William Dunlap
Blue Ridge, Look Away
While attending college, artist William Dunlap spent one blistering summer working on a road crew, building a section of interstate between Jackson and Canton, Mississippi. Early each morning, Dunlap would arrive at the worksite, chug water, swap stories with the other men, and begin a long day of manual labor. Apparently it was the perfect creative incubator for a young artist’s developing mind.
“It was hot, unforgiving work, but I was in the landscape,” he said. “It was just pristine.”
Dunlap would soon embark on a five-plus-decade career as a prolific landscape artist. Throughout his tenure as a mixed-media painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer, he has exhibited internationally, with works featured in public and private collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.
By William Dunlap
"Flamingos in the Flatland."
Although he classifies himself as a practitioner of “hypothetical realism” (“These places and things I paint aren’t real, but they could be,” he said in a recent interview, speaking from one of his studios, in Coral Gables, Florida), it is the majesty of America’s natural vistas that provide the flashes of inspiration vital to his creations.
“The works are allegorical, whether I want them to be or not,” he observed. “I like to use the word, ‘allegory,’ to suggest that they might be there . . . I’m making paintings that speak to something other than just the picture of the landscape itself.”
Growing up in Mississippi and spending time in Texas and the Carolinas, the eighty-two-year-old Dunlap has long been influenced by the sublime beauty of Southern landscapes. When he drives through his old stomping ground, he often dwells on the lives of his grandfathers, both farmers and the last of their kind in his family lines—bearing witness to the land they worked.
“It’s the same landscape,” he said. “I’m just doing something different with it.”
By William Dunlap
"Flat Out Fence Row."
In a sense, Dunlap continues to reproduce that same Deep South landscape, returning to and reviving the lush recollections of his youth. He recalls an early criticism of his work—that he seems to create the same painting over and over again. But that’s the point. “I’m going to keep doing it until I get it right,” he said. “I make these paintings because I want to see them. If I sell one, that’s a good thing.”
This part of the world haunts his imaginings. “The hill country of North Mississippi is subtly beautiful. It’s not the mountains, there are no great bodies of water. But the light’s extraordinary,” he said. “I’m drawn to the place. That sense of place is so prevalent in the writing of William Faulkner…and people like that—it’s true in the art, too.” He described a piece he was painting, of mountains in North Carolina—mountains that somehow still “got a little bit of Mississippi in it—the fog is definitely Mississippi fog. It’s not North Carolina fog,” he said. “I mix these things up.”
This sense of reimagined and rearticulated place, the blending of regional elements, the possibility of some unspoiled rural existence, evoke both the American pastoral and the American Gothic—two sensibilities held in one hand, close enough for their ambivalence and contradictions to touch, but not negate the other. Spend a moment or two with a Dunlap painting, with the rich colors and quiet imagery, and you might arrive at the conclusion that the landscape depicted must be from another time, even another century; it is a world that feels just out of reach, but distantly familiar. By composing in the vein of could be, one gets the feeling Dunlap has tapped other realities, other dimensions, and captured their impressions on a canvas. What are his paintings but possibilities, frozen in time?
“I’m not interested in making photographic realist paintings,” Dunlap said. “I’m interested in paintings that tell a story. A lot of times, the viewer can look at the painting and get something out of it I never intended, and I like that. I like to set up the dominos so they fall for everybody in a different way.”
Photo by Kay Holloway
Artist William Dunlap
Surrounded by Storytellers
His preoccupation with stories rivals even that of his obsession with landscapes—an infatuation he insists he comes by honestly. Dunlap grew up surrounded by storytellers (“Language is the birthright of we Southerners,” he argues.) and traces some of his fondest memories back to tall-tales nights spent with his grandfather.
“Whatever sense of oral history I have came from those evenings,” he said. “They’d build a fire, listen to the dogs’ chase. They could tell whether the hounds had struck a gray or a red fox, and who was out front. It was just remarkable to be around these guys—it was like magic, and they had great stories to tell. All this is mixed up in my art practice.”
Dunlap’s interests in oral tradition, in paintings that speak to their viewer, in artists that hunt for the right vista to tell a tale, have yielded an unexpected passion for creative writing. To be fair, he feels the impulse is his inheritance, having observed, during his adolescence, Eudora Welty “wrest[ling] her garbage cans down to the curb.” Such casual proximity to literary greatness could not help but light a fire in him—though he wouldn’t feel it for decades. In 2016, he published his debut story collection, Short Mean Fiction: Words and Pictures (Nautilus Press), and continues to write voraciously—always fiction. (“I really feel that fiction tells a greater truth, if you know what I mean.”) For what it’s worth, he believes this new passion for the written word has stimulated a creative muscle, sharpening Dunlap’s instincts as a visual artist.
By William Dunlap
Strafed Valley Fog Lift
“I think I’m making some of the best paintings of my life right now, and I’m eighty-two years old. The writing has opened up the painting in a lot of ways,” he said. “The paintings tend to make themselves these days.”
Today, Dunlap finds more solace than ever in his Mississippi upbringing. While he has traveled extensively, and now resides in the tropical climes of south Florida, he refuses to shed the Southern identifier that reverberates through his creative endeavors—even through the timbre of his voice.
In fact, Dunlap is feeling more Southern “all the damn time.” “Mississippi calls me… you can go away, but you can never get away,” he said. “I never stopped being from the American South. I never stopped being interested in it.”
