User:Paul James Gough/Paul Gough

Paul Gough is the RWA Professor of Fine Arts at the University of the West of England Bristol. He studied at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, in London. He has a PhD on the representation of the empty battlefield in British paintings, drawings and illustrations from the First World War.

As an exhibiting painter he has had numerous one-person exhibitions in the UK, Europe and Australasia, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum in London; the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the National War Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand. In 2009-2010 Paul Gough staged a show of drawings in the ‘Hall of Memories’ under the Carillon in Wellington.

His post-doctoral research has covered aspects of art history, cultural geography and material cultures. A monograph of the painter Stanley Spencer was published in 2006. It covered the painter’s experiences as a medical orderly in Bristol and the Balkans, and his chapel paintings in Burghclere. A new book – A Terrible Beauty (2010) – examines the work of fifteen British artists during and after the Great War. In 2011 he published Your Loving Friend, the illustrated correspondence between Desmond Chute and Stanley Spencer.

Other conference papers, journal articles and book chapters explore the visual language of emptiness, the iconography of peace, the nature of corporate war memorials, and the heritage of battlefield sites. A grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2005-06 enabled him to undertake research into the peace gardens of central London, and he is currently working on new material about ‘subvertising’ as a form of anti-commemoration. He is currently writing a book on the impact of the major Banksy exhibition held in Bristol in 2009.

During ten years (1989-1999) he worked in television, presenting arts programmes and also working as a freelance researcher and associate producer ITV, BBC and C4. He worked on a portfolio of cultural programmes from dance to drama, poetry to painting, including the award winning documentary Redundant Warrior, about the war photographer Don McCullin.

Paul Gough was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts at UWE from 2000 until 2009. He was promoted to Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) in 2009, and became Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) in 2010.