Richard Dunlop - A Northern Survey Catalogue

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Perc Tucker Regional Gallery 20 July - 9 September 2018

Publisher Perc Tucker Regional Gallery Galleries, Townsville City Council PO Box 1268 Townsville Queensland, 4810 Australia ptrg@townsville.qld.gov.au ŠGalleries, Townsville City Council and the authors 2018 ISBN: 978-0-949461-27-8 Organised by Perc Tucker Regional Gallery

Published on the occasion of

Perc Tucker Regional Gallery 20 July - 9 September 2018

Jonathan McBurnie Erwin Cruz Rob Donaldson Carly Sheil Amy Licciardello Leonardo Valero Emily Donaldson Stephanie Smith Tanya Tanner Lucy Belle Tesoriero Sarah Reddington Nicole Richardson Wendy Bainbridge Jo Lankester Rachel Cunningham Michael Favot Chloe Lindo Jake Pullyn

Creative Director Exhibitions and Collection Coordinator Digital Media and Exhibition Design Coordinator Digital Media and Exhibition Design Officer Business Support Officer Exhibitions Officer Exhibitions Officer Collections Management Officer Public Art Officer Curatorial Assistant Education and Programs Officer Education and Programs Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant

Image cover: Rainforest [detail] 2008 Oil on Belgian linen 183 x 243cm Image inside cover: Trip to North Queensland [detail] 2018 Oil and mixed media 120 x 180cm Image inside back cover: All That Big Rain Coming Down [detail] 2007 Oil on Belgian linen 180 x 300cm City of Townsville Art Collection Perc Tucker Regional Gallery Cnr. Denham and Flinders St Townsville QLD 4810 Mon - Fri: 10am - 5pm Sat - Sun: 10am - 2pm

(07) 4727 9011 ptrg@townsville.qld.gov.au whatson.townsville.qld.gov.au PercTuckerTCC

Contributing Authors Eric Nash Phil Brown Marguerite Brown Publication Design and Development Rob Donaldson

CONTENTS

FOREWORD 8 Dr Jonathan McBurnie

TO SEE A WORLD AS RICHARD DUNLOP DOES

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RICHARD DUNLOP’S GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

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Eric Nash

Phil Brown

RICHARD DUNLOP - EARTHLY ALCHEMY 35 Marguerite Brown

FOREWORD

It is with pride that I preface Richard Dunlop’s exhibition, A Northern Survey, by saying that Dunlop and his work really needs no preface. The man has been kicking around the Australian landscape (pun definitely intended) for a few decades now, and is as generous with his time and energy as he is in his work. One cannot help but think of Dunlop as an artist with a keen eye for detail and composition, but rather than create work slavishly to these watchwords, he chooses invocation.

Despite careful use of earthy tones and colours, the works demonstrate a clear love of paint that is pleasantly refreshing in this era of dogged photorealism.

The manicured outdoor spaces of the garden and the park are an interesting entry point into this body of work, especially considering their designation as Northern; North Queenslanders, especially Townsvillians, are quite fearsome when it comes to their rights to not just any water, but specifically water for the garden. Here, outdoor spaces are essential to our way of life, not so much a right or privilege, but a necessity.

The outdoors is by no means Dunlop’s only line of artistic exploration by any stretch, and we are lucky enough to be exhibiting a broad selection of the artist’s work. But perhaps Dunlop’s interest in this part of the world, which is an incredibly special and unique place from both cultural and geographic perspectives, is most influenced by this direction. Certainly, North Queensland is a place that has drawn the artist back again and again, and we are honoured to host this beautiful and rich selection of the work of Richard Dunlop.

Dr Jonathan McBurnie

Image overleaf

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Agriculture, Papua New Guinea 2001 Oil on Belgian linen 170 x 340cm Collection: QUT

Meat, Barcelona [detail] 2010 Oil on Belgian linen 90 x 90cm Collection of Michael Fox Arts Accountant & Valuer, Melbourne

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Lantana 2005 Oil on Belgian linen 152 x 152cm Courtesy of the artist and Rockhampton Art Gallery 12

Still life with Pelican’s Head 2000 Oil on Belgian linen 167 x 175cm Courtesy of the artist and Rockhampton Art Gallery 13

The Cure 2008 Mixed media on cotton rag 200 x 100cm Private collection

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TO SEE A WORLD AS RICHARD DUNLOP DOES To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

- William Blake There could be no more fitting title for Richard Dunlop’s most recent exhibition than A Northern Survey, a show which amounts to a quasi-survey of around 20 years of the artist’s leading role in Australian painting’s resurgence, and one which also presents two new bodies of work created in response to Dunlop’s surveying of Northern Australia’s reef and rainforest landscapes.

