Stefan Dunlop

This publication celebrates Stefan Dunlop and his trade as a modern painter. Over the past ten years Stefan has engaged with the act of painting to produce aesthetically challenging and complex works.The project grew from a chance opportunity when Dr Richard Brettell from the University of Texas saw Stefan's paintings featured in a magazine article and invited the artist to participate in the University's CentralTrak residency program in 2010.Originally from New Zealand, the artist has...
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This publication celebrates Stefan Dunlop and his trade as a modern painter. Over the past ten years Stefan has engaged with the act of painting to produce aesthetically challenging and complex works.The project grew from a chance opportunity when Dr Richard Brettell from the University of Texas saw Stefan's paintings featured in a magazine article and invited the artist to participate in the University's CentralTrak residency program in 2010.Originally from New Zealand, the artist has lived and studied painting and drawing in Brisbane, London and New York and has exhibited widely in these cities. His work is held in many private collections in Australia and overseas.Stefan Dunlop is a mostly figurative painter. His subjects are often unidentified people positioned in invented or borrowed landscapes, or suspended in vastly decorative though empty colour-fields. Groups of figures are often viewed in the act of undertaking something monumental, and both the theatrical and dramatic are familiar recurrences in Stefan's images.His early still-life and portrait paintings also have dramatic overtones emphasised by stark, contrasting illumination and isolation of the subject. He draws from historical models depicting human endeavour and our struggle with nature. The major painting 'Ships' completed for the University of Texas residency, mirrors these ideas, depicting men in two wooden boats desperately battling the sea for their survival as colour explodes across the canvas in muscular swatches.His tonal and highly graphic style has a reductive effect on any narrative thoughts, subtly bringing the fundamental elements of image-making to the surface with seemingly simple structures while also allowing the viewer a glimpse of the painting's complexity.Stefan Dunlop's performance is hard to define which is the whole point and purpose of the painter who, like a tradesman, does not set out to entertain any particular emotion, theory or meaning for his art.