Within a digitalised visual culture saturated with images, consumed at speed, this practice-based research project seeks to produce a body of work centred around still images in painting and in photography which create modes of looking that engage or structure time differently. Developing from an artistic practice rooted in painting, I use the concept of the off-frame, expanded from the off-screen of film theory, to explore the experience of absence that works around the presence of still images. This exploration moves between the implication of perceptual absence in different modes of representation and the absences implicit within narrative, knowledge, and understanding. The thesis addresses the relationship of absence and presence as constructed differently according to materials and processes specific to the different mediums of painting, photography and film.