I graduated in 2011, and decided to write a PhD thesis about narratology in painting. I got a government grant that would enable me to focus on this sort of research, and ran with it.
Within a year I realized that I was unable to focus on any specific topic (narratology) within any specific media (painting) before laying down a sort of framework to understand the ontology of that medium: what eventually was published in 2015 was this framework: an ontology of painting. It covers questions like
- What is painting today?
- How to define art?
- How to then define painting?
- How is painting influenced by digital media?
- What even is digital media — what are its attributes?
- What is the essence of digitalism, and how does it connect to (analog) painting?
- Can painting be argued to be exclusively analog?
This got to be a deep inquiry in the medium that I’d by then used for a decade.