Of the pictures, Dunlop explained, “Gardens are the perfect intersection of nature and culture; a form of architecture posing as nature. They are attempts for people to be grounded, but they are very much about control and order.” As Dunlop explores in works such as The Cure (2008) by blending botanical illustrative structures and painterly lyricism, the garden does pose an interesting conundrum. In its intent, a garden can be seen as a celebration of nature in all its glory, providing a space for escape, connection and enjoyment to counter our increasingly urbanised experience of the world.

However, it can in part reinforce this urbanised reality, reminding us of, or perhaps even triumphing in, our ability to study nature, classify it, and (at times) bend it to our will.

Dunlop’s contribution to the nation’s painting discourse is an entirely original one in which he has consistently incorporated, intersected, and challenged the longestablished landscape, botanical, figurative and still life traditions. Speaking to this point, Gilbert Meadowcroft celebrated his “breaking new ground in terms of a hybridisation of the Australian traditions of landscape painting and botanical illustration.”

...Though, in following this line of inquiry to such a ‘natural’ conclusion, perhaps I stumble upon the real conundrum, that of again needing to classify something as one or the other. I expect the artist would remind me that the world is not so black and white, but rather a blurred, light-filled plane of co-existing possibilities, heaving veils of colour and sensuous forms. Perhaps a garden is both things simultaneously, perhaps it is neither...

Much of Dunlop’s work is an inquiry into the human need for order and control, and escaping into his fictive worlds - which only seek to assume a sense of reality, and in doing so, transcend it - can act as a circuit breaker for the viewer so that they may instead see the interconnectedness of things; not only of art traditions to each other, but also of person to place, culture to nature, the finite to the infinite, and memory to experience.

Dunlop’s enduring interest in the human urge to study and classify is also seen in tattoo works such as Self Portrait with Asmat Shields (2000) and Firehead (Kylie tattooed with Bayeaux Tapestry) (2006-2013). Referencing fields of natural science studies, most notably entomology, this series of works also speaks to the artist’s fascination with people who choose to ‘permanently’ etch a sense of their identity on their body for the public to view, as if individual identity is frozen, fixed in time, as opposed to a fluid process of growth, destruction and recreation on loop.

(The permanency of the mark itself can also be called into question, with the ravages of nature and the body decay that comes with time paying no mind to a human urge for a lasting image.)

Such inquiry into our thirst for control is evident in the ongoing series of garden paintings, which I was fortunate to encounter in the exhibition Second Nature. The show included works from the period 1992-2005 and toured to Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in 2008, providing the platform for my first meeting with the artist.

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Firehead (Kylie tattooed with Bayeaux Tapestry) 2006-13 Oil on Belgian linen 120 x 180cm Private collection, Mt Eliza 16

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Townsville audiences may recall related tattoo works included in the Pinnacles Gallery exhibition A Permanent Mark; this curatorial passion project provided the setting for my second interaction with the artist, and in developing this project it became obvious that tattoo (like many of the areas of interest Dunlop pursues) was a well of inspiration he would return to from time to time, harbouring no desire to complete bodies of work sequentially but rather to follow his artistic inclinations of the time. No idea is explored with a final destination in mind. Interests and thoughts evolve naturally, shaped by experience, place and memory, and are then distilled through paint.

Prior to a public falling out, Dunlop’s former art dealer Ray Hughes stressed Dunlop’s achievement in this regard, stating, “The function of the artist is to describe the world in the first person: this is my life, this is my set of experiences.

If you get twenty-five or thirty people like Bill Robinson, Joe Furlonger or Richard Dunlop who describe their world in the first person and you weave them together you start to get some sort of fabric of our society. I’ve got a basic belief that the eccentrics, the mavericks, the one-offs are the real artistic mainstream.”

Dunlop’s is a refreshing approach to painting, an authenticity of vision and voice that has allowed him to resist fashions and trends, periods and fads, orthodoxy and conformity - all trappings of the current gallery dynamic which sees many curators follow a proven style of the period rather than taking significant and consistent risks to present new ideas. Heaven forbid art should break from a fashionable mould.

