Stefan Dunlop by The Cat Street Gallery

ten years

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Stefan Dunlop ten years. ISBN: 9780980480597 (pbk.) Subjects: Dunlop, Stefan, 1972 Artists--Australia--21st century--Biography. Painting, Australian--21st century. Art, Modern--21st century. Dewey Number: 759.994

First published in Australia in 2011 by 3E Innovative Pty. Ltd. on behalf of Stefan Dunlop. Copyright © All images Stefan Dunlop & text by respective authors. This book is copyright. Enquiries should be made to the publisher or Stefan Dunlop. www.stefandunlop.com

Design and typsetting by George Chapman and Mario Simòn at 3E Innovative. Print Production by 3E Innovative. www.3e.net.au. george@3e.net.au

From page 2 Self Portrait Study 2001 76 x 76cm Oil on linen

Collection of Michael Harding & Eric Carson

Contents Foreword Szalla Interview Crowd Notes

07 08 33

Ships Biography Acknowledgements

83 106 109

Foreword

This publication celebrates Stefan Dunlop and his trade as a modern painter. Over the past ten years Stefan has engaged with the act of painting to produce aesthetically challenging and complex works. The project grew from a chance opportunity when Dr Richard Brettell from the University of Texas saw Stefan’s paintings featured in a magazine article and invited the artist to participate in the University’s CentralTrak residency program in 2010. Originally from New Zealand, the artist has lived and studied painting and drawing in Brisbane, London and New York and has exhibited widely in these cities. His work is held in many private collections in Australia and overseas. Stefan Dunlop is a mostly figurative painter. His subjects are often unidentified people positioned in invented or borrowed landscapes, or suspended in vastly decorative though empty colour-fields. Groups of figures are often viewed in the act of undertaking something monumental, and both the theatrical and dramatic are familiar recurrences in Stefan’s images. His early still-life and portrait paintings also have dramatic overtones emphasised by stark, contrasting illumination and isolation of the subject. He draws from historical models depicting human endeavour and our struggle with nature. The major painting ‘Ships’ completed for the University of Texas residency, mirrors these ideas, depicting men in two wooden boats desperately battling the sea for their survival as colour explodes across the canvas in muscular swatches. His tonal and highly graphic style has a reductive effect on any narrative thoughts, subtly bringing the fundamental elements of image-making to the surface with seemingly simple structures while also allowing the viewer a glimpse of the painting’s complexity. Stefan Dunlop’s performance is hard to define which is the whole point and purpose of the painter who, like a tradesman, does not set out to entertain any particular emotion, theory or meaning for his art. Yenda Carson Acting Curator, 2010

University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery

Szalla Interview

“I just had to do a talk on my work and bored the shit out of myself. Nice one. Contemporary art can go fuck itself…I’m going to paint.” Dunlop, April 26th 2006

Interview with Jason D. Szalla – Beyond The New York School J.D. Who are your artistic precursors? S.D. Everybody, I think I’m very much aware of the tradition of western painting and my place in it. You are not alone with painting as it’s a game played by yourself and with others. There is an element of competitiveness. J.D. What other artist/artists or art has affected you? S.D. Well that drifts around depending on what particular series I’m involved with at a particular time. Perhaps a constant is that I like to look at all work available across history up to and including the present giving equal weight to say Rubens as to Neo Rauch. The point being one eye on the contemporary and one on history. I’m not so fixated on the contemporary. J.D. You have a degree in finance? Banking? Does this inform your painting in anyway? S.D. Nope J.D. As far as your New York Studio School studies…did you enjoy your time there? S.D. Yeah that was crazy. It was important for me as it was my first step in a conscious decision to become a full-time painter. It was funny and reminded me of the early 80s show “Fame”, everybody getting around with egos and ambitions far outweighing their realities. The teaching was good and I met my first serious art people. The Studio School taught a fundamental, observationist based figurative style and that discipline has stuck with me. I remember I was standing outside the school there one morning with a friend. Somebody walked by disssing us by saying “wannabe artists”. My mate turned to me and said, “yeah he’s right, we do want to be artists.”

