This practice-led research project investigates the potential for a philosophically defined and criterial notion of fiction to function within the medium of painting. It develops Kendall L. Walton’s make-believe theory of fiction via Gregory Currie and Richard Wollheim to include a criterion of fictive intent, whereby a painting is fictional if it is intended to prompt an act of imagining in its viewer. Although painting has not art-historically distinguished between fiction and non-fiction, the research demonstrates the intuitive usefulness of such a classification. The research then argues that painted works of fiction offer a means of insight through a visual medium into the everyday fictions that enable our understanding of the real world around us.

Using contemporary anglophone autofiction—a mode or genre of writing that purposefully blurs autobiography and fiction—as a model for this inquiry, the research analyses Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 to identify a range of strategies that confuse the real world and the fictional world of a work. These strategies are characteristic of literary autofiction and include a paratextual communication of fictive intent, an ambiguous authorial presence, the use of text and image, ekphrasis, self-appropriation, and extratextual reference. These are also identified in the painting practice of Avery Singer and so are demonstrated to be applicable across mediums.

The creative outcomes of this research project emerge from a painting practice concerned with the relationship between image and text to explore the enabling fiction of a coherent self-narrative. They encompass an artist’s book, a series of paintings that manifest a tension between typographic and anthropomorphic forms, a site-specific ekphrastic catalogue essay, a site-specific collaboration with a screenwriter on an exhibition of fictional paintings, and, ultimately, an autofictional exhibition of paintings that explore a transference between painting and literature through a short story and a typeface.