Artist Interview with Robert Dunt

Get to know Robert Dunt, who is donating all proceeds from one of his latest NFTs to the British Red Cross to assist in providing aid to Ukraine.

Robert Dunt is one of Dahai's abstract and representational painters. Dunt has always been an artistic/creative person, but it wasn't until his early adulthood that he found the outlet he was searching for. Once he developed his style of heavily colored abstract paintings, he became committed to creating works of art consistently and showing them in art galleries. As well as creating art, Dunt is involved in the London and international art community with his website and YouTube channel ArtTop10.com. He uses this platform to review art exhibitions and interview artists from all over the world. This interview was prompted by Dunt’s announcement on Twitter that he would be donating all of the proceeds from one of his recent NFT drops, Detail 1 on Dahai, to the British Red Cross to assist in aiding Ukraine. A truly commendable idea, using art and NFTs to make real-world change.

Was there a specific reason you chose “Detail 1” from your ongoing “Detail” NFT collection to raise money for Ukraine?

Well, I had made this one painting before the war had started, and it was one of my Electricity paintings. The Electricity painting all have this layering that is kind of crazy and which visually affects you but, as with any good abstract painting, also affects you emotionally. I decided to name it ‘Faded War Negative’ because in some of the darker sections of the painting, the way the paint had dripped across the surface picked up this pixelated element of the canvas weave. For some reason, this faded pixelation effect communicated to me a similarity with those black and white faded images of war from World War 1. Then the war in Ukraine started very soon after I had finished that painting, so it took on a greater significance. The NFT Detail 1 is a very, very close-up detail of the painting Faded War Negative, so it seemed appropriate to use that as the NFT to raise money for Ukraine.

Detail 1

The “Detail” NFT series itself came about as I have always been obsessed with technology and iPhones, so when I got the newest iPhone, I was experimenting with the camera, which has this incredible macro ability to zoom in insanely close and see exceptional detail. I was in the process of documenting my paintings so that people could understand what they would be like in reality, seen up very close, and I suddenly thought the up-close detail photos I was taking would make cool NFTs.

What motivated you to help Ukraine, and why did you want to raise money with an NFT?

Many people I know we're looking for ways to raise money, and I just thought it would be interesting to mix it up with NFTs. Many people don't know a great deal about NFTs or Crypto or aren't aware of them, but I thought it was an interesting, fresh, and contemporary platform to use to raise money. I find the whole NFT thing really exciting. Some of my more mature contemporaries and artists don’t get the idea, but when you talk to someone younger, they would rather have something digital on their phone instead of buying a physical painting. When you can have it on the phone, you can access it at all times.

How would you say your style has evolved?

I would say that I am always bouncing back and forth between abstract and representational work. Most of the works on Dahai’s site are abstracted, but many of my other pieces are representational, inspired by places I’ve been, but they all involve strongly colored sections, and they still work on an abstract level. I think most representational artworks on abstract aesthetics and most abstract art references the real world.

The Distortion Form paintings are some of my classic trademark abstract paintings. They are really like paintings of music, I have been inspired by the group The Jesus and Mary Chain, a Scottish band that makes pretty songs similar to the Beach Boys, but they cover it up with noise, distortion, and feedback. It's a clever way of making something pretty but mangling it to make it even prettier in the end. Some of my paintings are created in a similar way to how this music was made. In the background, they have pretty patches of color, and then on top, you have black and white shapes that I call my distortion forms. These forms are like a visual metaphor for the noise and distortion of the Jesus and Mary Chain.

True Blue

I have been influenced heavily by things in the past I have liked, such as artists who painted beautiful things like Monet, Matisse, Ben Nicholson, and Patrick Heron. By taking inspiration from these artists and mangling it in my way, I can create my style that is more contemporary and relevant to my own time. This notion of bringing things up to the present and making them relevant is another reason I enjoy NFTs so much. You aren't necessarily changing the way you see something, but it is changing how you access it, really shaking up the way you’d expect things to happen.

Could you tell me a little bit about your website and YouTube channel?

As well as doing the art, I run a website and a YouTube channel called ArtTop10.com, and the idea of that has always been about talking about art in a very simple fashion and making it accessible. When trying to learn about art, so much of the content is dominated by very stiff professorial information that can be complicated and hard to understand. With ArtTop10, I break down that barrier to help others engage, learn and talk about art, which is similar to NFTs. By taking art out of a shielded gallery environment and into a more normal people environment.

When I started the website, I was doing text reviews of exhibitions in London, but around that time, my son started getting into Youtube, and I just thought, what is the point of doing a written review when I can film it. This is why I got into filming vlogs that review art exhibitions and filming interviews with artists, and now I have somewhere between two or three hundred videos.

What is your relationship with color? How do you come up with the color palettes for your paintings?

Color is the thing that drives me, and the inspiration comes from all over. I guess you could call me a colorist painter above everything else. For example, one of the works I have up on Dahai now, True Blue was named after the Madonna album True Blue. The colors, as they turned out, reminded me of the album cover, with the blue and the beige colors. True Blue is a part of six large 1.7-meter paintings that I painted for an art and antiques fair. Each of the six paintings have very different color experiences.

With True Blue I wanted to create something that provokes emotion through an oceanic feeling, similar to experiencing rain or seeing light flicker off the ocean. The choice of the blue was not academic, but it was to create a certain mood around that blue.

Another example of a painting I have with Dahai, as both an asset-backed and non-asset-backed NFT, is Hacking Heron. I’ve always been inspired by Patrick Heron, a classic British artist from Cornwall. I enjoyed the colors Heron used, and it inspired me to utilize a similar palette for my own painting, which is why it's called Hacking Heron since I was inspired by the colors he used but hacked them up and put them back together in my own way.

Hacking Heron

There are many things I do quite consistently in my paintings; for instance, I'll use the same color in a dark tone and then in a light tone, so I am playing with the tonality of that color. Also, I try to keep the paint quite translucent, which is the beauty of oil paint because you can keep it thin and use it almost like watercolor or the opposite and use it very thickly. When you start matching those things up against each other (thick and thin paint), it creates a really nice effect, and the colors change. Oil paint really has a depth and gravity within it that allows you to create extremely unique and diverse ranges of color that other types of paint can't compete with. Color is my kind of thing, it's out there everywhere, but it's nice to put it into a painting and work so closely with it. Then after you look at the paintings, it changes the world around you, allowing all colors to be more vivid, noticeable, and intense.