The thesis is conducted through painting and writing, and considers the properties of motion particular to painting. This is examined through the conditions of appearance and the processes of formation in the making of paintings, and the notion of the ‘blot as both a patch of irregular, undifferentiated marks and an ‘illegitimate’ temporal opening on the surface of the painting. The ‘blot’ is explored as the embodiment of a perceptual movement, which occurs in the experience of apprehending a painting, in order to challenge the modernist exclusion of temporality from painting.

The thesis depends for its methodology on a model put forward by Yve Alain Bois in the book Painting as Model and relies on 7 paintings and two notebooks written concurrently with the making of the paintings. There is a theoretical text that lays out the main arguments and knowledge expressed in the paintings, and a glossary of terms, that might be defined as artist’s writing, detailing terms, which have been adapted to stand for complex events in the process of painting. This is situated in the appendix alongside the transcribed notebooks.

In order to consider and articulate ideas of temporality in painting the thesis has examined Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry; Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried’s theorisations of modernist instantaneity; Rosalind Krauss’ recovery of temporality and the body in The Optical Unconscious; a model of visual perception proposed by perceptual psychologist John Humphrey in Seeing Red – A Study in Consciousness; a particular model of the grotesque, described by Geoffrey Harpham in On the Grotesque; and Deleuze’s investigation of motion within painting in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.