Recognising this, we understand that all of Dunlop’s works, though impressive as self-contained images, are interconnected and achieve a collective strength over time.

While A Northern Survey can only include a cross-section of works from the last 20 odd years of his career, this much is already evident.

As far back as 1992, while the artist was still in the first decade of his professional practice, Dunlop recognised that the meaning of his work would “reside in the accumulation of images over time. I’m keen to make things that don’t exist and hope that they resonate with other souls. That’s it. Call it a serialised autobiographical narrative, a visual diary, a personal evolving garden, a small cathedral or whatever ancestors tried to create. I know that enough people will get it in time.”

Knowing as much as we do about Dunlop’s authentic, personal, continuous approach to painting allows us to grapple with the seemingly counter-intuitive fact that his two most recent series, exploring reef and rainforest, can be both seamless additions to his oeuvre, and ambitious and experimental departures.

Dunlop has been a regular visitor to rainforests throughout his life, including during visits to North Queensland, and through his curriculum development work in the 1990s for international aid agencies and the UN, work which would take him to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Tonga, and East Timor. These travels informed early rainforest works which underlined his mastery of light and deft hand in building up landscapes with great depth through the overlay of countless veils of colour, inviting the viewer to escape into the picture.

Dunlop has understood from the beginning that the only truly unique and original contribution he can make is his own - to show the world as he has experienced it.

Each vision he presents us with incorporates his personal experiences, consciously or otherwise. Spaces are coloured by memory, be it his childhood and early adulthood in Brisbane; studies in Education, Philosophy, and of course, Art; travels around the world, including periods living in Switzerland, Melbourne, and most recently his relocation to Tasmania; a passionate engagement with art history; and of course the passion, pleasure and pain of personal relationships. In many ways, the works are images of settings and vessels on which to hang or store his thoughts, rather than paintings of the place or thing itself.

A series exploring the magical Paluma environment presented a natural segue for inclusion in A Northern Survey, though just as the tattoo works were painted with a view to entomology, these new rainforest pictures have been painted “through the eyes of 19th century botanical / naturalist’s dispositions towards nature.”

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Self-Portrait with Asmat Shield 2000 Oil on Belgian linen 30 x 30cm Private Collection

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Colonial Style 2008 Oil on archival paper 90 x 180cm Private collection, Sydney

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The consistent call for viewers to consider our relationship with nature is also an invitation to re-consider our impact upon it in both broad and specific terms. While bravado or brashness in conveying environmental and/or political messages through painting may currently be en vogue, Dunlop again resists any lure of fashion in this respect. For instance, while some works within the exhibition suggest the folly of mining (topical given the exhibition’s Townsville setting and current discourse of the region), there are none that could be considered overtly political or moralistic, and certainly not didactic. Dunlop understands that completely lifting the veil on his thoughts on any such issues would undermine their power, inhibit the sheer joy of seeing how he can make paint dance, flow and achieve enviable luminosity. Herein lies the genius, as it is the joy of viewing the painting that enables escapism. It creates a prolonged engagement for the audience to view his paintings with the sensitivity and consideration with which they were crafted; a meaningful conversation between viewer and work that allows the former to seek and find the deeper meaning.

Dunlop employs translucent films of colour, juxtaposed and intermingled with more defined marine life forms, to handsomely approximate the underwater dance of light - a shadow play in which depth perception in every direction is disarmingly distorted, and solid edges are constantly flickering and shifting with refractions triggered by every movement of both form and ocean.

Having depicted landscapes intersecting with botanical studies that border on a macro view of our world, and many other scenes at a more ‘traditional’ scale, the seeming endlessness of the ocean is surely an exciting scene of experimentation for the artist. How can one convey an underwater landscape that is so vast, and still so mysterious, that it assumes a sense of the infinite in our minds?

Eddie De Wolf mused in his essay Infinity and the Universe that “from time immemorial, man has turned his gaze toward the heavens and wondered about the vast expanses of space and the sense of infinity it impressed upon him. To most it inspired awe, to some a sense of futility, to others that of fear and loneliness. Infinity has often had a strong emotional component and raised all sorts of fundamental questions.”

Francis Bacon once said, “an illustrated form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact.” That this should be one of Dunlop’s favourite quotes by the artist tells us that he is keenly aware of the manner in which he engages his audience, both aesthetically and conceptually.