Session 7 2005

140 x 124cm Charcoal on paper

J.D. After this, what do you consider your first major exhibition? How did this affect your viewpoint of your work at this time? S.D. Well I think my first major show was at the University of London Fashion Space Gallery. I think I looked at it and thought “Mmmm you might be able to paint.” You know I got a feeling from the show. Somebody wrote in the gallery notebook “More style than substance” and again I agreed with the sentiment. J.D. And now? S.D. You know with painting it’s always the next show, the next painting, the next idea, more, more, more. J.D. There seems to be this pervasive, provincial attitude in New York City that the future of art, specifically painting, belongs to a generation that is eternally younger than Jesus. Do you believe this being born in 1972? S.D. I think the obsession with youth is not restricted to painting. It’s pretty lame really but I do like hanging out with art students, they have good ideas, and the obsession is not completely misplaced. The fountain of youth eh? More seriously I respect painter’s with long careers who have been through the creative crisis several times and changed their style during that time. To me there is nothing worse than a singular style. Gerhard Richter interests me in this way, people are a bit sick of him being over exposed but I keep coming back to his work and it just blows me away, the scale and ambition of his life project. David Hockney is another that springs to mind. J.D. Is this a particularly New York viewpoint? Or do you see this psychosis globally? S.D. Oh definitely globally but it really doesn’t bother me, it’s too easy to get caught up in all of that and it’s just completely non-productive. J.D. Does being a father, a family man influence your work? S.D. Well look, life, family, day jobs, leaking roofs all need to be dealt with, you know that’s life; that’s it and from that I try to carve out this cave to work in, this time slot for the work and really it’s intensely personal in that very specific practice of painting. I think the two things can complement each other although that is often not immediately obvious. J.D. Many say painting is a solitary endeavor like writing fiction or poetry…do you believe this? S.D. Yeah I do, pretty much completely, I don’t know why but I think it is. I mean there are some collaborations, perhaps most famously between Basquiat and Warhol but on the whole I think it fails. I remember talking to you about a collaboration between yourself and Bucklin where you ended up painting each other out the whole time and the whole thing just degenerated. I think this is the general experience had by most. I know I couldn’t do it. J.D. Not to go completely off the scale, but what do you think of the never ending “white cube” gallery space, the clinically sterile but successful art fairs in which you exhibit and “promote” your paintings? S.D. Shit dude it’s the system. Honestly it’s just the system right now and you have to try and be clever to play it. People bang on about this gallery system and okay fair enough, but painting has always worked under some kind of restrictive overlay and you just have to navigate under it.

Past systems have included the 18th century French Salon system that still managed to produce Delacroix and, via agitation, the Impressionists.

I mean money and art are intrinsically linked. Michelangelo worked for the Pope, Rubens worked for Kings, then things changed. Vermeer worked for wealthy private collectors. Van Gogh has a lot to answer for, he created the romantic ideal of the starving artist, selling nothing and working “for the art”

