Jack Dunnett Scottish, b. 1995

Jack Dunnett is a painter who merges techniques of traditional oil painting with explorations into reactions between household chemicals, building materials and found pigments. Working with processes which build up and strip away layers, he creates paintings which examine relationships between prescriptive mark-making and chance elements, combining structure and chaos to create scenes which hold themselves in a state of balanced tension. Depicting stories from an unreliable narrator, the building and redacting of each surface references the flawed and grasping nature of memory and perception. The subjective lens through which thoughts and events are experienced is captured by an unyielding ambiguity of scenario, spun through processes of obfuscation and revelation. This culminates in a picture which presents itself as informative yet questioning, demanding that the image be filtered again by the eye of the viewer. 

 

 

Finely detailed, intimate sized pieces on boards, the paintings bear heavy adornments of materiality, containing twisting forms caused by chemical reactions, and sculptural textures reminiscent of a variety of stones. Pockets of glaze and varnish draw the eye around the paintings; arranged embellishments which encase flecks of a crafter's trait among chance elements. Conscious painterly marks are juxtaposed with these formations, allowing the intervening hand of the artist to converse with the permanence of the more elemental furnishings. Figures either meld or jar with their environment, the characters aware they are acting in a perpetually staged scene.

 

I draw a lot from stories and the paint's physical properties. When it comes to subjects for paintings, they're informed by a steady stream of influences that come from many sources. The films I watch, books I read and music I listen to all feed in alongside memories, musings and day-to-day experiences. I see as much art as I can and tend to be drawn to small details of texture and colour. Marks that convey the hand of the artist often grab my attention and make me think about the degree of control the artist can have over the materials and what level or expression is most appropriate to convey the subject. I have countless areas of inspiration. I dart between them so frantically that I'm often not immersed deeply in one particular subject but find myself skimming between something that links multiple interests. Stories and how we interact with them; the mundane and the transcendent; signs and symbols; honesty and allegory. The only constant is that feeling that doesn't go away, that says 'this painting needs to  be painted’. I'm interested in the documentary, the human element of how events or stories are told by the person capturing them. Filmmaking, for example, varies drastically and has noticeably changed over time due to different sensibilities and motives. A documentarian has the choice of delivery of their subject, from a cold, matter-of-fact articulation which values subjectivity through to using musical and narrative interjections to affect a specific area of emotional response from a viewer, aligning them with the viewpoint of the artist.

 

HAVE YOU ALWAYS WORKED ON A SMALL SCALE? HOW IMPORTANT IS THIS TO YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS? DO YOU WORK ON PAINTINGS ONE AT A TIME OR IN SERIES?

 

Working on a small scale has gifted me a lot of discoveries, none of which I anticipated or sought out. I first began making small paintings in my final year at art school. I had an overarching outcome in the back of my mind for what I wanted my degree show to be in the years before I even began thinking about the practicalities of it. It needed to be on a large scale involving a scene on a 2x4 meter canvas, encompassing many figures which showed a modern narrative in a grandiose Romantic setting, reminiscent of a Turner or John Martin painting. Over time, however, while making individual character studies for these large works, I found that I wanted to explore these snippets in more depth, keeping them self-contained yet involved in an ongoing narrative. The Romantic paintings I had been studying may have deployed many figures in a large painting, but that tended to emphasise the fundamental proponent ideals of what Romanticism was yearning to achieve in its time, the diminutive form of human within nature, and nature as the signifier of overarching divine superiority. I felt the characters I had been delving into needed their own platforms, which were more conducive to our contemporary situation. Isolated characters were explored in depth as part of a larger whole, yet eternally separated from it. Each piece is set in its own amber, to be looked at alone, defined by its own edges and limitations, yet continues to be part of the larger overarching body of work. Characterised by the grounded limitation of edge, restricted by their four walls, yet linked with a serial bond that they will be forever unaware of. Working intimately on small boards has led me to a process I wasn't conscious of until I had to think about it. I work on paintings while holding them in my hand or balanced on my fingertips. It allows me to immediately change the angle I'm working at without adjusting an easel and to move around the studio as I work, seeing the piece in a different light. My palette is on wheels, so I just roll it around the room with me as the light shifts. When I've taken a piece as far as I can go with it intuitively that day, I'll place it down and start working on another picture. I've found this the best way to avoid any creative blocks or dead ends in resolving a painting. I work on up to fifty paintings at once. All take a long time to complete, but I find this rotational working stops anything from feeling monotonous or laborious.

 

THE TECHNICAL SIDE OF YOUR PRACTICE IS IMPORTANT, OFTEN COMBINING TRADITIONAL MATERIALS WITH OTHERS NOT NECESSARILY ASSOCIATED WITH PAINTING. WHAT ARE THESE, AND HOW ESSENTIAL ARE THEY TO THE FINISHED WORK?

