Art Critiques on Dunning’s Artwork
Barbara Vogt
Director of Public Relations for the Galleries of DuPont Circle, Washington, DC
Pat Dunning moves from still life paintings to semi-sculptural paintings on wood to abstract expressionist works on canvas. Within the groupings, technique and form are an outgrowth of the content. Taken together, they explore the expressive possibilities of painting itself.
In her still lifes, Dunning creates the texture, volume and shape of ordinary objects through a stylized geometric representation. In her wood series she comments on nature versus art by juxtaposing the two. Nature – represented by the wood, with its natural gashes, knotholes, and rough surfaces – is further suggested in her brushstrokes, lines, and color choices. In her third set, Dunning foregoes recognizable subject matter for a direct expression of emotion and mood. Here she juxtaposes hard edges against soft edges, hot colors against cold colors, paint and layered canvas against non-painterly objects, such as nails, wire, screening, sand, melted metal, shells, and stones. Beyond the immediate impasto surface of the canvas she reaches for subconscious mind images expressed through the dynamic tension created by her contrasts, her demanding colors, and her balanced compositions.
The artist has exhibited and/or is in private collections in DC, MD, PA, VA, IL, MI, WI, FL, NY, SC and Internationally.
Gene Markowski, BFA, MFA, PhD,
Chair Art Department, University of Virginia, VA.
As a woman and artist, Pat Dunning’s paintings are a visual representation of a concentrated physical and emotional state of being that she shares with many other women, the specter of an uncertain future determined by the painful reality of being a breast cancer survivor.
The highly emotionally-charged abstract paintings are, without question, a directory to the artist’s internal struggles with a life/death battle hidden behind the facades of her tranquil physical presence. As documents to a dynamic inner creative energy, the larger than life images discharge anger, hostility, and self-pity; as well as, a sexuality of startling proportions.
Dunning’s honesty may be difficult to deal with for some, but it is in fact this very honesty that generates the power of the images. In a period when blandness rules the day, Dunning’s paintings exert a presence of emotional turmoil connected to a state of acceptance that dismisses blandness with a feminine reality seen in an unflinching cold hard light – a light that illuminates one of life’s darker aspects.