Jennifer & Claire 2001

153 x 122cm Oil on canvas

Private Collection

but the reality is that art history rarely works this way. The bottom line is that to make paintings costs a lot of money and they need to be paid for. It’s a nuisance but they do. J.D. Your work is so dynamic and beautiful in the context of real architecture and private homes…it seems to have a pulsating life of its own…How do you personally access this in relation to what we have just addressed? The gallery space exhibitions or the global art fairs? S.D. You know something; I personally love the white walled gallery, I think the paintings work best in this context. So much energy goes into the painting itself that I’m kind of too exhausted to deal with the architecture as well. The white wall thing is pretty much a 20th/21st century thing but I think it works for the art of our time. J.D. Look Stef, after knowing you and experiencing your work for over ten years, I like to think of you as an explorer, as being adventurous, yet you have never seemed too influenced by the hype and fashion of contemporary art. So, how do you stay on top of your own game? S.D. Now we are getting down to brass tacks! There are very few people who really know what good painting is and if you set out your stall as a painter you have to believe that you have a pretty good idea about it. So you measure your work and its success against other painter’s work, not against what is said about their work or where it is hung etc. but against good work. You know what this is; you see it because with painting you use your eyes, not your mouth. So you go into a gallery and see a de Kooning that blows you away and think shit I need to lift my game, or you see a Stephen Bush and think okay, there is an entirely new level of colour there. This is how it works. The whole painting thing is held together by a very small number of good painters. J.D. Beyond the visual, do you read contemporary fiction? Go to plays? Do you read poetry or listen to the latest Rolling Stone top ten? Does any of the contemporary literature or music come into your paintings? S.D. You know I like to think not but of course you are right. It seeps into the work and I think the narrative element in my work is increasing over time. I use the Internet a bit but oddly in this digitally hyped age I also use a lot of printed matter. The Internet/Google is a super broad search, no focus, misleading. I go to the State Library and pull out old picture books on mountaineering, animals in motion, shipwrecks or whatever. The images in these books completely obliterate what you can get off the net and the imagery is richer, rarer and just not available digitally. You know we are in the middle of cultural convergence and I think that it’s boring to be all looking at the same shit. I also read contemporary art magazines, to see what everybody else is up to and enjoy the criticism of Matthew Collings over say Jerry Saltz. J.D. Again, this may be a tangent, but fuck! There seems to be some great, almost visionary distance between you and the subjects in your paintings. Even when the object is as intimate as a steak or human skull; you as executioner of the work seem to be eons away. Can you say anything about this “space” between you as the painter and your elusively simple everyday subject matter? S.D. That’s interesting because those works you mentioned are all from direct observation in the still life tradition. As you yourself know, the time spent alone with an object when painting it from observation is completely outrageous and you get to know the object like nobody else. I agree those works have a different feel from work completed from projections, imagination and gridups. But beyond that I have no explanation. It must be related to the time under observation.

Bon Voyage 2003

184 x 128cm Mixed media on canvas

Collection of Celia McLean

J.D. Do you “feel” for the subjects you choose to paint or is it simply something purely “physical” with the medium itself? Am I being too vague about a possible architecture or compositional hierarchy that drives you intuitively? S.D. I think you kid yourself that it’s purely “something cool to paint” but in reality there is a small narrative “feel” element. As an example I’ve got this idea to paint an exploding airliner because I’m really into explosions at the moment and the dynamic compositional qualities that they present and the intrinsic energy they have and also the free form of painting that they allow. The airliner part I think would put the explosion into its most extreme format, so this is the idea, based completely on what you have called a “compositional hierarchy” but I cannot deny that there is also something else going on. J.D. Have you ever thought of yourself as a “conceptual painter”? Or maybe a “classicist”? Your ideas of colour seem to be beyond the time you actually live in, yet are still rooted in the masters of the past? S.D. Well you know at the Studio School they kept telling us that every painting was conceptual, (which by the way I never understood). Look I’m a classicist, I don’t think that can be denied, definitely not conceptual. The whole conceptual thing confuses the hell out of me. I’m an object-orientated painter. The object, the painting itself, the result is what matters. The concept, the process, the ideas behind it do not. To me the proof of this is that even now we really have no idea of the concept behind a great historical painting but the object survives and astounds us. In the end the object prevails. J.D. So what is it exactly about painting that keeps you painting? S.D. Well I think that you have this idea to do something, like for example the explosion painting, and you might work towards that over a year or whatever and then one day it’s done and for me personally that’s it. That way of working cannot be repeated and I don’t think it would be even possible to repeat it. So the idea has been played out and you need to move towards another idea about painting and what you are trying to achieve. So it seems to be this kind of morphing, evolving idea about what you are trying to achieve. The key with painting is that there is no end, it’s never conquered. Right now I’m looking at some more messy painting, I’m trying to accept imperfection as a way to give the work more freedom. J.D. Because you exhibit regularly and sell to collectors; what do you think brings the public out to experience your work? Is it sheer scale? Colour? What makes the work sell? And ultimately, what do you hope they walk away with after experiencing or purchasing your paintings? S.D. Oh no the sales word, I thought that was taboo? You need to talk to Damien Hirst. I don’t know how to answer this. You just stick your work out there and hope somebody gets it. I think the work is kind of hard, there is a masculine, garish, saturated romantic feel to it and it’s not easy for people. I find the work takes time. If people dig it they need to spend a lot of time with it. It’s an edgy, cagey kind of process. I’m lucky to have had a handful of people that have supported me to date, got me this far. J.D. Given you were born in Invercargill, New Zealand, and most New Yorkers don’t even fucking know where that is…how has your birthplace come into your work? S.D. I did begin painting there in “splendid isolation” as indeed I work now. Cut off from the “Art World” or rather at a safe distance. I remember at about 15 years of age looking at Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine. They really excited me back then. I had no interest in or knowledge of contemporary art.

