William Dunlap's work since I've known it -since 1975 - has adhered to
one essential premise, a stubborn dedication to physical mastery of
the medium. The paintings, whether on paper or canvas, have consistently
a kind of old-fashioned truthfulness to their craft, and to its capacity
to register not only what the artist sees, but what he knows.
These simple observations are not as obvious as might be assumed on
first glance. For in the context of contemporary art generally, in which
very often either immediacy itself of execution becomes the content of
the work, or a kind of endlessly labored, and often technically
inventive methodology takes over, Dunlap's approach is startlingly
anomolous. He takes a clean, traditionally draftsmanlike approach to
the art, in the service of a limited and yet always seemingly fresh
arsenal of literary images. Even before he is a craftsman, Dunlap is an
inveterate collector and memoirist, an artist for whom history and
personal experience combine to form a vocabulary that becomes, as one
looks over the whole array of paintings, drawings, prints and
photographs, unique to the artist, and, increasingly, intelligible,
meaningful, to the observer. It is as though the artist's tirelessly
compiled album of obsessions, an accumulation of ideas and events and
scenes from his rural, Southern past and his urban, sophisticated
present, find expression in a single serial outpouring, changing year
to year but maintaining an overall unity of source and style.
All the work, whether monumental, as in the extraordinary, fourteen-part
Corcoran Panorama of 1984-85, based on the grand tradition of the
nineteenth century cyclorama - or modest in scale, like the many small
landscapes or quasi-still-life paintings - is alike in its having sprung
from the artist's restless compulsion to
record his own rich associative life. He is, in all the work, as much
diarist as abstract composer, and as close spiritually to the American
trompe l'oeil masters, Peto or Harnett, as to our great landscape
painters, Homer or Kensett or George Inness.
In these new works, Bill Dunlap is introducing certain new images into
his repertory. The iris, the gladiolus and the Indian Paintbrush, in
particular, appear for the first time; and the trout, which has been
depicted previously in a few isolated versions, is now juxtaposed with
other images. The deer heads and dogs recur again and again, sometimes
placed against variously conceived landscape scenes, seen in summer or
winter, or simply alone, in what become strange, deracinated
still-lifes. These stark compositions signal an underlying
characteristic of the artist's work, for while many of Dunlap's
paintings, particularly some of the new ones, may initially seem simply
opulent, sensuously appealing works, even at their most decorative and
whimsical, the work is never entirely without another quality, an
impending darkness, an edginess and ambivalence of mood that is rarely
entirely absent even from the most lyrical or benign paintings.
The subtle, familiar ominousness, as well as the layered narratives that
occur in many of the larger landscapes are, however, somewhat mitigated
in this most recent body of work. The Italian hilltown landscape, for
instance, is as close to being simply a plainly observed landscape as
anything the artist has created. With the notable exception of the two
large canvases, one feels in these works a new sense of release, a more
open and expansive mood than before.
Yet this exhibition also contains two ambitious canvases, following the
same impulse to create a difficult allegory referring to both
public and private history, that the Corcoran Panorama exemplified.
Dunlap's ongoing series of paintings, which he calls generically the
"Landscape and Variable" works, provide for him an ever-evolving matrix
for the complex development of his themes and images. The two largest
paintings in this series give a dramatic example of the multifariousness
of Dunlap's use of imagery. The figure in Landscape and Variable I:
Indian Paintbrush, for instance, refers simultaneously to other art
(specifically, Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp), and to a
flayed figure photographed by Dr. William Bell. The riderless horse and
the painterly are equally fraught images for the artist: the horse in
stride is excerpted originally from a newspaper clipping and used in
several contexts; the flowers remind him of, among other things, the
beautiful riot of wildflowers in bloom on the field where the battle of
Custer's Last Stand occurred.
It is really only through a long and repeated exposure to Bill Dunlap's
work that one becomes fully aware of the depth of literary content in
it, and its far-reaching resonances. But, as with all good painting, one
needn't know all of the artist's vocabulary to intuitively understand
his aesthetic or his intended mythologies. A single work, even a modest
landscape or still-life fragment, hints at the full range of Dunlap's
extraordinarily sophisticated grasp of the symbolic power of painting.
What is never in doubt, of course, is the artist's sheer painterly
skill; what we may endlessly question and examine are his meanings.
Jane Livingston
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Washington, D.C.