Prof Craig Staff

Craig completed a practice-based PhD in Fine Art in 2002. His research sought to examine reflexivity’s role in relation to the production and subsequent interpretation of non-representational painting. Whilst he continues to consider separate categories of painting and the discourses that they engender, his research has broadened out to encompass historiographies of modernism and the relationship between time and the visual arts.

Craig arrived in Northampton in 2003 and is a Professor in Fine Art and the programme leader for the MA Fine Art.

Craig is Co-Leader for the UON Art and Design Research Centre.

Craig is the author of several books including Monochrome: Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art (2015), Retroactivity and Contemporary Art (2018) and Painting, History and Meaning: Sites of Time (2021). 

His most recent book, Weak Painting After Modernism: Material Strategies 1968-1978 considers the development of painting in the US through the philosophical lens of weak thought.

Currently in preparation is a second edition of his 2013 research monograph, After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice.

Rosie Zielinski; Slowing the perception of time via the window/veil in contemporary photography and printmaking

Kai Wang; An Autoethnographic Enquiry of Self-Documentary Practices Based on My Personal Family Experiences

Natasha Toms: The Multivalence of the Image Within Baroque Painting

Nour Zantah: The Expressive and Aesthetic Values of Violence Through Art (Completed)

Carlos Ruiz Brussain. Hyperdream: A Play-based Creative Framework for Illustration Practice (Completed)

Adam Ghani: Contemporary Art and the Liminal Space: Refuge for the Divine in an Empirical World? (Completed)

Andrew Langford; Winter Growing Fields: Landscape and Estrangement (Completed)

Abiodun Kafaru; An Exploration of Painting Aesthetics, Signs, Symbols, Motifs and Patterns of the Coastal Yoruba Land of Nigeria (Completed)

Elena Marchevska; The Screen as a Site of Division and Encounter (Completed)

David Parker; Painting as Process: a Jungian Approach to Image and Imagination as Experiential Practice in Contemporary Culture (Completed)

Jonathan Chapman; A Study: Critically Positioning a Contemporary Art Practice by Means of Reference Through the Genre of Still Life (Completed)