Liffey Falls near Deloraine (Birthplace of the Tasmanian Greens)

Liffey Falls near Deloraine North Tasmania (where I now live) is adjacent to Oura Oura where Bob Brown and partner Paul Thomas hatched ideas for the formation of the Tasmanian Greens over a kitchen table, with various visitors like Richard Flanagan. The images of the area on television were relayed to me in my twenties, and I was enamoured by the idea that anyone could conceptualise a persuasive movement with such modest means. As a subject for painting however, it has nothing to do with politics, but rather chosen for its formal and theatrical qualities as a painterly fiction, no more a copy of reality than what a novelist or a filmmaker might envision for an audience to communicate an experiential journey. I sought to bring various elements into a fresh and harmonious order, with the predominant subject being the capturing of an emergence of light in the north Tasmanian ‘film noir’ landscape.

Richard Dunlop

2021

oil on Belgian Linen