Neil Dallas Brown was a consummate imagemaker, capable of realising intense and disturbing visions in paint with piercing clarity. The imagery of many of his 1970s paintings draws clearly on the stuff of sex fantasy, a fertile dreaming ground; in the stark presentation of a scene as well as the enigma which is central to the implied narrative, Dallas Brown finds a means of articulating that simultaneously exciting and revolting quality which arrests us amid the drama of a troubling dream.

The idealised, voluptuous bodies of young women, often topless and clad in stockings, hold sway in these paintings. In their ostensible self-confidence and apparent ownership of their sexuality – many seem to vaunt what appears to be a free, positive, liberated condition, turning to display pert buttocks or erect nipples – they read as eager candidates for a potential sexual encounter. But for all of their allure, the figures are always disembodied, with heads truncated or faces turned away, as if in the eyes of a voyeur struggling to get a better view; often pictured in their own domestic spaces, lying face-down on plump beds or stretching on sofas, the viewer is invited to invade their space. In Nude and Hound Against a Wall from 1979 [image 1], which appears to show a woman poised to enter a shared shower, Dallas Brown fuses a sense of voyeuristic delight with the suggestion of an inevitable sexual liaison along the lines of a smutty movie.

The women appear to be cast as the perfect players in a private fantasy dream: denied personality, reduced to objects, they might satisfy a sexual urge without question or complication. As in pornography – it is possible that Dallas Brown, who drew inspiration from photographic sources, incorporated images from found erotica into his paintings - their apparent self-confidence is a superficial and inauthentic means of seduction [note 4]. Dallas Brown’s women represent a fantasy which could never be related to a healthy, consensual sexual encounter beyond the world of dreams.

An interest in titillation for the sake of male attention is hard-wired into the depiction of the female nude; Dallas Brown takes his place among the artists of the twentieth century who have inverted this art historical tradition. He presents the image of a woman as she appears in the sleaziest depths of the male imagination and offers the stuff of dreams back. If the image excites the viewer, if only for an instant, shame is bound to follow. By removing the woman from the seedy fantasy, the perversity of a dream is challenged: writ large on the gallery wall, the fantasy crumbles.

Act Death Dream - oil on board - 161x130cm - 1974 - private collection - courtesy of McTears and the artist’s estate

If the challenge to male desire is not flagrant enough in the deliberate misogyny of these works, Dallas Brown fuses the erotic with a very alarming ingredient: his nudes coexist with a menagerie of sinister animals. Snarling cats, beady-eyed parrots and birds of prey present a sense of menace through suggested physical threat – the sickle-sharp beak of a macaw or the trap of a dog’s yawning mouth threaten to pierce sensitively rendered flesh – or, more disturbingly, they represent bestial congress. Act, Death, Dream from 1974 [image 2] shows a woman adopting an almost balletic pose in order to bare herself before a crab which is trapped in a box in the foreground. The image perfectly reflects Dallas Brown’s desire to create an “abrupt, daring composition”: it possesses a brilliantly structured, formally sophisticated sense of design [note 5]. The content of the work as well as its formal tautness presents a clear but inexplicable implication, relying on the viewer’s participation; Dallas Brown does not overstate the facts, but the image of a woman in uncomfortably close proximity to an animal sparks a spiral of imaginings which leaves the viewer with a lingering sense of the disgust or shame familiar after the type of nightmare best kept to oneself.

In these 1970s paintings Dallas Brown builds large-scale, beautifully realised and exquisitely finished artworks from highly disturbing images which are drawn from the fantasies of the unconscious mind. While certain passages might appear to titillate, they are works which figure as a forthright challenge to male fantasy by playing on unconscious desires. If the experience of having them made flesh for all to see is disquieting, the cast of grotesque and threatening animals which are introduced into that same world is horrifying. Taken together, this strain of work reads like a stream of recurring nightmares.

Mastery of the painter’s craft is central to the dream-like power of Dallas Brown’s work. Technical flair, which he regarded as the most immediate means of communicating authority, allowed his paintings to assume what Emilio Coia described as “the inevitability of pictorial truth” [note 6]. Somehow in Dallas Brown’s world, his images hold true.

Dallas Brown deployed his technical gifts to carry off significant technical challenges on a large scale throughout the 1970s. His eye for tone, strengthened by the practice of removing paint from a dark layer overlying a white ground in order to articulate form and achieve a wonderfully luminous effect, sometimes created an appearance close to that of sepia photography [note 7]. The effect in works such as Nude and Hound Against a Wall is stunning: it has an arresting impact but manages to resist appearing as mute and remote as a photograph. Dallas Brown’s use of cloth rags and soft French polishing brushes to work the paint over a slightly textured hardboard panel gives the surface of his pictures a stippled quality, resembling the grain of leather [note 8]. The surface of a Neil Dallas Brown painting appears to have its own life, which appeals to the viewer for a sensual response. In his 1970s pictures, we can sense goosebumps growing on exposed flesh; we can almost feel the tickle of ticks in a dog’s coat. The works have a breathtaking presence which gets under the skin and sucks us into the seeming reality of the dream.

