Richard Dunlop

Low-flying birds, Morning Colours, near Lisdillon, East Tasmania 2020
oil on whiteboard panel
30 x 180cm

SOLD

Fly Fisher, Meander Valley 2017-2019
oil on panel
126 x 162cm
Glover Prize Finalist

SOLD

Voice in the Wilderness: Northern Tasmania

New works by Richard Dunlop at Colville Gallery, Hobart

“Dunlop’s imagery has an unusual feeling. He is not simply painting a landscape, but cracking it open, his eye swimming in to find the specific components, and how they are constructed. There is a sense that Dunlop is pulling things apart with his work, fragmenting and reforming to understand what it is that he sees.” – Andrew Harper, 2019
“One cannot help but think of Dunlop as an artist with a keen eye for detail and composition, but rather than create work slavishly to these watchwords, he chooses invocation.” – Dr Jonathon McBurnie, Director Perc Tucker Regional Gallery 2018
“The meaning of my work will probably reside in the accumulation of images over time. I’m keen to make things that don’t exist and hope that they resonate with other souls. That’s it. Call it a serialised autobiographical narrative, a visual diary, a personal evolving garden, a small cathedral or whatever ancestors tried to create. I know that enough people will get it in time.” Richard Dunlop 1992

This second solo exhibition at Colville Gallery finds Richard Dunlop in his third Tasmanian year since relocating from Melbourne (with artist Kylie Elkington) to the picturesque northern town of Deloraine (population >3000), surrounded by world heritage listed regions, the result of foresighted activism at the time. It is the complex relationship between a person and a landscape (and particularly the notion of wilderness versus cultivated land) that was the point of conceptual departure for Dunlop in this new body of work.

The colours and imagery of North Tasmania - the sculptural folds of the Great Western Tiers, the Highland Lakes District, hikers to Cradle Mountain, Liffey (the birthplace of the Tasmanian Greens), the fields of cultivated agricultural markings of the land near Sassafras as farmers use tractor blades as brushes, and the change of season exemplified by the sudden burst of wattle yellows in September in North Tasmania. Dunlop offers both aerial views of his beloved Meander Valley, Lake St Clair, the Highlands Lakes District and river-level images of the sculptural forms of introduced Asian weeping cherries in full blossom.

Dunlop has stated that “the Australian marketplace of ideas for new types of landscape painting is wide open at the moment. Tasmania remains a relatively unpainted territory, in terms of revealing its gothic majesty, sense of deja vu, and otherworldliness.” There are references throughout to the necessary conversation with those who have attempted the same before - Piguenit, Glover, Lycett, Rees, Wolfhagen and others who have attempted to paint Tasmania. This exhibition displays Dunlop’s equal interest in Eastern as well as Western conventions of depicting landscape.

Richard Dunlop has had a distinguished professional practice for over three decades, His work is in the collections of several universities (QUT, CQU, UTAS, Griffith), many other public collections (in some case, in-depth with five or more works), and private collections of the highest calibre, both in Australia and overseas. He has two PhD’s, four degrees in total in educational philosophy and visual art.

Dunlop’s paintings defy easy categorization and constantly seek to hybridise various painterly traditions and categories, particularly landscape, still life and nineteenth-century scientific illustration. He is interested in employing a wide range of painterly strategies to open a picture plane of great depth and multiple perspectives of viewing.