Dr Nicholas Wyatt is an artist and researcher based at Cubitt Studios & Gallery, London.
In 2015 he completed his doctoral research paper The Christian Image and Contemporary British Painting (the communication of meaning and experience in religious paintings) at Loughborough University School of the Arts. Prior to that he studied at Central St. Martins School of Art, London in 1984 with an undergraduate degree in Fine Art (Painting).
His paintings explore the communication of meaning and experience found in certain historic forms of Christian post-reformation painting.
His research uses painting practice as an experimental and investigative tool to test the capacity of practical aesthetics to generate similar or analogous experiences to the non-dualist reception aesthetics of certain key examples of post-Tridentine (1563) Catholic Counter-Reformation devotional imagery, particularly, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1647-1652) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Incarnation (1596-1600) by El Greco.
An interpretative method is applied to the development of Christian imagery within painting in the post-Reformation period and its relationship to the economic system of modern capitalism and the Enlightenment aesthetic of the sublime, which is explored in his paper
His research aims to see what, if any, meanings and experiences, which, he believes, were present in the affective aesthetics of certain Counter-Reformation imagery can, through the ‘religio-aesthetic’ of his painting practice, be reconstructed or re-generated again as similar experience to those original pre-Enlightenment non-dualist meanings and experiences.
“The experience I aim to generate in my paintings is an affective and experiential narrative of presence, – Eliot’s ‘unity of thought, feeling and action’, which I argue is found in the meaning and experience of those key Christian devotional images.”
Cubitt Studios
In 1991 Nicholas was one of the original group of artists who founded Cubitt Artists Studios and Gallery, an artist-led co-operative in London, where he still has his own studio.
Now based in Islington, Cubitt Artists has become an internationally renowned organization. It has charity status and receives public and institutional funding for its curatorial, exhibition and education programs. Nicholas served as Secretary of Cubitt Artists from 1992 to 2015, and continues to be involved in its running and development.
Curation
Curatorial experience as an artist-curator includes:
Nicholas is currently engaged in curating a group painting show, which examines cross-cultural meaning transfer in pictorial regimes of embodied experience and the affective aesthetics of the contemporary painted image.
As a student member of The Association of Art Historians and under their auspices Nicholas presented conference papers at institutions including The University of Birmingham Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Liverpool Cathedral and Loughborough University. Details of these conference proceedings can be found on the Association of Art Historians website.