Andrew 2 2003

182 x 142cm Oil on canvas

Collection of Geoffrey & Susan Elder

J.D. “The visual language is part of the way we think, but not really work based around style but around a search for a certain emotional, psychological or physical need.” I ran across this quote the other day in a magazine that exploits itself as well as its contributors as “the new luxury.” Given my prejudice toward you and your painting, I felt that this was yet another throwback to the New York School shlock, yet on a Jeffry Deitch/Koonsian scale. I thought Greenberg and Pollock were dead, but apparently not? How do you feel about this considering your painting seems to be about “work”? S.D. To me I feel like I’ve got this super urgency to get work completed, this constant full-on stress level to work. Never enough time, never ever ever enough time. I think it’s a negative thing in terms of painting but I try to use it. I think that that is the key with painting. If you are isolated then you need to use that in your work. If you don’t have time then milk the stress and put the energy into your work. It reminds me of a list Diebenkorn did about how to paint, do you remember that? One of the things on the list was “Try not to get bored but if you do, use it’s destructive potential” or words to this effect. I understand what he meant by this. I’m too busy with family, work, painting to intellectualise too much about the work and this is my advantage. It allows me to avoid the shlock... If you are part of the system use the system, if not use the fact that you are not. You have to be aware that during your career you will move in and out of the system, in and out of fashion. J.D. Before I move on to a complete philosophical rant, let me ask one last… Do you believe in the painter’s ability to manifest beauty? S.D. Oh yes, completely.

Szalla interview with Stefan Dunlop, January 2011.

Szalla J.D. Szalla is a painter, writer and director born in 1972, who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has been living and working in New York City since 1999. He currently works at the Guggenheim Museum to pay the bills, while continuing to develop new work in theater, film and contemporary art. He is presently editing an up-coming Chapbook of his recent poetry based on the dive-bars of New York City entitled: “If you run out of toilet paper ask the bar tender for some more.” J.D. lives in Brooklyn with his partner, Erica Marie Miranda and daughter Izzy Stardust.

8 West 8th Street 2001 Pencil on paper

Artist Collection

Man With a Quilted Sleeve (After Titian) 2003

148 x 127cm Oil on canvas

Collection of Ben & Cassie Mercer

Old Master Lesson 1 & 2 2003 Diptych each 180 x 142.5cm, overall 180 x 285cm Oil on canvas

Private Collection

Explorers 2 2003

after photograph by Mr Alfred Gregory, a climbing member and official photographer of the 1953 British first ascent of Everest.

208 x 198cm Oil on canvas

Collection Of Renee Lewis & Andrew Stafford

Explorers 1 2003

after photograph by Mr Alfred Gregory, a climbing member and official photographer of the 1953 British first ascent of Everest.

127 x 214cm Oil on canvas

Private Collection

Explorers 3 2004

240 x 170cm Oil on canvas

Private Collection

Head 2 2003

127 x 127cm Oil on canvas

Private collection

Head 1 2003

127 x 127cm Oil on canvas

Private collection

Notebook Sketch 2002

Crowd Notes

“Crowd” began its life sourced from a black and white photograph depicting a large gathering from the early 60s, some sort of radical student protest at an Italian university campus. What I liked was the way it portrayed a large group in a dramatic circumstance, and something seemed to be happening: conflict, argument, and aggression, something significant and perhaps fundamental to our nature and relevant to our times. I'd been looking for such an image for several months. In fact the idea had been brewing for years, initiated after seeing the late work of Bruno Fonseca, Gericault and Goya. I wanted to take on some of the big, multi-layered figurative challenges that good painters of the past have tackled. I also wanted to see if I was up to it. The piece began well enough. But after several weeks it became clear that it couldn't be resolved. I had come a long way with the colour but something was lacking in the composition. If the balance and structure of a piece is wrong, everything else is superfluous. I decided to cut the canvas down and create a smaller painting, in effect a study. Having failed initially on the large-scale canvas, I started re-arranging certain figures in the painting. One figure in particular was “mirrored” or “flipped” to the other side of the canvas and I could see the piece begin to work. The colour influence came from some of the paintings in the National Gallery, London. I'd noticed in old master paintings the use of robes or togas as a device for the abstract distribution of colour, which then builds a rhythm. The Titian retrospective of 2003 was also influential – his early stuff has these huge patches of unmodulated, intensely saturated colour. A very solid colour paired with a very solid composition and shape. All this comes into my painting in a modern way. But interestingly, I'm never sure if these ideas have truly influenced the production of a piece, or emerged after the painting is finished. What I do know is that “Crowd” is largely decorative, and I like the interplay of a subtle narrative within a purely pictorial device.

