Lying and Making a Living

Lying and Making a Living, the title from a Barry Hannah quote picks up where Short Mean Fiction leaves off. It contains more of the irreverent, hard-hitting, exhilarating, ironic, and emblematic prose we’ve come to expect from the writer and painter William Dunlap. His stories, some as short as a single page, leave the reader gasping for breath and wanting more. Whereas Short Mean Fiction, his first gathering of stories promised words and pictures, Lying and Making a Living delivers fiction with footnotes in all their subtle explanation and incongruity. Language is something of a birthright for this Southerner whose characters we know by what they do. Dunlap identifies with William Faulkner who said he invented his people and then “ran along behind them writing down what they have to say.” As with Dunlap's paintings, he feels little pride in authorship and makes no literary claims for Lying and Making a Living. But admits that for what its worth, for better or worse, and to his utter surprise, there are many more where these came from.

William Dunlap is a painter, writer, arts advocate and commentator. The American landscape, its flora and fauna, are essential elements in Dunlap's art, as are certain iconic Old Masters such as Rembrandt's series of self-portraits, which he quotes in his paintings and constructions. He calls what he does, Hypothetical Realism."The places and situations I paint aren't real... but they could be." Allegory is ever present in this work. Whether on the page or the picture plane, Dunlap expects the viewer to meet him halfway. There is nothing backward looking about narrative art. On the contrary, one can hardly contemplate something more contemporary or edgy. In a career spanning more than four decades, Dunlap has exhibited internationally and is include in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. He has received awards and honors from the Danforth, Rockefeller, Lila Wallace and Warhol Foundations, as well as the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. DUNLAP, (UniversityPress of Mississippi, 2006) with essays by Rick Gruber and Julia Reed, remains a definitive book of the artist's work. SHORT MEAN FICTION - words and pictures, (Nautilus Press, 2016) is Dunlap's initial foray into literary fiction with stories drawn from decades of sketchbooks accompanied by reproductions of original drawings. William Dunlap maintains studios in Coral Gables, Florida; Mclean,Virginia; and Mathiston, Mississippi, and can be contacted through his website.