Lovers and Still Pool - oil on panel - 55x45cm - 1970 - private collection - courtesy of McTears and the artist’s estate

Dallas Brown’s touch, evident in his 1970s paintings for all their refinement, is more immediately apparent in a series of work created throughout the 1960s, depicting lone figures and lovers in dark pools and marshes. A broad treatment in Lovers and Still Pool [image 3] shows the couple melting into their surroundings as if, in the throes of ecstatic satisfaction, they are literally at one with the world. Dallas Brown delights in covering the surface of the board with long, slow strokes in earth-greens and rust-browns, as if simulating the gently twisting, languid movement of the embracing lovers. The viewer is placed in the position of voyeur as well as active participant, with each mesmerising gesture drawing the viewer into the rhythm of the physical act of lovemaking. He articulates the sensation of being at a remove from the coupling, while we also sense something of their experience: a weird blending of sensation with no roots in reality. Nevertheless, the feat is carried off with such confidence that anything Dallas Brown paints can be believed, as the improbable drama of a dream can be taken at face value.

Fairy Tale or Summer Incident - oil on board - 96.5x121.9cm - 1966 - Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection- courtesy of Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection and the artist’s estate

In his strong gestural treatment, Dallas Brown found the means to create images which reflect the mystery of dreams. In Fairy Tale or Summer Incident [image 4], he pushes the boundaries of figuration with a much freer, looser painterly technique, so that the imagery is rendered almost inscrutable in the haze of marks and blending of contours. In straining to unravel the mystery of one of his panels, the familiar agony of struggling to piece together the facts of a dream, perhaps prompted by the memory of one single snapshot, comes to mind. Indeed, the six individual boards of this polyptych, which appear bound together by the suggestion of a developing narrative, tempt the viewer to identify a coherent story, message or meaning as we might try to recover the thread of a dream. Dallas Brown tantalises the viewer with certain suggestive threads which run throughout the work – a dark, shapely gouge in the board at the lower-centre chimes with a strange cloud formation in the lower-right– before, looking deeper, the clues confound themselves and we must admit defeat. While many images from the 1970s have the character of a vision which has seared itself into the mind after waking, much of Dallas Brown’s 1960s work appears closer to the elusive, phantasmagoric visual nature of dreams.

Neil Dallas Brown’s work is very difficult to dislodge from the memory once the viewer allows his images to take root. His legacy is one of daring works of art which burn themselves into the mind, and they derive much of their power from their relation to our own latent, unconscious fantasies. To find pictorial equivalents of private dreams writ large on gallery walls – and to find that these images appear fully-formed and undeniable, with Dallas Brown insisting on our involvement by appealing to the senses in paint – is a disturbing assault on our sense of reality. His images force uncomfortable self-examination. They are the images which, to quote the artist himself, his viewer might have dreamed about.

I’m grateful to McTear’s Auctioneers for their assistance in allowing me to reproduce “Nude and Hound Against a Wall”, “Act, Death, Dream” and “Lovers and Still Pool”. I’m also grateful to Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection for allowing me to reproduce “Fairy Tale or Summer Incident”.

I’m also sincerely grateful to Amanda Dallas Brown, the artist’s daughter, for allowing me to consult material which has been invaluable to the development of this text.

Douglas Erskine

Note 1 – Neil Dallas Brown, quoted in John di Folco, “Neil Dallas Brown: Obituary”, The Herald, 23/01/03, https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/11905974.neil-dallas-brown-talented-painter-who-lectured-at-glasgow-school-of-art-and-whose-work-reflected-troubled-times/, accessed 18/07/23.

Note 2 – (I) NDB commented: “I am often very inspired by dreams, though I don’t feel that my painting is very akin to the surrealists. I feel that there isn’t the same superficial incongruity in my work. There is more logic, I feel, in it and there is a tie-up within the picture of the images.” This quote is drawn from the website devoted to the artist via the link: https://www.neildallasbrown.co.uk/paintings/1962-1974/, accessed 18/07/23.

(II) Blakeston commented on “the drama of recurrent dreams” in NDB’s work. See Blakeston, “What’s On In London”, 30th April 1971. A cutting of this article is included in “Neil Dallas Brown”, an unpublished manuscript in the collection of the artist’s family. It was produced by Dennis White, an acquaintance of Dallas Brown’s and a student of the BA Degree Course in Fine Art, Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, in 1986. The manuscript comprises a thesis on Dallas Brown’s work and a quantity of reproduced press cuttings and catalogue essays. The cutting of Blakeston’s commentary is to be found on page 79.

(III) The list of mixed shows to which NDB contributed includes “The Surrealists”, Copenhagen, 1967, and “Aspects of Surrealism: British Art, 1930-72”. These are listed on the artist’s curriculum vitae, to be found on page 68 of the aforementioned manuscript.

Note 3 - see note 2 (I).

Note 4 - Dennis White, “Neil Dallas Brown”, p. 10.

Note 5 – Ibid.

Note 6 - Emilio Coia, “Impressive Dundonians: Glasgow Exhibition”, unidentified newspaper cutting dated “64” in pencil, held in the Papers of Bet Low, National Library of Scotland, Acc.12177.

Note 7 - Dennis White, “Neil Dallas Brown”, p. 10.

Note 8 – Ibid.