In The Painting Career ofPiero di Cosimo (1462-1522), I have sought to assemble a critical, monographic study of Piero's painting oeuvre that presently includes close to fifty works that are either extant or exist only in references and sources. The Florentine painter has historically proven to be among the most elusive artists of the Italian Renaissance and yet acted as a seminal figure in the artistic transitions occurring from the close of the fifteenth century to the beginnings of Mannerism in Florence. My thesis consists of close iconographic and stylistic analyses that have been balanced by archival work and technical examination. The latter involved numerous meetings with restorers in United States and European conservation laboratories. The resulting in-depth study of the physical states of Piero's paintings as objects involving painting technique, working methods and present condition produces some of the most revealing results. My research with original documents and other primary sources in Florence also introduces a number of new discoveries, particularly from the early and middle stages of the painter's life and career. The varied nature of Piero's art calls for a multidisciplinary approach. Combining iconographic, conservational and archival methods, I aim to contribute new insights into several specific areas. These include: a biographical grounding of Piero's life and those of his known patrons; Piero's advances in portraiture; the use of visual narrative forms and literary sources in Piero's mythologies; and the painter's large-scale devotional works. The questioning of past assumptions concerning Piero's work and biography also leads me to consider the larger scope of influence, legacy and modes of transmission between Piero and other contemporary artists. As one of the most important older innovators, living well into the sixteenth century, Piero was a major catalyst for the new generation of highly inventive artists such as Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo, both of whom passed through his studio. It was Piero, however, who proved to be perhaps the most groundbreaking practitioner in the domestic secular painting tradition before his pupils' ascendance.

This study explores El Greco's language of gestures. The first part will explain the preconditions for the general development towards rhetorical gestures and draw parallels with El Greco's artistic development in the sphere of gestures. In addition, handbooks on gestures are introduced. The second part will analyse how El Greco applied gestures, using examples of his paintings. It will reveal how El Greco developed some gestures over more than thirty years, and how he creates with their help an intense concentrated mood in his paintings. It will also demonstrate how he worked by means of hyperbole to evoke an inspiring atmosphere, how he created space with the help of gestures and gaze, and how he transformed the meaning of some 'model' gestures he took over from famous Italian painters. Finally, this work seeks to renew and intensify the analysis of gestures in painting as a way of approaching the paintings and revealing layers of meaning that can not be found by an analysis solely focused on iconographic topics. In this study the body is taken as a mediator of signs, difficult to read, but decipherable. This study is intended to be a step forward in approaching a deeper understanding of the codified language of gesture. It should open the way to an intensified concern with the language of gestures, with the reading of bodily signs in paintings.

The dissertation is divided into two sections, dealing with the positive and negative faces of travel and the sea in visual art, each further subdivided by chapter. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 deals with cartography, providing a broad context for the cultural reception of travel imagery. Chapter 3 discusses Thames imagery. It is argued that the increased interest in the river as a pictorial subject was part of a growing view of London as the metropolis of a grand commercial empire, whereby the Thames was aligned to the construction of the imperial nation. Chapter 4 examines metropolitan contexts for travel and maritime imagery. Conflicts are noticed between the image of navigation as a sign for commerce, and the marginalization of marine artists from polite artistic society. Patterns of patronage also indicate an ideological and actual distancing of the maritime nation from maritime communities. The second section turns to the image of the sea as a negative force in British culture. After an introduction, Chapter 5 examines the problematic depiction of the lower deck sailor, as a contradictory figure in national culture. Chapter 6 looks at how smugglers and wreckers were visualized, as wreckers both of individual ships, and of the larger ship of the commercial state, which assumed markedly political connotations in the 1790s. Chapter 7 considers the slave trade, especially the implications of the absence of imagery dealing positively with such an important component of the maritime nation's prosperity. It is argued that the force of abolitionist images relies upon inversions of pictorial conventions. Chapter 8 examines the wider significance of shipwreck imagery, in relation to shipwreck literature. Discussion of illustrations to Falconer's poem, The Shipwreck, is extended to the wider field of the shipwreck narrative. By providing a vehicle for the expression of native virtues, shipwreck reinforced British identity's being located with the sea, at the same time as it was shown stricken by disaster. The Conclusion considers further how national concerns and values were mediated by the image of maritime disaster. Through a consideration of Loutherbourg's work of the 1790s, it is argued that the aesthetic of the maritime, by being increasingly interleaved with the sublime, permeated a wide variety of imagery. But the naturalization of the nation in the sublimity of the sea represented it continually on the verge of disintegration. For a maritime nation enduring the crises of naval mutiny and continual threat of invasion by sea, this was peculiarly apposite.

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“A Strange Loop” explores abstraction through a series of paintings that begin from a single point and evolve infinitely to create a self-contained, self-referential, and yet endlessly self-generating world. The series was created through an elaborate and repetitive process of tracing the marks, drips and forms from an existing painting. These traced drawings archive the act of painting, and serve as a map that reconstructs the space of the subsequent layers, which in turn generate future paintings. The drawings work in a symbiotic relationship with the paintings, each evolving in relation to each other and perpetuating each others’ existence. The resulting paintings are fictional spaces which emerge out of the painting process itself.

