TO SEE A WORLD AS RICHARD DUNLOP DOES

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

...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...

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.)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

Eric Nash Artist | Writer | Curator