Articles Arts and Artists David Dunlap, Jun 05
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David DunlapDunlap's Art is to Art as a Coral Reef is to ArchitectureBY MARK PAUL PETRICK
David Dunlap at Gallery 51 East in Fairfield, Iowa (photo by Mark Paul Petrick, ©2005).
“He’s all sort of community and loving, and a bit impenetrable.” David Dunlap is a cultivator of relationships, a planter of conceptual seeds, a harvester of images, and a packager of the fruits of his obsessive creative labors in exhibitions that seem to accrete into place like a tantalizingly wonder-filled coral reef. Among his various artistic personas, Dunlap is now the proprietor of Walnut Farms, an Inter-Species Artists Collective that guarantees to you: “In the SWEETNESS of Time all the Love in the World.” It would be understatement to invoke collaboration as a strategy of his work. David’s life (probably not all that unlike yours) is a regular flow of interactions, combustions, discussions, ingestions, and creative regurgitations. He is a disciplined obsessive about keeping notebooks as the place of record for the thoughts, images, and findings of each day. The notebooks and pages from them often become the stuff of an exhibition, where a single sketched pattern may be repeated several times, once per page, with attendant notes and date. Like any good cultivator, the passing of time, as days, months, and seasons, holds a special interest for Dunlap. And, like the rows in a field orlines in a notebook, the rows of days that make weeks and accumulate on top of each other to become a month are given special expression as large, painted, monthly calendars. These are often made with a collaborator (or collaborators), embellished and used, each day its own box, a place for more recordings of his life’s activities. If I’ve given the impression that Dunlap is all grids and detached, cool note-making, pardon me, for nothing could be further from the Truth. The lines in the notebook or the boxes on the calendar are only suggestions of an order upon which the tangle of his energies, obsessions, shared images, and fantasies emerge. The repeated cartoons, cryptograms, and utopianism of the notebooks and calendars overflow onto his clothes, sculptures of implements, pottery, pottery as clothes, wearable sculptures, and vast collections of tidbits and paraphernalia, often in unexpected and provocative combinations. His delight in others’ work translates as images made by two or more people and the attendant sharing of credit. This exhibition of Dunlap’s seems to bring together the energies of more accomplices than any I’ve seen before. It feels like an art show assembled by a traveling circus of politically astute, graffiti-inspired pranksters on the verge of OCD (or maybe deeply in the throes of it). There are so many stories laced together throughout the exhibit, many written on the walls, or hinted at, and you are asked, beckoned, and lured into taking part. As is often repeated in the exhibit (and so helpfully so, if you dare take it as a guidance):
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written by john barrett, April 22, 2008
This is a message for David Dunlap and I would be grateful if you could forward. david, you taught me at Leeds College of Art (UK) in the early 1970s and I was truly inspired by your approach to creating art and design. I would be very pleased to get back in touch with you as I'm certain we have a lot in common and maybe share our experiences through future correspondence. I look forward to hearing from you. Best wishes John B
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... written by kate, April 07, 2008
david dunlap taught me how to draw. his ideas of delight and dailiness have fueled my work for some time now, as you can see from my website. thank you, david.
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This is a message for David Dunlap and I would appreciate if you could forward your e-mail too me. I was one of 400 art exhibitors at an Annual Monroe Center for the Performing and Cultural Arts exhibit on June 14th with one of your former art students Liron Sissman in New Jersey, a watercolor and drawing student.
I truly appreciate the beauty and realism in her landscape artwork. I share a deep love of nature with you David Dunlap and would appreciate if you could provide info if you plan to teach here on the New England east coast of USA or are you abroad...my info is as follows:
Fine Artist (acrylic seascapes & landscapes) and works on paper in graphite
J.A. Zielaznicki
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I will be honored to forward my digital images to you for review with constructive critique. Is that fair David ? My dream and goal in the life of an artist has always wanted to exhibit in galleries and museums across the globe during my travels abroad. I recently visited Pune,Nashik and Pune, India with my boyfriend from Dec 26, 2008 thru Jan 12, 2009. I have such hopes to create a huge exhibit refering to my spiritual experience looking through the eyes of the India mountains and watching the peasants wrok long and hard with a rich spirit. NAMASTE J.A. Zielaznicki