Extract from Talking Pictures, Interview by Will Cantopher, BBC London 2004.

Crowd 2004

163 x 229cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Crowd Study 2004

127 x 152cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Eric Titian & I 2006

153 x 153cm Oil on linen

Collection of Tony & Barbara Brooks

Session 10 2005

140 x 124cm Charcoal on paper

Private Collection

Office 2004

127 x 143cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Skull 2 2007

76 x 76cm Oil on linen

Collection of Raymond Manton

Sirloin & Sauce 2007

36 x 49cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Chicken 2 2009

56 x 46cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

T-bone 2007

45 x 45cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Spoon & Two Knives 2007 46 x 44cm Oil on linen

Collection of Geoffrey & Susan Elder

Foam Cup 2007

38 x 30cm Oil on linen

Collection of Michael Harding & Eric Carson

Cap, Cup & Bottle 2007 50 x 60cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

8 Figures 2008 260 x 184cm Oil on linen

Fight 2008

138 x 169cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

3 Figures 2008

180 x 176cm Oil on linen

After the Fight 2008

143 x 91cm Oil on linen

Collection of Stephen & Christina Train

4 Figures 2009 156 x 360cm Oil on linen

Stations 2009

107 x 100cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

2 Figures 2008

166 x 124cm Oil on linen

Capitalism is Exhausting 2009 152 x 132cm Oil on linen

Artist talk, University of Texas at Dallas 2010

Small Fall 2008

61 x 61cm Oil on linen

Collection of Matthew Stafford

Realism 2009

40 x 40cm Oil on linen

Yellow Road 2009

153 x 137cm Oil on linen

Parliament House Collection, Canberra

Big Fall 2008

240 x 190cm Oil on linen

Grey Day (After Streeton) 2009 40 x 40cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Cloud Land 2009

40 x 40cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

23 December 2008 Extract of email from Stefan Dunlop to Geoffrey Elder Landscape painting: Plein Air Study 1 [Pomona] “I’ve recently completed some small landscapes. They were done ‘plein air’ after looking at some traditional Australian Landscape painting (Condor, Streeton etc.). The painting Plein Air Study 1 [Pomona] has some very strong intense colour, but it actually is the exact colour of the grass here in Spring. Although it looks a bit impressionistic, it is not. It is of a cattle farm looking down a valley towards a dammed creek. I was looking for the blistering heat and super intense reality of the place at about 11:00am in the morning over the twelve visits. It was one of those farms with patches of bracken, scrub and spear grass amongst the grass. A really enjoyable painting to make – for a change.”

Plein Air Study 2 2009

60 x 60cm Oil on linen

Collection of Geoffrey & Susan Elder

Smoke 2009

40 x 40cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

More Smoke 2010

60 x 60cm Oil on linen

Notebook Sketch 2002

Ships Study 2010

46 x 79cm Oil on linen

Richard Brettell

Ships

Stefan Dunlop arrived in Dallas Texas to paint, and he came to the right place. He had a light-filled studio in which to live and work, very few expectations placed upon him, and sufficient material for a concentrated campaign. And campaign it was. He worked almost every day and most nights for somewhat more than a month—with the odd visit to a museum or gallery or a pot-luck supper with other artists in the program called CentralTrak in which he found himself. His fellow artists were from Europe and the US, but, although he interacted pleasantly with them, he never let these encounters get in the way of his painting. He DID permit the odd “crit” with a fellow painter, an art historian, a local collector, or a grad student, but these exercises in critical discourse were so focused on his own project that they were, in effect, part of it rather than an interruption from it. He poured paint, pushed paint, scraped paint, talked about paint, painted with paint—moving his two large square canvases from the floor to the wall and back again to the floor over and over and over. How did he get to Dallas? The story of the journey is almost as interesting as his pictorial adventure. It began with the publication of the home and studio he shares with his wife and children in an international architectural magazine called DWELL. As an architectural groupie and founder of CentralTrak AND a fan of what one might call “real painting,” I saw in DWELL a photograph of Stefan Dunlop working on a very large canvas representing several figures and was immediately interested in the combination of body-imagery and physicality in his work. Thank God for the web, because we were shortly in touch by email, and I offered him the chance to get away briefly from family responsibilities and to throw himself completely into painting in a part of the world at once unfamiliar to him and comparatively easy to access both culturally and linguistically. In other words, the huge physical distance between Australia and Texas combined with a cultural connection that made it possible for Stefan Dunlop to spring into action.