Drawing upon a review of literature and interviews with four artist-teachers, this thesis explores the implications of post-modernism on the studio teaching of painting. Additional emphasis is placed on uncovering the issue of the-death-of-painting and its links to post-modernism, and my own reflexivity as a painter and a teacher of art. The thesis presents also an attempt to respond to an apparent lack of educational research that addresses post-secondary studio teaching of art, and that engages artist-teachers in reflection on their teaching philosophies. The overall objective of this thesis is to generate a body of knowledge that could be of assistance to other practitioners in the field in their own pedagogical reflections and development of contemporary studio instruction. Thus the questions and ideas brought in this study present both an invitation and directions for future inquiries in this area of education.

The contemporary visual landscape can be seen as a continuously shifting experience of surfaces. Synthetic, glossy, reflective, transparent, flexible and colour saturated. We find them often in the form of architectural facades, automotive finishes, interior fabrications, printed materials and design objects. They are rich, seductive and desirable skins on the surface of everyday items. / Within recent contemporary visual art practice, and particularly certain nonobjective painting practices, there can be seen to be an engagement with the idea of surface as it relates to aspects of the 'everyday'. These artists are often incorporating 'new' materials and methods of making that actively respond to what is out there in our lived urban environment. They share a concern for rigorous play with an attention to surface quality, functionality, materiality and manipulability. Contemporary artists such as Thomas Rentmeister, Ian Davenport or Jessica Stockholder, to name just a few, could be seen to fit here. On the function of paint and surface Stockholder writes: The paint functions both to alter existing surfaces and as a very flat object in its own right placed over or alongside other objects. The surface of the object conceals the mass of the object from us; it is also the part of the object revealed to our sight, it is an area where we are vulnerable to deception and also a site poignantly ripe for the development of fiction. The surface becomes a tenuous site where fiction and reality struggle with notions of subjectivity and objectivity to find boundaries or to determine difference. / Stockholder talks here about the fundamental ability of paint to alter the visual and tactile characteristics of the 'thing' being painted, making its reality somewhat indeterminate by imposing a different quality. She speaks about paint in terms of surface substance, surface quality and surface manipulation. Paint is a substance separate from the object it is applied to; like a skin yet capable of transforming its visual and tactile presence in extreme ways, rendering the object less certain. It is this potential of paint as a plastic material capable of contradictory functions that underlies this research project and defines my use of the term 'uncertainty' in the title of my thesis. / Surface - as a kind of fluid, organic, and mobile skin applied over a structure or even as 'structure' itself - can be seen to be a key operative concern within several important architecture and design practices of the past ten years. This development is itself influenced largely by the potential of recent technological developments in software design tools and new materials and manufacturing techniques, which now enable complex, topographically located objects and structures to be readily designed and manufactured. / My research set out to focus mainly on recent comtemporary painting, sculpture and installation practices which, through the use of new materials and methods of making, engage primarily with the manipulation of a surface in a way that emphasises a largely visual engagement with the work. The exegesis will look at the historical relationship of such work to a largely modernist tradition of material-based practice, in an attempt to suggest there exists today a particular attitude that has a positive and openly indexical relationship to the surfaces of our everyday urban environment. This will be supported and extended by references made to particular contemporary design and architectural practices that share concerns for uncertain surfaces or surfaces that suggest ambiguity and flux. / The major focus of my research into this topic has been the development in the studio of a body of artefacts that have been exhibited at various points during my candidature. The written exegesis attempts to position these studio artefacts within a wider critical/cultural context, through discussion of the studio work as situated in relation to ideas and works developed largely by other visual artists, but also by designers and architects which share similar concerns and aesthetic sensibilities with the particular notion of surface that I am attempting to define. / Thesis (MVisualArts) - University of South Australia, 2004.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A personal experience of migration provides the content for this exegesis research and exhibition titled A Long Road Home. Narratives of identity, displacement and loss, common to the migrant experience are translated as concept and inspiration for this research. Exploring an attachment to my cultural past highlights a disrupted sense of place, which is examined within the context of personal experience. Movement as a condition of migration is a developed theme in this thesis, which is described through a shared sense of place between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Scotland and Australia. The exhibition A Long Road Home is developed from studio-based research and journeys into past and present landscapes over a period of three and a half years. Accompanying this exegesis is an exhibition of four components: Painting and drawing, a book of self-published poems and memories, after before white rabbits, 2009 [appendix i]. A self-published book of documentary photography of Glasgow’s East End, 2007, the dead end of culture, 2009, [appendix ii]. This exegesis and exhibition component employs mnemonic notations to explore memory as [re] remembering to conceptually underpin this thesis and also to prompt an emotive response. As an abstract concept, memories encompass an itinerant history that is teased from beneath the surface of the skin to extend the narrative of personal experience. after before white rabbits, a series of memories and recollections, reinterpret the past to inform the present, suggesting mindscape as an alternate landscape. A series of mnemonics invite the reader to participate on a journey that is in a continuous state of flux and transformation that moves between one horizon and another.

PhD / This thesis is an interdisciplinary explanation of correspondences between painting and philosophy. It does not offer, as could be assumed, a critique of philosophical concepts or an instrumental description of painting. Instead, it shows how concepts from philosophy can be used to see painting in new ways, particularly abstract painting. The philosophy discussed here is limited to continental or speculative philosophy, mainly, but not exclusively, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The work of philosopher Richard Rorty also plays a part because he presents a clear description of the relationship between vision and philosophy. From a philosopher’s point of view, painting is highly relevant to an image of thought and is in general, used to explain conceptual assemblies. Rarely, however, do philosophers talk of painting’s own philosophy. This thesis argues for an account of painting as philosophy of sensation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [538]-555.