. There is an emphasis on characterization and setting because Hogarth himself chose to isolate character as a feature in the subscription ticket to Marriage á la Mode. The figures acquire their depth through their interaction with the setting. The interaction compensates for the lack of physical movement in Hogarth's picture narratives and is a source of much of his humour. A number of sections are concerned with relevant background information, such as the traditional rivalry between the cities of London and Westminster, and the medical details of the quack doctor's laboratory. The seventh chapter is concerned with the literary allusion in Marriage à la Mode, particularly to the popular drama of the time. The eighth is concerned with the extensive and ironic use of analogies. The ninth chapter is concerned with the subject of structure, including the delineation of the rôle of the projected spectator as defined by the work which contains him. The tenth is about theme and includes the use made of the traditional elements and 'humours'. It is concluded that Marriage à la Mode is a tragi-comic and melodramatic work, and that Hogarth in what are here termed periphrastic sequences came close to making images behave like words without their becoming dependent on any verbal form. His achievement lay in the ability intelligently to organize diversity into a unified structure, similar to that of situation comedy.

This thesis examines the evolution and dissemination of the iconography of the post-Resurrection appearances of Christ. Special attention is given to the association between word and image, as well as the influence exerted on art by contemporary theology, liturgy and politics. The earliest use of these apparitions in art is associated with baptism while in literature they were successfully employed against heresies. The Virgin’s participation in the post-Resurrection narrative reveals the way in which homilies and hymns inspire art. Another important figure of these apparitions, which receives special attention, is the Magdalene, whose significance rivalled that of the Virgin’s. While the Marys at the Tomb and the Chairete were two of the most widely accepted apparitions, it was the Incredulity of Thomas that found its way in the so-called twelve-feast cycle and revealed the impact of liturgy upon the dissemination of an iconographic theme. The emergence of the Anastasis will rival their exclusive role as visual synonyms of Christ’s resurrection, but this thesis reveals that their relation was one of cooperation rather than rivalry, since the post-Resurrection scenes and the Anastasis complimented each other in terms of iconography and theology. Finally it becomes apparent that the pilgrimage in the Holy Land and the liturgy that was taking place there is responsible for many iconographic details which help us discern the dissemination of a particular iconography.

This collaborative thesis focuses on the extensive collection of works on paper and related objects by Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) held at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (BMAG). It is the first academic study to use Brown's works on paper as the basis for discussion. In doing so it seeks to throw light on neglected areas of his work and to highlight the potential of prints and drawings as subjects for scholarly research. The thesis comprises a complete catalogue of the works on paper by Brown held at BMAG and three discursive chapters exploring the strengths of the collection. Chapter one focuses on the significant number of literary and religious works Brown made in Paris between 1841 and 1844 and examines his position in the cross-cultural dialogues taking place in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter two uses the dual definition of the word 'construction' to examine how his interpretation of history was affected by contemporary changes in historiography, and to discuss his practical approach to composing a history painting. Chapter 3 studies illustrations he made for publication. Progressing chronologically, it explores his changing attitude towards illustration as a medium and argues that these works had increasing importance for his artistic career. The catalogue is the most up-to-date and informative inventory of the collection and includes new identifications, titles and dates and exegeses.