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Arsonist Landscapes 2001+

Private collection

Apart from fires caused by natural events, arson is a crime which continues to plague rural Australia, combated by courageous volunteers, and here depicted in extensive nineteenth century style neo-Romantic panoramas in the manner of Eugene von Geurard. Sigmund Freud wrote a seminal essay on the psychology of arsonists in 1932, linking it with the myth of Prometheus, punished for stealing fire from the Gods.

Easter 1986 The Deposition of Christ

“Exponential advances in science and technology, especially in learning how to compartmentalise nature has assisted its rapid exploitation and depletion of diversity. It would be difficult to hold any religion for quite that much devastation.” – Richard Dunlop, 1986

“This series of small paintings now comes to resemble the hooded figures tortured in Abu Ghraib prison, but they were completed well before that, more in conversation with European art history rather than a subscription to any religious ideology.” – Richard Dunlop, 2014

“When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an ‘idealist’ he had always been.”  – Hannah Arendt, Eichmann and the Holocaust

2014

“The aesthetics impress as usual. Richard’s paintings are always gorgeous to look at and they continue his quest for truth and beauty in a visual language he has painstakingly developed. A language that is earthy and transcendent. Richard invents his painterly environments often alluding to the nuances between water and life, which is a very Taoist idea.” – Phil Brown, 2014

“The winner of the painting prize was Richard Dunlop, an artist of considerable standing who creates what he self-consciously terms a “neo-romantic Australian landscape”. The artist enjoys combining traditions in art, blending the empirical studies of the natural science illustrations of the nineteenth century with inventive Romantic explorations of the natural world to create something of a personal pictorial mythology.” – Professor Sasha Grishin, Sydney Morning Herald 2014

“One of my favourite sources for emergent trends.” – Fanny Tsai

“Water shapes its current from the lie of the land.” – Sun Tzu c. 551-496 BC; Joshua Wong

“Paint the living universe, this sun, this cloud, this rain, this tree, this animal, this day, this hour, this wind, this kind of earth, this kind of water, this sound in the grass, this pitch of wind, this anger, this confusion, this silence, put it all in there eventually”. – Advice received from Ugo Rondinone

“With Goya Nights (Witches in the Air) and related works, featuring Ku Klux Klan figures which transcend national and ethical boundaries, the artist’s expectation of the rise of the new right international politics precedes other artists, and just like Goya’s mature political subtleties, is likely to be regarded as a seminal series.” – B. Schwabsky

Animal Farm 1990+

“Animals, and in particular, rhinoceros beetles are a recurring image in Richard Dunlop’s paintings where they intersect with themes of taxonomy, museology and changing identities and histories. Richard’s paintings represent traces of unreliable memories, circumstantial evidence and documentation of people, objects and events.” – Ian Galloway (Director, Queensland Museum), 2005

“The young pointer can no more know that he points to aid his master, than the white butterfly knows why she lays her eggs on the leaf of the cabbage. I cannot see that these actions differ essentially from true instincts.” – Charles Darwin, 1859 On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection

“Dunlop’s enduring response to the idea of connection, and as connected sentient beings humanity’s responsibility to be the good gardeners of our 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 Curator MFA

“Orwell never ends well”. – Bill Maher

The Thaw: Waterfalls of Switzerland and France 1999

“The strong sense of physicality is underscored by the artist’s expressive application of paint and by the way he clearly presents to the viewer the whole process of making a picture. One notices the progressive accumulation of pigment and forms, the way each veil of colour, shape or meandering line has been set down either to abut its neighbour or to overlap the layers underneath.” – Sue Smith, 2001

‘Everything seemed so clear-cut, so polished. The symmetrical beauty of the farms, laid out like toys; the fields of mustard of so unbelievably a pure yellow… then there were the mountains! I had never imagined anything so grand. Each time I looked at them I experienced a shock of fresh delight.’ – Ian Fairweather describing Switzerland (where he lived from aged 16-18 at boarding school)

NB: The images of works that form this series are incomplete

South Western Queensland Drought Drawings 1984-85

Exhibited at Spring Hill Gallery, Brisbane in 1985, these are the remaining drawings from that period.

“Between 1984-86, I lived in Roma in South-Western Queensland, and assisted “one-teacher” schools from Dalby to Thargomindah during a severe drought. To break the drive, I’d sketch some of the animal victims of the drought or “road kill” on off-cuts of acid-free art paper, as an update of Nolan’s works from an earlier drought.” – Richard Dunlop, 1986

“I oscillate with my eyes backwards and forwards until I get the points of reference… the line is always wrong, never essential. My experience has taught me that you can only draw after you have painted for fifty years. Remember a child taking its first step, thinking “How far am I from my mother, will I fall?” Now having urged you to imagine that, I have adjusted your eyes like an optometrist. Now you can see.” – Oskar Kokoschka’s advice about starting a drawing offered to adult art students, 1962

“Painting is only worthwhile if you don’t know the outcome. When you start painting you must never know what the end product is going to be. You should end up with something looking at you which you have never seen before…  I like to change the medium every now and again so that I can work against it, so that I am not proficient at it – because in some way, I’m always worried by proficiency. It has so many dangers, especially as there is a certain kind of satisfaction in automatic response. You handle paint a certain way, you flick it this way and that way, and this often steals in unawares. You see, even the muscles learn tricks. Yes, you must fight against it because I suppose if a painting is worth anything it is supposed to come from some place inside yourself that you cannot get to through any other means.” – Sidney Nolan

Village People, Brisbane 1987

Set price: $32,000

“Duly noted by a handful of artists, a precursor to much of the political art which followed in Queensland in the 1990’s.” – Michael Richards

