William Dunlap: Contemporary landscapes

By Staff
Jan. 28, 2001
Webster County native William Dunlap is among artists whose works will be featured in the upcoming Art for Heart 2001.
Currently residing in McLean, Va., Dunlap's art is described as taking a highly contemporary view of the timeless American landscape. Using allegory, animism and elements of language, he address the ever-evolving American sensibility, its history, its light and its often troubled ground.
In a release, the artist said he is drawn to the pastoral and Gothic within the natural and historical landscape. Within this over-arching theme, charged images merge to stir the memory and challenge stereotypical perceptions. Whether working oil on paper, polymer paint on canvas or assembling found and fabricated objects, Dunlap's art, for the most part, is hybrid. The dualism of painting and sculpture has intrigued him and informed his work from the very beginning.
Commenting on his Construction series, Dunlap said, " … (The series) combines elements of painting, sculpture and assemblage in such a way as to provoke connections and dialogue between our perceived historical past and the critical concerns of our current time and place."
Dunlap's works hangs in numerous museums and collections across the country, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art, where his 14-paneled, 112-feet long cycle of paintings, "Panorama of the American Landscape"," opened in the Rotunda Gallery in 1985.
He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Danforth Award in the Visual Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation International Fellowship, a grant from The Warhol Foundation and a residency in Bangkok, Thailand, as a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest International Artists Fellow.