The Deep Cartoonery of Bill Dunlap
By Jonathan Zwickel
As easy as it is for the San Francisco painter to deconstruct his visual narratives of virtue and vice, there’s a deeper resonance within his work that speaks to the uneasy freedom that arises from the inevitable acceptance of life’s temptations. Also evident is a not-so-subtle sense of ironic humor, wrought from both the colorful, rubbery style of his subjects and the seemingly incongruent subtitles that accompany them. Dunlap’s childlike expressions actually reveal damage and danger, but it’s the kind of danger that’s welcome, necessary, human; the kind amplified and anesthetized by a good hazy binge, until tomorrow’s first disappointment.
Though he’d been drawing and doodling his whole life, Dunlap was 30 years old before he began to take his artwork seriously. As a child growing up in rural West Virginia, he was never encouraged to be creative; he was the first member of his family to attend college. “I was a total bumpkin,” he confides. “There were no paved roads in my town.” After college and travels through DC, New York and Japan, he made the move to San Francisco in 1994. Two years later, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a Master’s Degree in design, and founded a web design company. The slick, direct nature of the Internet helped Dunlap sharpen his eye for line, balance and contrast, and in 2000 his firm was featured prominently in the book Color Harmony for the Web by Cailan Boyle. A year later, the dot.bomb dropped and the company was no more. It was then he turned his full attention to painting.
“I had been doing illustration for a few years, stuff for Progressive, Pulse!, the Chronicle Sunday Datebook, San Francisco Examiner Magazine,” he says. The direct nature of contract illustration appealed to Dunlap in a way that painting initially didn’t. “It’s really ephemeral, but it’s engaged, it serves a direct purpose.”
From the beginning, Dunlap’s graphic art contained the archetypal icons that currently populate his full-scale paintings: crescent moons, barking dogs, skulls, stars, crosses. These emblems, orbiting foregrounds filled by detached cityscapes, busty temptresses, or sullen men in cowboy hats, comprise the symbolic language of Dunlap’s visual world.
“It’s like the artist’s vocabulary,” he explains. “Shorthand.”
That vocabulary seems derived from the stylistic bridge that connects the quirky, Crayola-colored glyphs of Joan Miró and the jagged, inky stabs of an underground comic book.
It’s through the convergence of simplistic images that a more resounding story begins to unfold, their repetition hinting at the greater truths Dunlap seeks to examine. A sense of foreboding is wrought by laughing skulls and XXX-marked whisky bottles hovering behind physically and emotionally isolated characters. But the bright, flat colors and comic book feel of these heavily outlined figures convey childlike ignorance—or perhaps a more adult denial—of the threats that await.
The incubator for Dunlap’s creative process can be found inside the three-drawer filing cabinet that stands monolithically in his home studio. Within the cabinet is a paper sea, a collection of scrap sheets from legal pads, torn airplane napkins, sketchbook pages—doodles and fledgling ideas dashed out in pencil or ink, all amassed as a cipher that catalogs his funky hieroglyphics. “I keep nearly every doodle I make, which is, like, kind of insane. There’s thousands.” Files are marked “Dogs,” “Girls,” “Stars,” and hold examples of Dunlap’s tempestuous, almost obsessive mind. These images, organized neatly and logically, reveal his endlessly fertile imagination, but belie the frantic, energized nature of his work.
“The few times I’ve tried to create a real structured piece, with a vanishing point, layout, technical stuff—when I do that, the result seems lifeless,” he says.
“I’m not very good at that, I guess. Conversely, when I sit down and doodle a face or something in, like, 10 seconds, like on the back of a phonebook, I’ll keep it and file it away, then three months later I’ll be going through the files and find this little face and think, ‘Oh my God, what a powerful, horrible little thing.’”
Dunlap scans the tiny glyphs and then projects them, magnified, onto canvases, where he can outline them and flesh them out with color. “After days and days and layers of paint, that random doodle has become this major thing. It’s the advanced execution of this idea that sprung in a raw, spontaneous way.”
An admirer of the post-World War I German expressionists, most notably the scathing political paintings and illustrations of George Grosz, Dunlap often uses dark outlines to separate his subjects from their surroundings. It’s a simplistic, comic book-like effect that imparts a sense of urgency, contrast and loneliness. Juxtaposing words with images further elaborates the cynical fairy tale feel, since the subtitles frequently confound the literal interpretation of the piece. “That’s because I want to use words in a more provocative way,” than for mere exposition, he goes on to explain.
The commingling of words and images can jar the viewer into new and different modes of interacting with the art. You Are Enslaved by your Desires, written in flowing script, runs along the bottom of a painting of a buxom, beckoning woman flanked by bottles and cigarettes. A blocky pastoral landscape confirms Nature is fine without you. As he ambles down a dark pathway, a solitary man is haunted by the reminder This is the path you chose. Somehow, despite their detached, even cruel admonitions, these paintings still elicit a wry smile.
Not so for all of Dunlap’s work, however. Recently chosen out of thousands of entries for display at the Richmond Art Center’s “Go West” exhibition is “Riot of Madmen,” his re-interpretation of Grosz’s ghastly 1915 drawing of the same name. In it a savage mob of crude stick figures runs rampant, raping and killing in the streets of a burning city. Repulsive but terribly compelling, the painting indicates his willingness to “visually sample” his influences, and delves into themes Dunlap would like to further explore.
“Some of the most arresting images come from someone else,” he explains of the Grosz original. “I have no problem with someone taking my stuff and reworking it. Ideas are meant to be used, copyrights are pointless because no artist is losing money from someone rethinking his idea.” Dunlap has cited bits of Whitman poetry, Fellini movie titles, even imagery from other illustrators into his own personal expressions, all post-modern reference points that help convey his dubiously hopeful world view.
“I like the cartoon approach because it’s accessible,” he says, “but I want to invest the cartoon with something more serious and dramatic.” It’s time, he believes, for a reemergence of the kind of art that is less a commodity or ornament and more an indictment or social statement.
“I would be foolish to think I have solutions,” he admits. “I just want to encourage people to be more contemplative. The big problem is that people don’t think for themselves. You have to make your own decisions.”
Dunlap continues, ardently, “We’re losing our intellectual and cultural heritage. If everything’s ‘cool’ or ‘rad,’ then everything is trivial. Art shouldn’t be shallow, it should have input. I have this naïve, romantic notion that art can ‘soothe the savage beast.’ A sophisticated approach to history and culture can do something good for the world.”
Check out more of Bill Dunlap’s work at www.billdunlap.com.
