An Iconography of Doubt: Paintings of Collective and Private Disaster

Abstract

Religion and art are two dominant strands that have echoed throughout my life. This thesis explores their role in my life and their influence on my painting within the context of the Anthropocene and the Christian church in which I was raised.

The spectre of the Anthropocene elicits paralysing fear and melancholy in me, and I paint as a way of responding to and understanding these feelings. I also view them through my experiences of Pentecostalism, and this thesis incorporates imagery and ideas connected to Christian Eschatology and the Apocalypse, delving into these concepts through the work of religious scholars such as Karen Armstrong and John Collins. I have looked to the early paintings of New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson about small-town religious life, and the writing of Anna Parlane in analysing these. I have also explored how Eschatology affects a sense of time, how it corresponds to care for the earth, and the way the psychology of the Apocalypse echoes the effects of trauma, as pointed out by Charles Strozier. This is of particular significance now, when religious fundamentalism is increasingly present in contemporary discourse.

The eschatological experience of earth’s body, her systems and sense of history, found eerie parallels in my own encounter with death through a cancer diagnosis in 2022, and this project uses painting to express these parallels. In understanding this experience, I looked to the work of Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd, and also assessed how New Zealand painter Star Gossage has responded to historic tragedies and upheavals. Literature offers another way of understanding tragedy, and this thesis explores Southern Gothic fiction, particularly the work of Flannery O’Connor, as a source of imagery and ideas. I have assessed how Intertextuality has been used in other artists’ work, for example the contemporary Romanian painter Victor Man. I describe the ways in which influence between different art forms can unfold, and explore the value of aesthetic experience as a response to disaster, drawing on the critical writing of poets such as James K. Baxter, Wallace Stevens, and Delmore Schwartz.

Another thread of influence that helps to unite these themes is nineteenth-century Symbolism. This movement arose as a response to rapid social and economic change, and focussed on a shared sense of melancholy, nostalgia, an interest in the subconscious, and a reliance of symbols to convey meaning. This exegesis explores the theories of Charles Baudelaire and the work of painters such as Odilon Redon and Fernand Holder as they trace their interior worlds through symbols. I also investigate symbolism in the work of contemporary painters such as Niklas Asker and the sculptor Mariele Neudecker, and assess how historical concerns can be reanimated within contemporary painting. My paintings have developed through observational painting techniques that my Grandfather, Austen Deans, taught me and I have looked to the work of contemporary Perceptual painters such as Alex Kanevsky and Ann Gale for their use of these techniques. In exploring art and faith, this thesis – the exegesis and its accompanying paintings – offers an iconography of doubt in response to personal and collective disaster.