Dunlop has gazed out into infinity before of course, as in his series painted in response to Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea. In his most recent reef works, perhaps he gazes to sea once more to wrestle with the infinite in the finite unknown.

The reef series presents Dunlop with a whole new set of challenges, most evidently the treatment of light, and the possibilities of landscapes that don’t simply stretch towards a horizon but also extend below and above.

I do expect over the ensuing years that his gaze will wander however, back and forward to old wells of inspiration and new ideas alike, all building towards the completion of a collective masterpiece that will only be achieved with the embrace of our finite reality.

Undoubtedly attracted to the challenge, Dunlop acknowledges the reef as “a relatively untouched” landscape subject offering “a subject to play around with depth and space and multi-perspectives of levitating fish.” His approach is informed by recent visits, and also “filtered memories of reef, and experiments in achieving particular relationships of light, depth, and movement in a painted surface, in some distinctive way.”

Eric Nash Artist | Writer | Curator

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All That Big Rain Coming Down 2007 Oil on Belgian linen 180 x 300cm City of Townsville Art Collection

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Miranda’s Favourite Balancing Trick 2002-08 Oil on Belgian linen 180 x 120cm Private Collection

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Last Night with a Great White (Two Fish Inside) 2011 Oil on Belgian linen 200 x 115cm 25

RICHARD DUNLOP’S GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS I can’t think of the work of Richard Dunlop without Voltaire coming to mind. The French writer and philosopher, Francois-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the name Voltaire explored the meaning and meaninglessness of life in his classic picaresque novel Candide.

He depicts Queensland as a tropical paradise in his work and celebrates the reality and the mythology of his memories of Queensland in the same breath. He identifies as a Queensland artist, an idea that is now less unfashionable than it once was. And he says he is still sustained and inspired by the fecundity of his childhood world, a world that he constantly reflects upon his work.

His early travels in North and Far North Queensland also still resonate.

After experiencing the world Candide famously retreated to his home and concluded that, after all is said and done “we must go and work in the garden”. This sage if somewhat enigmatic advice has been interpreted in many ways since Candide was first published in 1759. I see it as an admonition to concentrate, or cultivate, what is at hand … to focus on the microcosm rather than the macrocosm.

Richard Dunlop has been cultivating his own metaphorical garden for decades and this exhibition demonstrates the rich harvest yielded from this process. This show is, according to the artist, “a mid-career survey of sorts” and it is also a fascinating window into what he has been doing in that garden of his, the artist’s studio. Dunlop appreciates the Voltairean analogy and quotes the Roman politician and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero on the matter.

“As a kid I traipsed through reefs and rainforests every holiday of my life and I spent the rest of the time fishing the length of Enoggera Creek in Brisbane for freshwater fish I would sell to commercial aquariums,” Dunlop recalls. “I still get up to Queensland regularly and that refreshes my memory.”

Dunlop points out that the reefs and rainforests of the north have been somewhat neglected in the world of Australian art. Fred Williams and John Olsen did make forays to Queensland but others focussed on the outback while fellow Queensland artist William Robinson painted the rainforests of the border ranges.

It was Cicero who said “if you have a garden and a library you have everything you need”.

“But the only person who I can think of who has done the reef is Ken Done,” Dunlop says. “The outback has been done to death but we really don’t have many paintings of the reef.”

“I’ve always remembered that,” Dunlop says. “For me, I think that all you really need is this body of knowledge, an accumulation of congealed wisdom, something to confirm that all things are interrelated.”

Nowadays Dunlop divides his time between his home and studio in Deloraine, Tasmania, where he lives with wife Kylie, and Hawley Beach near Devonport, where he has a place that reminds him of childhood and the family fibro holiday shack on the Gold Coast before it was transformed into a high-rise hell. Tasmania is now the garden where Dunlop sows his seeds and cultivates his rich oeuvre. Here Queensland still dominates his inner world – a world where memories of the subtropical Brisbane of his youth and childhood forays north and beyond infuse. The poet William Wordsworth talked about poetry being “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Echoing Wordsworth, Richard Dunlop says his paintings are “remembrances distilled by time”.

Nowhere is this interrelation more evident than in Dunlop’s beautiful and inspiring paintings of nature. In the verdant tangle of his botanical works or his more enigmatic landscapes (works that defy the normal conventions of the genre) cosmic reality and the life force that quickens our world is expressed with verve and beauty.

