I Stand for Sacrifice
new works by Bill Dunlap

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The title comes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and Shakespeare is a near daily inspiration for me. Every piece I make starts from a different motivation. Motivation can come from anywhere.That’s part of the immense freedom of art. For these pieces, some motivations I could name include: paintings by old masters, internet pornography, Appalachian quilts, and how I felt and what I was thinking day to day as I worked on them. 

I think pictures are best when they’re like poems. William Kentridge wrote that viewing art is like trying to reduce to sense a riddle that has no answer. “Reducing to sense” is a diminishment of the power of the painting.A great painting is free beyond that kind of control, or rather, it is so strong it can carry a thousand different interpretations and still remain a riddle with no answer.A good one always manages to slip away. I always try to slip away! 

I’ve heard Agnes Martin say that she “painted with her back to the world.” That’s funny, but I think also very telling. I feel utterly isolated sometimes, and painting the way I like to paint requires lots of solitude. In this way, I think I’m boiling things down to the rarest essentials. I used to think that painting only a few things was a limitation, but now I’m beginning to think that’s the goal. Find the riddle you can never answer. For me, maybe it’s the face or the figure, and maybe the land. But I’ve done almost nothing with the land yet.

~Bill Dunlap

Bill Dunlap is an artist who splits his time between Western Maryland and New York City. Most of the art-making happens in Maryland. His work has been shown extensively in galleries and museums across North America and Europe, including recent solo shows at the University of Maryland and at galleries in Boston, Denver and San Francisco. His work is included in several permanent collections, including the library collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art and recent acquisitions by the Universities of Wisconsin and Maryland.

His work was recently featured in an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and he is currently engaged in a large-scale ongoing commission from the University of Maryland to paint murals on barns across the state. He and his work have been featured widely in print, television, radio, and on many art blogs. He has also worked as an illustrator, and his images and cartoons have appeared in magazines and newspapers nationwide.