This thesis is built upon an encounter with what seems to be a paradox in painting practice. In undertaking a PhD by practice, I have constructed it around a demand to manifest a form of new knowledge. My first intuition was to imagine that this knowledge would emerge at the interface of theory and practice, but I had gradually realized that sometimes such an academic understanding was not quite in place and that painting or the encounter with a painting was predicated on my engagement with the Deleuzian concept of becoming, a mode of existence.

I am not certain whether I gleaned this perspective as a theoretical construct or whether it was already embedded in my intuition of painting itself. My thesis seeks to present a two-way working relationship between painting and writing. It is not simply a case of representing a theoretical position on the one side and presenting the process of painting on the other, but rather attempting to articulate a process whereby both conditions find a co-extensive relationship.

In light of this, I have divided my thesis into two parts, each with a distinct focus. The intention is to elucidate my engagement with specific textual points of reference whilst tracing the internal dynamics of my painting and writing process. In this way, I draw together the different forces out of which a coherent presentation of practice began to appear. In Part One, drawing on a term used by Jean-Luc Nancy, I describe this as being-with: a way of understanding multiplicity and an existential mode of the painting process, which is explored with the idea of spacing. I then explain the practice of reading-with through my encounter with the work of Clarice Lispector and Cy Twombly. They both appeared to me as representing improvisation and invention.

In Part Two, I present a series of paintings made in different locations and describe spatiality as part of the processes behind them. I have attempted to discover a space in which a text about painting might emerge without the distance which, I would argue, normally exists between artists’ works and art critical writing. Walter Benjamin would have viewed such figures as constituting a constellation (Gilloch, 2002), and this concept is the heart of my methodological composition.

I had the sense of passing through (considering) painting as much as passing into (embodying) painting, becoming aware of my perceptual processes (intuition, improvisation, sense, chance, imagination). I was thus able to get closer to the forces which could be encountered within the process of constructing the work of art. I would not necessarily evoke this as a foundation for an artist writing about their own work: I would question the viability of this within my context because of my awareness that painting itself involves the suspension of thoughts. My PhD proceeded without the expectation of resolution and, in this way, kept alive a tension at the heart of the undertaking, a process of being-with both the activity of painting and the dynamic of writing.