Stefan Dunlop - Crowd, 2004

ArtVals welcomes genuine offers through the Enquire/Acquire button

“Crowd” began its life sourced from a black and white photograph depicting a large gathering from the early 60s, some sort of radical student protest at an Italian university campus.

What I liked was the way it portrayed a large group in a dramatic circumstance, and something seemed to be happening: conflict, argument, and aggression, something significant and perhaps fundamental to our nature and relevant to our times. I’d been looking for such an image for several months. In fact, the idea had been brewing for years, initiated after seeing the late work of Bruno Fonseca, Gericault, and Goya. I wanted to take on some of the big, multi-layered figurative challenges that good painters of the past have tackled. I also wanted to see if I was up to it.

The piece began well enough. But after several weeks it became clear that it couldn’t be resolved. I had come a long way with the colour but something was lacking in the composition. If the balance and structure of a piece is wrong, everything else is superfluous. I decided to cut the canvas down and create a smaller painting, in effect a study. Having failed initially on the large-scale canvas, I started re-arranging certain figures in the painting. One figure in particular was “mirrored” or “flipped” to the other side of the canvas and I could see the piece begin to work. The colour influence came from some of the paintings in the National Gallery, London. I’d noticed in old master paintings the use of robes or togas as a device for the abstract distribution of colour, which then builds a rhythm.

The Titian retrospective of 2003 was also influential — his early stuff has these huge patches of unmodulated, intensely saturated colour. A very solid colour paired with a very solid composition and shape. All this comes into my painting in a modern way. But interestingly, I’m never sure if these ideas have truly influenced the production of a piece, or emerged after the painting is finished. What I do know is that “Crowd” is largely decorative, and I like the interplay of a subtle narrative within a purely pictorial device.

Extract from Talking Pictures, Interview by Will Cantopher, BBC London 2004.