RICHARD BUCHANAN-DUNLOP
| Richard
Buchanan-Dunlop’s art defies categorisation. It derives from
a singular personal philosophy and involves a complex four-stage mental
process. Born in 1919, the son of a Scottish clergyman, he rejects
what he calls the “hearsay religions,” believing that
the spiritual ingredient of life is Nature. Because Man has the gift
of Reason, Buchanan-Dunlop believes that the universe is in his sacred
charge – a charge that Man has abused to the extent that, as
a species, he now stands at risk of being eliminated or “culled”
by the forces of Nature. Forty years ago he sought isolation on the
Greek island of Skiathos, where he taught himself to paint and began
to develop his mathematically-based philosophy. His initial attempts
to capture the Greek light in geometric coloured patterns were succeeded
by a sharp change in his style when he perceived the natural beauty
of the island to be in retreat and threatened by the evil force of
materialism, caricatured as the Devil.
A mathematics scholar and a poet, the process of encoding is fundamental to Buchanan-Dunlop’s methodology. He selects a poem from a body of work that he wrote during the 1980s and allocates a colour to each letter of the alphabet, which varies from poem to poem. Some of his paintings consist of thousands of coloured rhomboids, each overpainted at least three times. Others are schematic scenes deriving from poems whose encoded “veils” of coloured dots overlay them. Each painting has a different colour key, through which the veil can be decoded to reveal the poem. Many refer to the Scotland of Buchanan-Dunlop’s adolescence, - a psychological refuge, where poem and painting are tightly interlocked. Here, God, depicted in one painting as a complex mathematical symbol, takes tea with the artist. Detached
from their partner-poems and codes, Buchanan-Dunlop’s paintings
reveal little of the thought behind them. Taken together, his philosophy,
poetry, encoding system and painting disclose an idiosyncratic and
deeply pessimistic perception of the world, that their bright colours
bely. The paintings represent the final stage of an obsessional
and painstaking artistic system that demands to be taken into account
as a whole. |
For further information and a list of works currently available |