When one meets Stefan Dunlop, he is modest, attractive and very friendly. Yet, his easy-going way masks an intensity that grows with each encounter. He is, as a man and as an artist, completely focused on what he is doing, and it almost seems that his friendliness is a veneer that masks his own determined and largely solitary work ethic. If anyone thinks that painting is “easy,” all s(he) has to do is to meet Stefan Dunlop to find that the opposite is true. He pushes himself both physically and intellectually, becoming his own worst critic and forcing himself again and again to rethink his method before and after each “attack” on the canvas. Because he is so technically proficient and also has a flair for decorative colour harmonies, he feels that he has to push himself to make strong rather than “attractive” works of art— and it is the hi-wire performance of beauty with strength that defines his work. While at CentralTrak, he decided to work on a diptych of square canvases that form, in effect, a continuous pictorial field. He knew, of course, of the late horizontal landscapes by van Gogh (one in the Dallas Museum of Art) that, like his, adopted a “double square” format. Yet, he elected both to enlarge each square and to make them physically separate so that it was impossible to create a single seamless pictorial field à la van Gogh. He also elected to paint a subject that was far from his own direct experience in an inland-studio in Texas— filling both square canvases with two archaic wooden boats crammed with sailors who have abandoned their vast sinking ships and given themselves over to the elements. Their collective struggle for survival is the “subject” of this diptych, doubling in intensity in Dunlop’s two square canvases. The subject forces one immediately back to art history—or to the heroic theatrics of films like Mutiny on the Bounty or any of the pirate flicks with Johnny Depp. Indeed, the kind of Australian masculinity of Russell Crowe collides with the highart pictorial worlds of Gericault, Turner, and numerous Dutch marine painters in Dunlop’s ambitious diptych. The imagery is, thus, at once historically imbedded and contemporary—as if to remind us that art can push us to re-encounter the elemental world of nature as it collides with our will and our sense of destiny. For Dunlop, paint is itself the medium for this primal encounter—and he pours, pushes, and physically cajoles it into pools that almost swim on the canvas, pushing up against each other, colliding, and occasionally covering each other.

Old Master Lesson 1 & 2 2006

Diptych each 180 x 142.5cm, overall 180 x 285cm Oil on linen

private collection

A Woman Bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffel, Rembrandt) 1654 61 x 47cm

The National Gallery, London

The Raft of the Medusa (Théodore Géricault) 1818 – 1819 Musée du Louvre, Paris

75 x 120cm Oil on linen

Tampa 2009 private collection

The sheer physicality of his paint is what separates his aesthetic from the equally “pooled” pictorial world of American colour-field painters like Frankenthaler and Louis, for whom paint was so thinned that it literally penetrated the canvas “ground.” By contrast, Dunlop’s paint is thick, viscous, and palpable, retaining, that is, its sense of liquidity even when dry. It is, indeed, when it is wet that Dunlop retains his power over paint. By the time it is dry, his love affair with it is over. Like many artists of the modern era, Dunlop is fascinated by the various “art histories” accessible to the global artist. Not only has he encountered major works of Western easel painting on his numerous travels to museums in London, Paris and New York, but, like all great artists in the Western museum tradition, he also loves reproductive images of many sorts, and his studios are filled with prints, photographs, and drawings of absent works of art.

