Posters for The Legless Lizards, International Band (2023)

“Doing rock band posters for The Legless Lizards, a fictitious band that never toured makes perfect sense for the times. I did the same thing with movie posters in Trinidad for years”. – Doig

“Some of the best rock art and merch is coming out of Deloraine in Tasmania, Australia. That’s where The Legless Lizards started their world tour, slithered off an international stage without hardly leaving a trace, with the exception of some tour posters and t-shirts.” – Newer Musical Express

“The Legless Lizards was a band created by Matt (“Bedroom Eyes”) Crosbie, former sound engineer for Nick Cave for 35 years, and Andrew (“Mostly Wallaby, touch of Devil”) Kelly, internationally renowned animal conservationist, Trowunna Wildlife Sanctuary, via Deloraine. I created posters at the fledgling band’s request, forming a paper trail of a band that began with boundless optimism and cooperation yet self-sabotaged. The official press release said the band split over ‘heartfelt musical differences’ . While the final correspondence to the internet was cleared by both Crosbie’s and Kelly’s lawyers, both parties agreed eventually with Nine Inch Nails lead singer that “none of it was really real to begin with.” – Phallus Collossimo 2023

“If I had lived, The Legless Lizards would have been my favourite band.” – Chris Bailey, formerly The Saints

“I find Deloraine fans to be among the most intelligent in the world. And I say that because they always agree with my opinions on music and almost everything else.” – Matt Crosbie Sound Engineer Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, one of Deloraine’s favourite sons

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

Images coming soon.

‘Ned by the Mighty Murray’ (After Nolan) – 12 works on board 30 x 180cm being created in late May-June during an artist’s residency at Ned’s Outback Station, Victoria. Return here in late June to see them.

“Dunlop’s is a refreshing approach to painting [and its intersection with photography], 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.” – Eric Nash Curator, Centre for Contemporary Photography

“Unlike forms of rational discourse, art conveys meaning by reshaping the world and presenting it to us in a new form. We apprehend this reshaped world with the same combination of senses, imagination and intellect that we use to perceive the real world.” – Christopher Allen

This series was completed from photographs taken at Dunedin’s Natural History Collection, New Zealand. It is a unique collection well worth visiting.

Note: These can be viewed like film stills accompanied by a few minutes of music.

“Like a favourite artist, Otto Dix, I believe portraits are only worth painting when there is an intuitive sense of some inordinate major changes looming in the subject’s life. That’s when the person is caught in their own headlights, exhibiting vulnerabilities that only last for so long until they regain their balance.” – Richard Dunlop 2002

“When Tim saw his portrait, I explained that he was like a Johnny Cash figure to me. One
intelligent eye pierces through you, the other eye surveys the whole room. So I painted Tim
on a square format LP cover. He called me one morning by surprise with a full, passionate
and suggestive rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Burning Ring of Fire”. Tim had a good voice, as
good as Cash’s, he knew all the words, and sounded so child-like happy, like we had shared
an inside joke at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Archibald Prize. He did say it gave him
a wake-up call though. I had drawn Tim while we were having some drinks at one of those
sunless brick pubs in Sydney. Wendy [Whiteley] thought it could have easily been awarded
the prize that year if not for Del’s [Kahryn Barton] unbeatable entry of her with her children.”
– Richard Dunlop 2008

“It’s the most dark, lugubrious version of a beat -up art dealer who’s poisoned by celebration.
I asked ‘How on Earth it got hung?’ and they said, “we saw it and thought he’s really got
you, He’s really captured you”, recalls Tim. From that day forth, I never drank again. I was
defeated. If people think that’s me, then obviously I’ve got to work on my beauty.” “That’s
not the Timmy I know”, Lisa nudges Tim. “It was very confronting but I think sitting for that
drawing did me a favour. I certainly realised when I gave up drinking who my real friends
were. Good old Tim who was good for a laugh and a drink is not so accessible in a way” says
Tim.” – Tim Olsen 2013 quoted by Jade Dunwoody

“As the word itself implies, vision is a matter of seeing, and seeing comes from looking; if an artist has the potential for any kind of original vision, it will be found only by patient and humble attention, and the concomitant, simultaneous effort to crystallise what is understood in concrete form. For what is ultimately seen is through rather than on the surface of things, and the artist must reshape the world to make visible what he has perceived by intuition.” – Christopher Allen 2014

“The portrait of me by Richard Dunlop, Tim Olsen: The Man in Black, hung in the 2008 Archibald, was my Dorian Gray moment. Once a handsome young man, by then the sins, weaknesses and the decadence of my life were written all over my face, exposed in the most visited exhibition in Australia, for the whole world to see. It is the darkest, most lugubrious version of a beaten-up art dealer who has been poisoned by celebration. Expressing my amazement that it was hung at all to Edmund Capon, he replied: ‘It does have a certain likeness. He’s really captured you.’” – Tim Olsen, Son the Brush, (Allen and Unwin) 2020

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.

“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

“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

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