Next exhibition : Sanctuary Gallery One, Gold Coast, Opens 3 October 2025

“It’s a beautiful, quite tiny fragment that the artist has clearly been engrossed by, and he really succeeds in capturing the wonder that clearly held his attention. Dunlop has strong ideas and is bold about following his instincts into new territory.” – Andrew Harper

“Grand weeping cherries line the Meander River in Deloraine, donated by Japan Flour Mills. It is a tree with a profound history in Japanese culture. Their manicured scaffolding of branches offers an architecture to hang paint on as Fairweather might have with a figure, allowing for an ambiguous depth of field and shifting light. In Japan, cherry blossoms are commonly conceived as the equivalent of clouds, because of their propensity to bloom en masse, and are a persistent metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life, the transience of all things, and a celebration of exquisite beauty. Because of its association with mortality and graceful acceptance of destiny, the cherry blossom was used during WW2 to galvanise national pride with falling cherry petals representing sacrificed lives.” – Colville, Hobart

“Some are more sun-drenched than a Katz, or as airy as an early Clemente and would look at home on a wall in the Hamptons.” – Val Blondel

“When the realization dawns that you’re likely doing just what the artist did when he made the work, a new appreciation of how well Dunlop shares his vision emerges. This is an artist who not only wants to share what he saw, but how he saw it”. – Andrew Harper

“Richard’s paintings are always gorgeous to look at and they continue his quest for truth and beauty in a visual language that he has painstakingly developed. A language that is earthy and transcendental.” – Phil Brown

“Tuned into the world and environments around him, Richard Dunlop takes specific events, narratives and landscapes as a starting point and transforms them into paintings with continued resonance by pushing forms beyond the literal and into the elusive. The convalescing of specific references with Dunlop’s overarching perspective of their inextricable relationship to wider systems is seen in specific works such as Crossings (2021)
– which was painted during the invasion of Ukraine and refers to contemporary events all the while showing the historical influence of artists such as Grant Wood and Colin McCahon. Another work, In Search of Thylacine in the Great Western Tiers, takes the canonised and mythologised rapid extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger as the starting point to grapple with the colonial mindset in tandem with explorations of the Tasmanian landscape, where the artist lives. With art movements such as the Sublime and Picturesque – at the front of his mind, the artist lets in the layers of any given moment, Short Walks in North Tasmania is both a representation of the contemporary and the enduring.” – Sophie Prince

“There’s a lot of beauty, but Dunlop also finds poetry – he balances the warm breath of a cow, observed as a steaming plume, with a night sky cascading with stars. It’s a beautiful, quite tiny fragment that the artist has clearly been engrossed by, and he really succeeds in capturing the wonder that clearly held his attention. Dunlop has strong ideas and is bold about following his instincts into new territory.” – Andrew Harper

“Art that can woo…Dunlop has more than earned his reputation.” – Rebecca Agnew

“As painters we are doing far more than just making pictures – studios, lights, paint… all that paraphernalia to disguise the act of reflection.” – James Drinkwater

“Only when one is standing at exactly the right angle can you see and comprehend a new thing fully and for the first time.” – Lao-Tzu 6^th Century BC

“I have to record the glimpse seen at the highest point of affection – points of optical ecstasy, where romanticism and optimism overshadow any form of menace of foreboding. I have to paint pictures that have an effortless naturalness, not artificial or synthetic, not manufactured. I have to paint pictures that have no affectation through mental tricks, but are graceful and according to nature… Every part should be poetic and responsible for its own existence. It should be easy to take. I try to change the meaning of the thing painted into a new image – an elevated feeling.” – Brett Whiteley re ‘Lavender Bay’ paintings

While most of the risks Dunlop takes are well considered, some are quite the opposite. He describes 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 film.” The process, like his subject matter, is quite organic. Dunlop takes further risks by introducing random acts of violence to each work, and then attempts to resolve them, as would “occur in any natural settings.” Though, fittingly, he allows “earlier layers to persist…to give a sense of memories and the passage of time, just out of reach.” – Eric Nash, Curator

“Your pictures give me energy in the morning.” – Adam Hudson, serial entrepreneur and philanthropist