“Powerfully, even poignantly themselves as these objects may be – utterly present as phenomena of the known world – they seem endowed at the same time with the status of emissaries from another more ‘real’ one, which we recognise but could not name. It is in this sense that they might be said to approach the sublime. But to put it in those terms we must intend by “sublime” what lies mysteriously beyond the limits, beyond the threshold of what we can grasp, of where we have actually been – though not where, in moments of delight and enlightenment, the awakened spirit may take us.” – David Malouf, Being There, 2015 (quoted with the kind permission of the author, 2015)

“His luminous botanical paintings juxtapose then meld the traditions of both East and West to present us with an overwhelming fecundity of nature’s beauty. This master of seduction plays at the intersection of conventions of poetry, landscape and still life to create a luminal space for the imagination. This allows the viewer to invest Dunlop’s works with his or her own interpretations of life, death and immortality.” – Dr Christine Dauber, University of Queensland, 2015

“Richard Dunlop has had a successful career as a contemporary artist for a sustained period of more than twenty years. In this time, he has been at the forefront of painting’s resurgence in popularity and appeal, and has never been shy of breaking with established art conventions, such as his blending of elements from botanical illustration with still life and landscape traditions.” – Eric Nash, Perc Tucker Gallery 2015

“It sometimes haunts younger artists when you tell them that in the 444 days that van Gogh spent in Arles before he committed suicide at 37, and where he cut off part of his ear, he did 200 paintings, 200 watercolours and wrote 200 letters in three languages… especially when you ask them what they’ve been doing in the last fifteen months.” – Elwynn Lynn, September 14 1985

“He is one of the few Australian painters whose work it is actually worth standing in front of for more than a few seconds, in order to decipher the processes that put it together, the artistic judgements and intuitions that are to be seen in the sudden decision to use a particular dab of colour or correct a stream of falling paint.” – Sound advice on how to look at a painting by Rex Butler, referring to Ian Fairweather

“Dunlop understands that completely lifting his thoughts on any overtly political or moralistic 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.” – Eric Nash Curator CCP

“Painting is not something that must be understood. If the picture is for you, it will produce an almost physical sensation, something of joy, of wonder – a tug to the gut. Don’t go trying to understand it. Don’t expect the painter to stand and deliver his innermost convictions in other than his work.” – Ian Fairweather

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In his exhibition, ‘Lung Capacity’, Dunlop assembled literally hundreds of small canvasses in strict rows. Some of them were placed in an arbitrary sequence, while other small groupings were composed of very carefully placed sets of small painted works. Upon reflection the viewer had a sense of being surrounded and overwhelmed by the works. The gallery became the artist’s territory which is no mean feat at the best of times. Here the work owns the walls on which it is placed. The eye makes its own connections from one piece to the next and endless variations arise – endless possibilities occur.” – John Nelson

“I’ve just purchased Richard’s Night Garden: Rising Damp and the Promise of New Growth. It’s as powerful and brooding a painting as anything I’ve seen at any Biennale.” – Louise Mitchell, Director, Artspace, The Gunnery, 1997

“Dunlop’s painting has always been intelligent and it has always had significant content. The viewer has to work harder to unearth his meaning. In their derivation and method, these are highly introspective images.” – Michael Richards, 1991

“Richard Dunlop uses the domestic garden as an image for the interplay between the human impulse for orderly processes of control and classification, and nature’s inherently disorderly processes of development through trial and error. There are real species, contrived species, ambivalent species such as carnivorous plants, and ambiguous organisms whereby the evolutionary decision to be plant or animal has not yet been taken; all are linked together through networks of vines and tendrils which both connect and entrap.” – Leonie Stanford, 1996

“The gardener is someone who paints with forms. The excellent form produces a harmony of the faculties, which prompts us to label the garden beautiful.” – Emmanuel Kant

“To paint one must be alone. I cannot become involved with people. I paint for myself and have no sense of mission, nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.” – Ian Fairweather