I have followed Dunlop’s career since we were near neighbours in Brisbane’s inner-north a couple of decades ago. His works have always seemed to me refreshingly beautiful in an age that often eschews beauty.

Since then he has moved away from the world that shaped him – first to Melbourne and now to Tasmania. But the idea of north has remained a constant. Growing up in Ashgrove in Brisbane’s west his young world was one of the green tangles of a subtropical city and that has stayed with him as a touchstone that he returns to time and time again.

The man who approaches the canvas is still also the boy who loved the unruly, jungly, Henri Rousseau-style gardens he used to pass by on his way to school. That imagery has always stayed with him wherever he goes.

A conversation about art with Dunlop will, inevitably, at some point, turn to one of his favourite painters - Ian Fairweather, the hermit artist of Bribie Island. Fairweather too painted distilled remembrances and later paintings often echoed his earlier life, in particular his Oriental adventures. Dunlop identifies strongly with Fairweather’s Orientalism.

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Rainforest 2008 Oil on Belgian linen 183 x 243cm

Image overleaf Still Life of How to Start a War 2000 Oil on Belgian linen 152 x 304cm Collection: Hugo Weaving and Katrina Greenwood

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Meat, Barcelona 2010 Oil on Belgian linen 90 x 90cm Collection of Michael Fox Arts Accountant & Valuer, Melbourne

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“There are all sorts of explanations as to why Fairweather painted China when he visited it 30 years before he painted it, “ Dunlop says. “I understand that. In the same way, even though I’m away from Queensland and have been for years, I’m still working on that project and the project is to paint quintessentially Queensland pictures that other people won’t paint.” In the art world this is almost akin to the State of Origin cry of “Queenslander!”

“It might seem a little kooky to create something aimed at 4-6 year olds which was what made it so enjoyably taboo and irreverent to make,” Dunlop says. One of the paintings featured in the animation is Still Life of How to Start A War, a work owned by the actor Hugo Weaving. This piece is an appropriate inclusion for Townsville, an army town and home to veterans of conflict.

While Dunlop’s work has an immediate impact on the viewer he also encourages people to spend time … to tarry awhile. “You need to spend time in front of a work to understand it,” he says. “With my paintings, I feel that if people take that time they will be rewarded.” Although he confesses that sometimes even after doing so some people are still left scratching their heads.

Like Fairweather, Dunlop is attracted to Eastern philosophy, particularly the Taoist vision of the intertwined relationship between nature and man, heaven and earth. For me Dunlop’s work is spiritual although he’s a practical fellow who expresses no spiritual aspirations in conversation.

He allows the viewer to add layers of meaning. There’s a certain spirituality encapsulated in his vision of the life force that flows through everything. Dylan Thomas wrote about that in his poem The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower. That force, wrote Thomas, “drives my green age”. I can’t look at the complex botanical works of Dunlop without thinking of those lines and that “green age”.

For him meaning is sometimes ambivalent, subjective, and even irrelevant to his process. He’s often more interested in the practicalities of the paint and the alchemy of the painterly process.

“People will say to me that a painting they bought looks different at different times,” Dunlop says. “They will see it in the afternoon and there will be this luminosity that wasn’t there in the morning.”

For his part, Dunlop is often more interested in the process than the metaphysical dimensions of his art.

“To paraphrase Fairweather, I like to make a mess and then make some sense of it,” he says. “The way I tend to paint these days is in concentrated bursts like an expressionist, to contain energy and movement and then to have them sit around for some time.” Later Dunlop will return to try and make more sense of his “mess”.

They will talk about how his painting lights up like a stained glass window filtering sunlight, speaking in almost reverent tones about the effect and meaning of that. But the everpractical artist insists that his paintings are just objects he’s making.

Recently he’s been interested in creating works with a mysterious internal light and “the suggestion of deep recessional space in watery environments, achieved with countless layers of transparent oil juxtaposed with opaques”.

“I’m most interested in the way the paint behaves and how to get different effects,” He says. “And I’m interested in constant experimentation. I sometimes look at other artists and they are painting the same picture year in year out because it’s a safe bet and they are making a reasonable living. They grind away at the same plot. I think they are missing out on the joy of experimentation. I love it and I’m just struggling to make the pictures as well as I can. That’s the whole story.”

