Three Routes Through Painting the Cliché

Aiming for a more careful understanding of creativity and love as vital world-building forces, this thesis centres around two key and overlapping enquiries: one concerning today’s image economy as the horizon against which painters work, and whether the manipulation of clichéd images and narratives might produce a mechanism for turning superficial encounters into deeper engagements with an image; the other considering ways in which making and viewing painting can interrogate popular romantic ideals and ways of communicating them.