Undertaken between January 2014 and September 2017, the body of work that is this research output consists of a series of nine narrative paintings and a journal article (comprising a short contextual essay and piece of art writing) which (re)articulate deliberate anachronism as a methodology for story-telling and picture-making. The methodology for this output evolved from research into the use of anachronism as a creative strategy in European and American painting and illustration of the mid-twentieth-century and in images and fictional genres associated with the romantic literary tradition.

This output re-articulates deliberate anachronism through the construction of images and compositions for narrative paintings, contributing directly to the practice-based field of contemporary narrative painting; specifically, that which appropriates images and objects from the past and/or uses a deliberately old-fashioned style of image-making to re-create the mood and sensibility of romantic art (and literature) in a contemporary context.

This output contributes to (and expands) that research field by articulating the formal and structural relationship between anachronism, modernist picture-making and romantic fictions. While this research evokes current parafictional strategies in the visual arts insofar as it is playful, satirical and critical, it gains a stronger resonance through being situated in sustained painterly development. The creation of a fictional and parodic universe of display opens a fruitful dialogue with genres such as illustration and film design as they fold into the workings of anachronism in modernist art.

The textual component of this research output is a journal article published in the Journal for Writing in Creative Practice in 2017. The nine paintings forming the visual component of this output were disseminated in the solo exhibition ‘(After) After’, staged at the Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University in August-September 2017.