“Richard Dunlop, is at heart, a well-travelled rebel. This is best reflected in his art practice as he believes “the act of making paintings involves balancing risk-taking with experience”. While most of the risks Dunlop takes are well-considered, some are quite the opposite. He describes studio painting as “an arena almost like a boxing ring… I don’t do preparatory drawings and the final paintings carry some signs of decisions made en route, erasures and changes of mind, remnants of under-painting all add to the archaeology of a picture, an artificial thing like a novel or a film.  In the mid-1980’s when I started blurring the interrupted traditions of botanical illustration, landscape and still life with the then moribund tradition of painting, no-one else was doing it because every element of it was downright taboo, collectively almost heretical, and as such, irresistible.” – Eric Nash (interview with the artist), 2008

“In Rainforest and Mangrove (After Fairweather) (both 2008), plant and water forms are elaborated across the painting’s surface, abandoning the logic of a perspectival scene for a meandering brocade of natural forms. Dunlop is conscious of the historical weight of painting yet also believes in an essential spontaneity in the studio.” – Dr Sheridan Coleman, 2018