Goya, Daumier, Tiepolo, Gericault, Muybridge, Rubens, and others fight for recognition in pictorial collages on his studio walls and tables with newsreel photographs of old and contemporary digital media. Each retains its integrity in these temporary collages, but each is put into the gristmill of Dunlop’s imagination for different—and highly specific—reasons. Compositional energy comes from Gericault and Rubens, particular figures from Daumier and Goya, and a sense of informality and immediacy from the photographic sources. The “meanings” of these sources in the art historical sense is of minimal importance to Dunlop, who carouses through the centuries with little regard for accuracy and consistency—an almost Australian swagger of a visual sort.What is, for me, most interesting and compelling about Dunlop’s recent art is the sheer beauty of its chromatic and compositional harmonies in contrast with its highly theatrical subject matter. His scruffy sailors clamoring for life in the midst of the vast, energetic emptiness of the sea are represented in gorgeous oranges, terracottas, and sienas, while the atmosphere that battles them is granny-apple green, mint green, pretty pale blue, and gorgeous warm grey. Dunlop the voluptuary is in open warfare with Dunlop the tragic story teller. When Stefan Dunlop left Dallas, his diptych was almost, but not quite, finished. He had struggled with and against it daily for weeks, but he calmly rolled it up and took it back to Australia to be re-stretched, re-encountered, and rethought. He flew across that same great Pacific Ocean that he had evoked in paint and drove along almost rural roads to a modern house overlooking the sea. His journey was a postmodern one, the chief unpleasantnesses of which were pat-downs in security, bad food, and long hours of sitting in an airplane. But the pictorial journey he had taken was both longer and more demanding, one taken by so many Australians for several centuries. His paintings of men adrift in vast pictorial oceans might seem oddly outof-date given our global world, but they take us back to our ancestors for whom the world was an angrier and much larger place.

Study After 12 figures (Yellow) 2010 40 x 40cm Oil on linen

Richard Robson Brettell, Ph.D.

Richard R. Brettell is professor of Aesthetic Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. With three degrees from Yale University, he has taught at the University of Texas, Northwestern University, The University of Chicago, Yale University, and Harvard University and is currently Margaret McDermott Distinguished Professor of Aesthetic Studies in the Interdisciplinary Program in Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is also an international museum consultant with projects in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He has recently been appointed the Director of the Paul Gauguin Catalogue Raisonné for the Wildenstein Institute in Paris and was the guest curator for Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1900 for the National Gallery, London, the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2000-2001). His many books include From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern (2009, Yale University Press), The Robert Lehman Collection: 19th and 20th Century Painting, (Princeton University Press, 2009), Gauguin and Impressionism (2005, Yale University Press), Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1900 (2001, Yale University Press), Modern Art, 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation (2000, The Oxford History of Art) and Monet to Moore: The Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation (2000, Yale University Press). In 2003, 19th and 20th Century European Drawings in the Lehman Collection for the Metropolitan Museum was published by Princeton University Press, and his scholarly catalogue of 19th Century European Painting in the Norton Simon Museum, co-authored with Stephen Eisenman of Northwestern University, (2006 Yale University Press). He has also published books on the work of Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin as well as a major study of Impressionist landscape painting.

An Actor Honoré Daumier n.d. 25 x 17cm Pen, ink, wash, paper, laid

Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection

Ships 2010 Diptych each 168 x 183cm, overall 168 x 366cm Oil on linen

Tampa 2009

75 x 120cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Study, 12 Figures 2010 55 x 120cm Oil on linen

Study, 2 figures 2010

46 x 49cm Oil on linen

Private Collection

Men with Wings 2010 40 x 40cm Oil on linen

Phthalocyanine 2010 120 x 90cm Oil on linen

Millmerran 2010

152 x 132cm Oil on linen

100

101

Banana Republic 2011 127 x 127cm Oil on linen

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Peter Saul

“The people I taught were undergraduates, who weren’t planning on being artists anyway. And they were very easily discouraged. I couldn’t keep them working. If they took the picture home and a parent, boyfriend, girlfriend didn’t like it, that was the end of it. They didn’t finish it. They might even quit the class because some family member thought the work looked stupid. I mean, it’s just hopeless. I came to the conclusion after teaching for 19 years that it’s a personality thing rather than a talent thing. Some people persist and insist that you look at what they’ve done. They won’t let you out of the room without seeing it. Those are the artists.” Daniel Kunitz Interview with Peter Saul, Modern Painters, November 2010.