“The reef is a perfect subject to hang paint on these ideas and it’s a frontier in terms of Australia’s long standing landscape tradition.”

The reef has also been the inspiration for his most whimsical work, Reef Aquarium, a 5-minute animation aimed at children developed with Mick Madden of Studio Madden, which promises to be one of the surprises of his Townsville show.

And while other artists may “grind away at the same plot” Dunlop is constantly digging away and planting new seeds in his own garden. Voltaire would approve.

Phil Brown Arts Editor, The Courier-Mail

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Sublime East Gingko and Water Landscape 2005-2017 Oil on Belgian linen 243 x 183cm 32

Vessel 2011 Oil on canvas 180 x 150cm

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Harvest from the Land and Also from the Sea 2010 Oil on Belgian linen 180 x 300cm

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Mangrove (After Fairweather) 2008 Oil on Belgian linen 152 x 152cm

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RICHARD DUNLOP - EARTHLY ALCHEMY In A Trip to North Queensland (2018) he expands the botanical forms of the illustrations, augmenting their detailed perfection with his loose and liberal application of paint. A riot of marks, textures and tones, this juicy work evokes the headiness and heat of Far North Queensland. It’s as though the various sights and forms of life encountered in this part of the world have been wrought together into one tangled vision of botanical fecundity. This ripe sensuality is reinforced by the inclusion of what appears to be an early example of Chinese erotic art, nestled in the bottom left area between a fish and honeyeater.

It is a strange and seductive alchemy that Richard Dunlop conjures in his work, where the slippery substance of oil paint is transformed into imagery that evokes a cultural and botanical lexicon. This survey of the past twenty years of artistic practice reveals not only Dunlop’s technical skill and mastery of the medium of oil paint on canvas, but the impact of multiple influences on his work; eastern philosophies, European Old Master paintings, the Australian landscape (specifically that of Queensland) and the work of certain artists who depicted it, Papua New Guinean tribal art and culture, mythology, and natural history to name a few. Yet rather than a didactic expression of Dunlop’s formidable knowledge of art, philosophy and history, his intellect underpins a fundamentally sensory and intuitive approach to art-making which lends these works their experiential and organic qualities.

In this and other works, such as Blue Reef, One Garden to Tend (2018) the introduction of nineteenth century illustrations of flora and fauna allude to colonial era artists documentation of new and unusual species they encountered when discovering the ‘new world’. The stark nature of collage evokes an almost alien introduction of British and European ‘settler’ culture on Australian soil, and the western urge to document and classify nature. This is borne out of a desire for understanding, but also of control.

Recently I travelled to the top of Queensland, the furthest north I have ever been in this country. I walked in the Daintree and swam over the reef and noticed how nature seems bigger in this part of the world, more impressive upon one’s physical being. Like the heat, its colour and vibrancy is impossible to ignore, especially coming from Melbourne with its grey southern light that can desaturate the urban landscape. It is this experience of the tropics that informs my perception of Dunlop’s A Northern Survey, a collection of work where the artist celebrates the abundant life and intoxicating atmospheres of rainforest and reef, while acknowledging the danger that human interaction with these environments present.

Dunlop unites these otherwise isolated representations of animals and plants through his painterly additions. In doing so he tempers the cold, taxonomic representation of natural life in the collage, with lyrical mark-marking that arises out of a visceral, emotional and sensory perception of the natural world. Logic and sensation, sense and sensibility are here blended in pictorial space. Thus Dunlop acknowledges unseen realities in the context of hard scientific fact signified by the collaged illustrations.

Collage is a new element within Dunlop’s oeuvre that makes its debut in this exhibition. The artist has created large paintings that incorporate collaged reproductions of nineteenth century botanical illustrations. These are glued down to a plywood substrate, torn edges and meeting points between the sheets marking out a haphazard grid, and forming a tacit homage to one of Dunlop’s most admired artists, Ian Fairweather, who used sheets of cardboard abutted against each other as a painting surface.1 Over these paper records of old world/new world discovery and exploration, Dunlop has applied his characteristic swathes of colour in broad brushstrokes, where meandering linear marks flow through the compositions to unite the disparate elements contained within.

