From:

Kathryn Dunlevie / Paintings, Frederick Spratt Gallery, 2000

"Kathryn Dunlevie / Paintings"

by Frederick Spratt

…about the work

Like an old record-or a sound track slightly out of sync-the scenes in Kathryn Dunlevie's pictures play back and forth between the recognizable and the implausible. They have the tone of remembered places; compellingly rich, but dimly recalled and unsettling. Are these places one has known: scenes conjured from memory; a collage of recollections; movie shards; fragments of one's imagination? Déjà vu?

One wonders.

…about the pictures and the artist

Schooled in pictorial media, Dunlevie practiced painting and its many gambits for years and found it fulfilling. But she always packed a camera (a kind of side game?) and incessantly-with no apparent intent or purpose-snapped views that caught her eye. In earlier black and white shots she found her natural eye for composition, but it was later in the ubiquitous commercial color photo processing that she had her epiphany: Dunlevie saw qualities of color and tone that captivated her and bore an uncanny likeness to 17th Century Dutch genre painting. It was then she realized some of her photographs were destined to be combined into paintings; married, as it were, by the touch of a brush and paint, not unlike the way vintage, pre-color photographs welcomed the lifelike blush of oil color tinting.

In this exhibition Dunlevie's newest pictures are thus hybrids: montages of photographs seamlessly wedded as paintings. They speak the mute language of pictures: still, silent and evocative.