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Self Portrait as Rembrandt After Rembrandt 2010 40 x 40cm Oil on linen

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Stefan Dunlop Biography Studies 2010 2002 2001 2001 2000 1994 – 1996 1994 – 1996

University of Texas Artist Residency – CentralTrak – Dallas Texas USA Part-time Study – Slade School of Fine Art – London UK New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture – New York USA Part-time Study – Slade School of Fine Art – London UK Part-time Study – Chelsea College of Art – London UK Brisbane Institute of Art – Brisbane Australia University of Queensland – Bachelor of Commerce – Australia

Select Solo Exhibitions 2012 University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery – Australia 2011 Edwina Corlette Gallery – Brisbane Australia 2009 Select Paintings – Edwina Corlette Gallery – Brisbane Australia 2008 The First Lie of Painting – Axia Modern Art – Melbourne Australia 2007 Recent Paintings – Tim Olsen Annex Gallery – Sydney Australia 2006 Pick of the Crop – Noosa Regional Gallery – Australia 2006 New Work – Fisher Galleries – Auckland New Zealand Stefan Dunlop Painting – University of the Arts – London 2004 2003 Cracker – Recent Paintings – Goya Galleries – Melbourne Australia 2003 Cracker – Recent Paintings – House of Phillips Fine Art – Sydney Australia People Places – Recent paintings – House of Phillips Fine Art – Sydney Australia 2002 Recent Paintings – Rex-Livingston Contemporary Art – Sydney Australia 2002

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Select Group Exhibitions 2011 Wattle – Cat Street Gallery – Hong Kong 2010 Art Hong Kong 10 – Cat Street Gallery – Hong Kong 2010 The Stan and Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize, Gold Coast City Art Gallery – Australia 2010 London Art Fair – COMODAA – London 2010 Recent Acquisitions – Parliament House Collection – Canberra Australia 2010 Clayton Utz Launch Art Award – Brisbane Australia 2010 Signal 8 – Cat Street Gallery – Hong Kong 2010 Approach to the Landscape – AXIA Modern Art – Melbourne 2009 Iain Dawson Gallery – Sydney Australia 2009 Australia Now – COMODAA – London UK 2009 Launch – Metro Arts/Clayton Utz – Brisbane Australia 2009 Chronology – The Cat Street Gallery – Hong Kong 2009 Edwina Corlette Gallery – Brisbane Australia 2009 Noosa Regional Gallery, Travelling Scholarship Show – Australia 2008 Edwina Corlette Gallery – Brisbane Australia 2008 Duke Gold Coast Art Prize – Gold Coast City Art Gallery – Australia 2008 2 x 2 – Tim Olsen Gallery – Sydney Australia Narrative – Brenda May Gallery – Sydney Australia 2008 Still Life – Brenda May Gallery – Sydney Australia 2008 Sunshine Coast Art Prize – Caloundra Regional Art Gallery – Australia 2007 2006 Conrad Jupiters Gold Coast Art Prize – Gold Coast City Art Gallery – Australia 2006 Tim Olsen Gallery – Sydney Australia Art Aid – Royal College of Art – London 2005 2004 This Is 7, International Exhibition of New Painting – Academy of Art Architecture & Design, Charles University – Prague – Czech Republic Compression – New Paintings Stefan Dunlop & Jason Szalla, 2003 Ensign Gallery – London 2003 Conrad Jupiters Gold Coast Art Prize – Gold Coast City Art Gallery – Australia 2003 Goya Galleries – Melbourne – Australia 2002 House of Phillips Fine Art – Saint George Bank – Sydney Australia House of Phillips Fine Art – Xavier College – Melbourne Australia 2002 Sadler Fine Arts – Mad River Post – New York 2001 1991 Excellence in Youth Art – Brisbane Australia

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Acknowledgements Special thanks to: Rick Brettell for his enthusiasm and for staying psyched about the project. Also to the University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery and the sponsors who have assisted with this publication. To Michael Harding, Eric Carson and Geoffry Elder for their generous support. To Jon Linkins for his photography of the majority of the work as well as for moral and professional support, and to Mario & George from 3E for all of their hard work. To J.D Szalla, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe the hype. And finally, to my family and friends for their constant encouragement.

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