Tactility, illusionism and the depiction of flesh in selected contemporary painting.

Date
2014-03-13
Authors
Dewhurst, Thomasin
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Abstract
Painting that gives an illusion of external reality can often induce powerful tactile sensations in the viewer, even though it is primarily a visual art. This dissertation examines features of tactility and illusionism that occur together in selected contemporary figure painting The aim is to show that, despite arguments to the contrary, illusionistic painting need not always effect an intellectual response in the viewer. Some art critics and historians have argued that in its quest to produce a perfect replica of nature, illusionistic painting erases all traces o f the artist’s bodily labour and fails to capture the physicality of objects It is argued that this serves to distance the viewer from the image in a bodily and emotional way An excessive build-up of the material of paint, on tne other hand, is assumed to convey an acute sense of corporeality and to create an intimate spectatorial response to the image. In this present study, with specific reference to the twentieth century painters, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and to the theories of the psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, I maintain that this is true only to a degree My hypothesis is that through a particular painting process, during which the artist responds in a bodily way to the objects viewed, a certain textural paint mark can be produced It is this, I argue, that creates a tactile quality in a painting whether or not the painted surface is overtly material or smoothly and realistically rendered. I discuss my own work in relation to the contents of this dissertation.
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