If there is a thread that unites Dunlop’s work regardless of subject, it is the awareness he brings of things that lie outside the realm of tangible matter, such as energy and spirit. This is reflected in the multi-dimensional quality to his work that is both aesthetic and conceptual. Dunlop is often credited with his hybridisation of established genres such as still life, landscape and botanical art, as he borrows conventions freely from each and merges them into a new painterly paradigm within the edges of the canvas. This merging of recognizable imagery from these genres with ambiguous forms, areas of abstraction and multiple perspectives is analogous to the impression of an experience, and the many ways it is absorbed through the mind and body.

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Iron Ore 2 2008 Oil on Belgian linen 180 x 300cm Collection UCQ

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Works such as Rainforest (2008) exemplify this approach, as layers of colour pigment suspended in oil paint describe botanical forms that shift in and out of clarity. Dunlop’s distinctive, languid line work trails through the composition, evoking some kind of subterranean root system, or perhaps energy lines that might run through the land. A smattering of flecks interrupt the surface at various points, like seeds in the wind. And while all of this action takes place within the picture plane, a tan/orange band runs across the painting near the top of the composition, evoking a horizon line.

While similarities to the Rembrandt exist, Dunlop’s work is less visually explicit, and in it rawness is replaced by mystery. The space in which the shark is suspended is punctuated with areas of warm light, where red and golden under-painting is revealed and emerges from the rich black.

Dunlop’s ability to manipulate light and dark to create enigmatic atmospheres is shown to best affect. All manner of secrets might be concealed within those shadowy recesses. A shower of cobalt blue-marks descend upon the canvas, standing out in contrast to the warm tones that dominate throughout. Dunlop unsettles what could be a still life with a purely abstract inclusion that could signify water, an apparition – or perhaps both… or neither. It’s up to the viewer to decide.

Similar bands are seen Iron Ore 2, also of 2008, which is a landscape painting of Queensland’s mining country viewed from an aerial perspective, where the terrain is boldly intersected by strips of white cloud. The horizon line in Rainforest introduces a classic landscape view and sense of recessional space into the picture plane, which is otherwise consumed by vegetation that fills the composition in an abstract sense. Multiple perspectives are evoked in this sun and colour-drenched depiction of a rainforest, which contains an immersive quality that shares similarities with Monet’s famed impressions of Water Lilies.

Similarly in Meat, Barcelona (2010) a bird hangs suspended, surrounded by red and white shapes that are suggestive of meat. Again a warm brown/black dominates the background from which the forms emerge. In this work Dunlop has scratched lines and marks into the paint while wet in a technique known in ceramics as sgraffito.

Or, it might refer to scrimshaw – the practice of engraving designs onto animal bones or ivory that began on whaling ships in the eighteenth century, an art-form that Dunlop has referenced in other paintings. In Meat, Barcelona the scratched lines reveals the layering of fine coloured glazes of oil paint, and adds a surface decoration to these nebulous shapes that appear lit from within.

In other works in the exhibition, Dunlop reveals a much darker sensibility. In the mighty Last Night with a Great White (Two Fish Inside) of 2011, the torso of a shark hangs suspended in a dark interior space. Cut in half the animal’s internal cavity is revealed, in which Dunlop paints two fish laying side by side. The work immediately calls to mind the great genre painting by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, Slaughtered Ox of 1655, held in the Louvre. In this work the carcass of an ox is suspended in a darkened room, the visceral depiction of the animal’s flesh, bones and sinews illuminated against the dark background. This work has been variously interpreted as a metaphor for the Crucifixion of Christ, a momento mori symbol, or simply an exercise in painterly virtuosity that reflected the life of everyday people (as seventeenth century Dutch genre painting sought to do). Regardless of Rembrandt’s intent, the painting has inspired numerous artists – from Van Gogh, Soutine, to Francis Bacon and his depiction of Pope Innocent X seated between two carcasses of beef in his work Figure with Meat (1954).

Through content and technique, these works touch on the thematic concern of human relationships with animals, and more broadly nature, that underpins much of the work in this exhibition. In Harvest From the Land and Also from the Sea (2010), the black forms of various animals including fish are represented like pictographs found in ancient cave paintings, with their simplified monochromatic shapes. Such images speak of the origins of art, and human being’s everpresent urge to make sense of the world through making pictures – an impulse that in its essence remains unchanged.

It also speaks of the interconnection between humanity and the plants and animals that comprise our natural environments, a reality that also remains unchanged despite modern societies’ best attempts to forget.

