Philosophy
I am a recovering philosopher.
Several years after completing my PhD, publishing in journals and lecturing at university, I now work out my ideas through film, painting, creative collaborations and our fantastic pop-up philosophy bar, staged in galleries, bars and cafés.
I am interested in still images: our need to make them, the strange ways in which they represent space and time, and how intimately they seem to be linked to our capacities for personal recollection and dreaming.
But mostly, I find them beautiful to look at.
Publications
Edited Books
2025
The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts
Edited with Derek Matravers. Routledge.
Book Chapters
2027 (Forthcoming) "Still Time: Empathy and Pictorial Expression", in Empathy and the Aesthetics of the Visual Arts. Theoretical, Empirical, and Historical Perspectives, edited by David Romand, Routledge
2025 “What Makes a Painting Sad?" in The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts, edited by Derek Matravers and Vanessa Brassey. Routledge.
2025 “Introduction” With Derek Matravers. In The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts. Routledge, pp. 1–9.
Journal Articles
2023 “The Pictorial Narrator” Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 60(1), pp. 55–70.
2021 “The Expression of Emotion in Pictures” Philosophy Compass 16(9), e12767.
2020 “Still Moving” Debates in Aesthetics 15(1), pp. 35–50.
2019 “The Implied Painter” Debates in Aesthetics 14(1), pp. 15–29.
Conference Proceedings
2021
“The Pictorial Narrator” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 13, pp. 29–42.
Book Reviews
2023 “Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel” Review of Jussi A. Saarinen, Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel.
British Journal of Aesthetics 63(1), pp. 129–132.
Doctoral Thesis
2020
What Makes a Painting Sad? PhD thesis, King’s College London.
Paintings as Time Machines
Typically we say that the aesthetic qualities of a still picture depend solely on its spatial features; a curve here, a line there. Conversely, we consider the beauty of music to depend on its temporality, namely rhythm, melody, and cadence. The way the score is played, not how it looks on the page, is what matters. In slogan form, pictures are spatial, while music is temporal.
However, some paintings, such as 'Hammershoi’s Interior from Strandgade with Sunlight on the Floor' (1901) or Hopper’s 'Morning Sun' (1952), seem to aestheticize nostalgia and melancholy. There are also numerous other works we experience as being expressive of this or that emotion. This is puzzling if we believe that painting is a purely spatial, unchanging medium, because emotions both unfold and orient themselves in time. Theoretically, paintings are structurally incapable of the change required to sustain such an unfolding.
In the past, philosophers have confronted this puzzle by explaining the experience of emotional content in spatial terms. However, this reductionist view misses something intriguing about the phenomenon that is both informative regarding how we see pictures, and potentially useful to research into our personal recollections and dreams.
- Aspects of this new research has recently been presented at the British Society of Aesthetics in Oxford, and will feature in my talk at the Mind, Art, Knowledge conference in Brussels in June 2026, and at The National Gallery in London later this year.
