Letter from Brian Dunlop, in answer to a student's questions
May 2006

Dear Bridgette,

I will try to answer your questions.

My father came to Australia from England when he was sixteen and struck the 1930s depression. He eventually trained to be a woodwork machinist in Sydney, but he also had a love of painting and drawing. We went sketching together regularly and to exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW. Half of artistic talent is having the correct temperament, most importantly the ability to work alone for long periods.

I went to the National Art School, Sydney, on a scholarship for five years full time, during the second half of the 1950s when it was considered correct to paint abstract paintings. However, some of the teachers were from the old school of traditional painting, and I learnt such things as perspective, figure drawing and painting, even including drawing of plants.

After leaving college, I floundered in my approach for several years. In Rome, an older friend, the painter Justin O'Brien looked at sketches and drawings I had done in Rome and said that they were more 'true to you' than the abstract work. He said 'Keep doing them, and they will evolve', so I did.

I have always had a deep interest in the history of art, particularly European art, not as a scholar but as a practising painter. I have also always liked what I regard as the true American tradition which includes a deep respect for nature and wilderness and social comment (Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth). If a painter were to write down his or her influences, he or she would probably mention fifty names, the order varying at different stages. Of continuing interest to me have been artists as different as Piero della Francesco, Vermeer and Braque. One favourite painting of mine is Rembrandt's 'The Jewish Bride', although that was not its original title. Apart from the subject, which is inherently human and warm_hearted, the quality of the paintwork is quite breathtaking, and the glazes of colour are glowing with richness enhanced by texture and the dark background.

I taught one day a week for some years and then stopped to paint portrait commissions part time for twenty years. After painting over ninety of them, I stopped because I thought that I had proved to myself that I can cope with them, and I became sick of painting grey suits which were the garb of many of my subjects. In earlier centuries, people dressed in more interesting and colourful clothes which would have been fun to paint.

Painting becomes an obsession, a matter of life and death; the desire to paint a worthwhile painting before dying is all consuming. One is always wracked by doubts; the next painting might work well, but mediocrity is always lurking about. I am too ambitious to be interested in fashions, success and popularity. Only timeless values will suffice. Is it worth the effort to try to maintain one's integrity at all costs? Each new painting must be an enlargement of one's experience.

By restricting one's range of subject matter, one requires a considerable degree of imagination and sensibility in order to say something new each time (in personal terms). One subject that has endured for me is interior with window, often including a figure or still life. The room represents the mind, the windows the eyes looking out, curtains are the eyelids. A window is the division between inner and outer, spiritual and worldly. The figure later stood in the doorway, the threshold; then she ventured outside into the landscape.

At present I am also working on paintings of The Crags on the coast near where I live out of Port Fairy and, as well, of a bush reserve, but the next exhibition in Sydney in September is called 'The Breathing of Light' and is based on curtains billowing in and out around windows with patterns of light on the floor and walls.

I usually begin a painting very loosely and push the paint and drawing into place gradually, building up detail later. With oils, each layer needs to dry properly before re-working, so they are often left for three or four days at a time and go on for over a period of months. Because gouache and watercolours dry quickly, they can be worked on continuously and will often be completed in a week. However, there should be no formulas for working; a painting will dictate its own terms or rhythm to you, and from experience you learn to flow with them.

Best Wishes

Brian Dunlop