“Richard Dunlop’s Village People series documents Spring Hill in 1987, a time when it was a low-income suburb where he worked, populated by prostitutes living in ramshackle wooden houses. As a teacher, he would regularly check the playground for drunks and the homeless. It would not be unusual to find gay men bashed looking like roadkill to him. He used to offer to call the police but more often than not, it was the police who did the bashing with impunity from the law. Many of the works are painted from memory, depicting the people he encountered directly or close by. They are sketches that seem to be etched into the oil on the paper and in their flatness are documents of the powerless immersed in their endurance of pain or people immersed in life.”  – Kevin Wilson, Curator, QUT 2018

“Among other characteristics, Brisbane in the late 1980’s is a city in which Police relish bashing and tormenting gays, while “illegal” prostitution and gambling is overseen by corrupt Police and the State government. Although not by nature dogmatic, gay, a client of prostitutes or gambling, or awe-struck at all by anything  less than clearly rational  authority, the unfolding role of the State in relation to the individual unfolding affected me. This prompted a series of small paintings of Brisbane Village People and what is likely to become a lifelong interest in painting people (especially tattooed people who choose to declare their identity with permanent marks), but I also have an interest in depictions of interior and exterior landscapes, hybridised with the concerns of other painters, some from other centuries.” – Richard Dunlop, 1988

“I think all good painting looks as though the painting has escaped from the thicket of prepared positions and has entered some sort of freedom where it exists on its own, and by its own laws, and inexplicably has got free of all possible explanations.” – Frank Auerbach 1988

2002

“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 and 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.” – Ray Hughes, 2002

“Remember, there is never just one trend going on in art, never just one feeling. Mondrian and Matisse lived at the same time, together with Klee and Soutine. Old man Monet painted his water lilies while Cubism was being invented and after it was left behind.” – Andre Emmerich, The Art Dealers

“Dunlop’s works are not only about moving through memorable environments, but are in a larger sense about moving on in life: growth, loss and transition, looking back nostalgically at old possessions, throwing off some old encumbrances while assuming new ones.” – Sue Smith

“Remember that when Andy {Warhol} died in February 1987, his top price at auction was $650,000,
as opposed to Johns who had already sold for $17 million, Rauschenberg hit $6.3 million,” – Advice
received from Mary Boone

“The visual, on the other hand, short-circuits the labyrinth of words… Like music, it leaps right over rational, reasonable thoughts.” – Robert Greene

2000

“Having returned from living in Switzerland, and a divorce, I had no studio at the time in Australia, but was offered one in a wooden building with “tongue-in-groove” walls to which I stapled canvas (also being unable to afford or store “stretchers” in the short term). I was initially frustrated that the impression of the tongue-in-groove walls would persistently “show” through otherwise finished “botanical” works. I decided to just submit to it, and completed a series of tabletops in a vertical format like Chinese landscapes, working from the top of the canvas down the walls. Until I could afford the stretchers, some of the (more autobiographically interesting, in my opinion) paintings reveal the impression of the tongue-in-groove wooden walls on which they were made.” – Richard Dunlop, 2000

“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of external signs passes on to others the feelings that one has lived through, so that other people are infected by these feelings but more importantly, experience them. It doesn’t happen often.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Paintings like Still Life with Pelican’s Head and Still Life of How to Start a War have a most mysterious and rare inner illumination, whereby you see into the picture plane.” – Adrian Ghenie

“A unique sense of place can still persist in the collective psyche of sprawling cities such as Brisbane. Brisbane is a state of mind as much as a place, and artists like Richard Dunlop are its guides.” – Sue Smith Director University Collection UCQ

1999

“Richard Dunlop’s show at Ray Hughes Gallery gently envelopes you as you walk in, inducing a mild, pleasurable sensation of which Matisse might have approved. The overlay of lianas dividing the surface into Matissean arabesques works well, as do the fine lines etched into the leaves with a nail.” – Sebastian Smee, 1999

“Since 1992, I’ve strived to conceive images which I regard as a fresh contribution to the Australian landscape painting tradition, drawing on ‘Asian’ verticalised views of landscape rather than a rather hackneyed European panoramic view. So many of my pictures are intended to be ‘read’ from the bottom up, and with a tension between macro view and micro-details like the best of neo-Romantic painters or 19th century botanists. But it’s not an exclusive interest. I dislike artists that have as an overarching goal the creation of a strong ‘brand’ which taps some current fashion or pot of money. The best painters in history ignored that stuff, maintaining long-distance eyes both to the future and past. The sediments of time revealed their voices to be almost inadvertently distinctive of their age.” – Richard Dunlop, Catalogue for Hinterland, Ray Hughes Gallery, 1999

“Mondrian died in New York in 1944 at the age of seventy-four, before he could finish his Victory Boogie-Woogie. The highest price he ever received was $600 for Broadway Boogie-Woogie… Out of the exhibition of deKooning’s Women, only one or two sold, and those for around $1800. Pollock never enjoyed the sweet smell of success; an eighteen-foot painting called One was sold in 1952 for $8,000, which was to stand as the greatest amount we received for a Pollock during his lifetime.” – Sidney Janis, The Art Dealers

“A line that at once describes the image, also profoundly floats above the image, the eye constructing form and add detail, but the line continuing to live by its own rules.” – Murray Bail

“I think of Richard’s early work as quintessentially “Queensland”. I cannot think of anyone who has captured Queensland better. You walk into one of Richard’s pictures from that period and you can sense your body dissolve into that hot tropical air of Queensland, remembering the heady summer scent of frangipani and gardenia.” – Stephen Lees