“I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Dunlop’s recent exhibition at your gallery. Dunlop’s growing achievement interpreting landscape has no real parallel among the work of his contemporaries, dealing as it appears to do with the stubbornly unfashionable subject of natural beauty converging subtly with environmental and broader moral concerns. I think his work will survive beyond the current fixation with the passing parade of narcissistic identity politics in which some artists opportunistically see a parade coming down the street and jump out in front. If anyone needed reminding of my favourite Keats quote “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – Professor Bernard Smith 1998

“Everything is collapsing and transforming deep inside the picture” – Per Kirkeby, 1998

“You make it look so easy” – Del Kathryn Barton, 1998

 “Painting is dead’’ – Paul Delaroche 1839 (long dead)

“My father was a bit of a beatnik and his favourite topic, almost his only topic, was the idea of the mind as a country you could develop, and develop, and build and build. My mother believed in the country of the heart. For me it’s the hand.” – Patti Smith

“Drawing is taking a line for a walk” – Paul Klee

“If on the one hand Dunlop’s paintings are essentially handsomely composed planes of colour on canvas, on another, some of his works in the present show are as psychologically charged as a visionary landscape by Giorgio de Chirico or Yves Tanguy. Time and space have little reality in paintings which present almost surreal associations of images and ideas. Children’s toys, fish, vegetables, birds and kitchen utensils, the artist’s paintbrushes and the art works of friends and strangers, are all presented rising elusively from nebulous surrounds. These objects are spread before us as if in a land of dreams.” – Sue Smith, 2001

“How can art keep you involved for 40 years? If it means something… Something quite new and authentic was flowering and you happened to be holding the hose… What price can you place on that?” – Ray Hughes 2001

“Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow and turn into months. Before you know it, you’ve got yourself a bad year.” – Tom Waits

“A cultured hand.” – Robert Hughes, 2001

“I see my life as entering and exiting a series of theatres. The ocean is a theatre, my studio is a theatre and my kitchen is a theatre filled with drama and intimacy and chaos. My input is found in these everyday theatres.” – James Drinkwater, 2019

“Dunlop’s work stands up well with a wide range of artists whose work resonates with his own free colourist style – from the sensuous, decorative painting of Matisse, William Scott and Brett Whiteley to the roughly applied brushstrokes of Philip Guston and Alberto Burri; from the playful wandering line of Paul Klee to the carefully modulated forms and inky backgrounds of Modigliani. Dunlop’s works range from claustrophobic biospheres of beautiful and menacing animals and plants to images of barren, dusty vistas containing vessels, utensils and art objects which emerge mysteriously from kitchen tables that morph into cabinets.” – Sue Smith

“Dunlop strives for timelessness with his art. Each work resists periodisation by virtue of the sensation that its own image may not even belong to this or any other world; may exist above all for itself, or that its secrets will not be revealed lightly. Beyond the window of these paintings is a plane of consistency, where the one constant is the artist’s idiosyncratic coding of the infinite – light years away in our own back yard.” – Gilbert Meadowcroft, 2003

“Gardens are the perfect intersection of nature and culture; a form of architecture posing as nature.” – Richard Dunlop

“Richard Dunlop is a contemporary Australian painter with a strong commitment to pursuing his own line of investigation. Working in long cycles spanning several years, he experiments with evolving theatres of imagery, using his formidable technical skills to tease out the visual and metaphorical nuances of forms and spaces. This results in luscious, fluid, evocative works that defy simple analysis. These paintings are clearly inventions, created at a remove from the actual specimens or locations, and yet they have the capacity to confound the viewer’s eye with a sense of familiarity and naturalness.” – Professor Mostyn Bramley-Moore, 2004

“Everything I know about how the art industry works I learnt not from art school but from talking to you for hours when your exhibitions were on in Sydney at Ray Hughes Gallery.” – Ben Quilty 2004