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Saint Sebastian and the wounded forest : personal relationship with the tasmanian landscape

thesis
posted on 2023-05-26, 18:05 authored by Lendis, Andrew John
Saint Sebastian and the Wounded Forest is a project that sets out to show that painting has the ability to evoke a truly emotional, poetic, connection with the Tasmanian wilderness because it has the capacity to create, and exist within, its own space and time. Through an investigation into the way that icons operate and into the way that the presentation of space and time in the construction of a painting can affect whether a painting is experienced on an intellectual or an emotional level, I have come to an understanding of how certain painters such as Albrecht Altdorfer and more recently Stanley Spencer and Peter Booth, control the viewers' response to their work. This project is an investigation into, and an attempt to prove through practice, the proposition that painting is different from other art practices such as photography in that it can exist outside of time, and thus can be free of time. It is able to manipulate and conjecture its own laws of temporality. This project also investigates the proposition that a painting can exist as a place (that is to say: a space to be in) on its own terms precisely because it possesses the ability to define and control its own space in the world and can construct and collapse space in the same way that it can collapse time. This project proposes that the effect produced by this ability has the capacity to produce a sense of transcendence in the beholder, an impression that could be described as time standing still or as an unexplainable response that elicits deep emotion (a half- remembered memory of a place or time, or both, known from long ago). The outcome of the research project is a series of paintings that aims to disrupt the viewer's ability to undertake an intellectual reading of the manifest subject in the work and, rather, force the viewer to experience the works on a purely emotional level. It is intended that this emotional engagement might form a bridge between the viewer's own experience and what they seek within the image, which is something invisible and hidden behind the painting's skin and is also a re-enactment of my own process of painting.

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Copyright 2006 the Author - The University is continuing to endeavour to trace the copyright owner(s) and in the meantime this item has been reproduced here in good faith. We would be pleased to hear from the copyright owner(s). Thesis (MFA)--University of Tasmania, 2007. Includes bibliographical references

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