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Trip to North Queensland 2018 Oil and mixed media 120 x 180cm

Image overleaf Blue Reef (One Garden to Tend) [detail] 2018 Oil and mixed media 120 x 180cm

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Light Penetrates the Reef, North Queensland 2018 Oil on Belgian linen 172 x 152cm

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Environmental themes are playfully teased out in the animation Reef Aquarium, a short film by Studio Madden in association with Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, based on artwork and concept by Dunlop. Here his paintings are submerged in an imaginary aquarium, as various fish taken from the botanical illustrations of his collage based paintings swim past and through elements of his works, and conduct surreal and often hilarious conversations with each other. Aimed at 4-6 year olds it’s refreshing to see an artist reimagine their work with humour in the service of entertainment for younger (and older) minds, while conveying important messages about global warming, the impact of mining on the ocean, and the yes vote for gay marriage (complete with singing worms dressed-up as the Village People).

This work extends into new territory Dunlop’s deep sensitivity to the fragility of all forms of life, and the ephemeral beauty that arises out of a transient state of being. If anything this survey of twenty years of creative practice reveals Dunlop’s enduring response to the idea of connection, and as connected sentient beings humanity’s responsibility to be the good gardeners of our marine and rainforest environments. This is a quiet missive, rather than a political statement and as such it resonates deeply with the viewer, like an experience of beauty that is felt rather than rationally understood.

Marguerite Brown MA ArtCur Comments supplied by Richard Dunlop about the current exhibition, 21 January, 2018.

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People (and Fish Too) Show their True Colours and Courage only when Trapped 2018 Oil on Belgian linen 142 x 152cm

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Reef Aquarium, North Queensland 2018 Oil on Belgian linen 164 x 160cm

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BIOGRAPHY Richard Dunlop was born on 24 December 1960 about 100 metres from where he established his first art studio in his teenage bedroom in Amarina Ave, Ashgrove, Brisbane, a suburb in which all of the streets are named after flora (including poisonous varieties). The leafy surrounds of the suburb are routinely assumed by critics as the impetus for the artist’s idiosyncratic way of depicting sub-tropical botany teeming with life and metaphorical loadings about cycles of beauty and tragedy.

Dunlop began exhibiting in Brisbane in 1985, painting at nights while employed by the Queensland Education Department. First as a teacher in south-western Queensland, then as a prominent curriculum developer, he obtained three degrees, including a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Queensland in 1992. Some overseas curriculum development assignments took him to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Tonga, and East Timor working for various international aid agencies and the United Nations.

Dunlop continued to exhibit with a range of successful commercial as well as not-for-profit artist-run galleries in Brisbane throughout the late ‘80s and mid-1990’s, by which time he was invited to join Ray Hughes Gallery, a gallery renowned for its cultivation of world-class painters. He agreed to exhibit exclusively with Hughes until 2003. In 1999, Dunlop relocated to Switzerland, with the following year resulting in the dissolution of his longterm relationship with Anne Gambling. He returned to Australia as a sole father to the two children of the relationship.

In 2003, Dunlop met his current partner, Kylie Elkington, a highly accomplished artist in her own right. In 2003, following a retrospective of Dunlop’s paintings, the artist re-connected with his home town by also joining the stable of Jan Murphy Gallery, as well as Hughes. This caused a major rift with Hughes, resulting in an ongoing dispute which attracted years of national news coverage and was resolved through court battles all in Dunlop’s favour. Released from the monopoly of a single dealer relationship, the artist continued to have regular major solo exhibitions with Jan Murphy Gallery, and other commercial galleries in various states of Australia – Michael Reid, Tim Olsen, Hill-Smith, Despard, James Makin, and Greenhill Galleries, while his works also featured in various institutional travelling survey exhibitions.

Dunlop attained a second PhD in Art from Griffith University in 2007, this time earning the University Medal for Academic Excellence at PhD Level for 2007.

The artist exhibited periodically overseas in the early to mid-2000’s – with solo exhibitions in Zurich, Tokyo, Auckland, and London, and in group shows in New York, Milan, Los Angeles and Toronto. Nevertheless, his work remains very unfamiliar to audiences beyond Australia, apart from the attention of a handful of international collectors with multiple works from various series of the artist’s 30-year career.

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Richard Dunlop with Reef Aquarium in progress, Magnetic Island, North Queensland

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