 

I've come to utilise a short list of household chemicals in my work just as much as any particular oil colour. They all stemmed from heavy-handed experimentation with materials when I was at art school and worked part-time in a hardware shop. Behind the counter was this laminated sheet of pictures of different problems people would encounter with paint if misused, things like 'surfactant leeching', 'rippling', and ‘blistering'. It reminded me of the books you'd get in high school that showed photographs of painterly techniques; 'scumbling', 'sgraffito', 'impasto' etc. I brought this knowledge to the studio, along with discounted burst bags of building materials, defective tins of paint and various volatile industrial chemicals. I've pared these down over the years, as the first experiments occasionally resulted in inadvertently burning a hole in the studio floor, accidentally synthesising chemical weapons and creating paintings which were 'hot to the touch' and couldn't be exhibited for public liability reasons. All these initial compounds are gone from my work. However, looking up their less powerful chemical counterparts has led me to certain salts and light acids, which significantly affect the patina of a lot of my work. I've learnt that the bones of the piece still needs to be the paint, but there are a lot of domestic paints, which I find a lot more hard-wearing and effective than the most expensive oils. For example, liquid rubber used for roofing makes an excellent deep matte black. I also paint it on my boots to keep them from letting water in the cracks. Some brands of plaster used in the trade are much stronger than artist's plaster and can be used to make fresco-type pieces which can stand the test of time. The best way to get the effect of a cement wall in a painting is to use cement.

 

WHICH ARTISTS DO YOU ADMIRE AND WHY? DO ANY DIRECTLY INFLUENCE YOUR WORK?

 

There's a lot. Philip Guston, Rose Wylie and Louise Bourgeois for the way they talk about painting. Antoni Tàpies, Anselm Kiefer, Kai Althoff and Merlin James for their use of materials surrounding painting. Hopper, Vuillard and Turner for their use of colour. Walter Sickert, Andrew Cranston, Norbert Schwonkowski and Frank Auerbach for their manipulation of paint. Emin, Munch, Schiele and Bacon for their rawness and honesty. Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Spitzweg and Carl Gustav Carus for their compositions. They've all influenced my work directly to some degree. I like how certain filmmakers talk about creating images and working with narrative. Charlie Kaufman and Tarkovsky write excellently about the process and the thoughts behind them, and they speak in terms which often cross over with painting. Many performers, comedians and musicians also talk so well about the creative process that I take a lot from their words: Patti Smith, Stewart Lee, Nick Cave, and Aidan Moffat. I'm a sponge when listening to folk talk about their work. The feeling of a shared experience in the arts, however much I can relate to it or not, is always cathartic.

 

A bit of context helps, a bit. Jack Dunnett was born in 1995 and was brought up in Thurso, a small town on the most northern tip of mainland Britain, where the ferry leaves for the windswept Isles of Orkney. His art gives the impression that he has always felt that he exists on the extreme edge of … I was going to write of everything, but that would be too simplistic. But then everything I start to write about Jack Dunnett's work I find to be too simplistic. Even his name. I was tempted, just now, to write 'Jack's work', but that would sound too personal and familiar. But referring to 'Dunnett's work' is too formal. His work is both individual and detached, so using his full name is more apposite. 

 

Back to the edge … of what? The edge, perhaps, of himself. His paintings are purposefully ambiguous. They spring in part from personal experiences but he wants these to remain inaccessible to the viewer. Yet at the same time he doesn't want the viewers to feel locked out but free to explore the piece and find in it what they will. This is an invitation and a distance. It is fundamentally true, too, of all human relationships, however intimate. We are each ultimately alone, however much we love another. This is the solitariness one senses in all Jack Dunnett's painting. It is, one feels, one reason why they are so small, and the edges of each image are so important to the whole. 

 

More facts. He can't remember when he didn't draw. An only child, his grandmother bought him a sketchbook when he drew on all the note-pads she used for shopping lists. From the age of about five, his father drew with him for half an hour in the evenings, pictures from life or their imaginations. He went to art school, not because he thought there was any chance of earning a living as an 'artist', but because he didn't know what else to do. He studied at the most northerly art school in Britain - another 'edge' - one of the few left that taught the techniques of painting and drawing. And, from there, he has never looked back.

 

Visiting Jack Dunnett in his studio is an unforgettable experience. The silence around his thin, delicate form is almost palpable. He gives the impression of being haunted, quietly but relentlessly. This stillness is emphasised by the smallness of his studio, one of several - most presumably much larger - in a multi-storied artists' workshop complex near the city centre of Glasgow. You are immediately aware of a mind at work. There's a shelf of books in the corner by the window: volumes on his favourite artists, like Anselm Kiefer, Phillip Guston and Caspar David Friedrich, interleaved with books by Carl Jung and one by Freud. All look well-thumbed.