After graduating from Mississippi College, Dunlap joined the Imperial Show Band, a stage band composed of white musicians and a black lead singer. In the first of many long road trips that still define Dunlap’s life and art, he traveled with the band across the country on Route 66, settling for a while in L.A., where he saw his first real art museum. “There was a great Jackson Pollock retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and seeing it was so different than seeing art on slides, which is pretty much all I’d ever seen in school. Until then, I had no sympathy with the whole action painting thing at all. I’d been trying to paint and draw like the Hudson River School as well as I could. But standing in front of a real Jackson Pollock, when it’s a huge field and fills your eye, I got it.”

His musical career ended when “the draft board got after my ass in a big way.” He headed home and “slid into” grad school at Ole Miss in the nick of time, and spent the next two years earning a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking and sculpture and running the campus foundry. It wasn’t until he was engaged in his subsequent teaching career in the 1970s, first at a junior college in Mississippi and then at Appalachian State, that he taught himself to paint. Astonishingly, he’d taken only formal classes in watercolor. One of his earliest works speaks to the process: a three-part Rembrandt portrait called Learn to Paint Like a Master in Three Easy Steps. The painting, he says, “dealt with the irony of being a twenty-seven-year-old kid just out of graduate school, suddenly finding himself a college professor. How absurd was that?”

At Appalachian State, in addition to the Southern Rim Conference, he exposed his students to speakers ranging from Tom Wolfe to James Dickey. And he introduced his friend Jane Livingston to more diverse aspects of Southern art. “Jane became the godmother of black folk art in America,” John Alexander says. “She put so many artists on the map, but it was Dunlap who exposed her to most of them. We had some of the great road trips of our lives, going to all these remote places to look at that stuff.”

The road increasingly became Dunlap’s second home. In North Carolina, he lived on the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway and constantly traveled back and forth between North Carolina and Mississippi and New York and Washington. In his paintings he captured the vistas from his windshield. “The landscapes that emerged offer a subtext of tension, of loneliness, of expectancy,” the writer Mary Lynn Kotz said at the time. “Faulkner’s themes are repeated by Dunlap—the land abides, surviving all of man’s attempts to cordon it off with boundary lines.”

Some of his best paintings from this period were exhibited in a show titled Off the Interstate, and one critic described him as the “chronicler of the Interstate Generation,” a description he doesn’t mind. “A lot of art comes from the side of the road,” he says.

The paintings reached their apogee in 1985 when Jane Livingston asked him to create a work for the classical rotunda of the Corcoran. His response was a contemporary cyclorama based on the cinematic Civil War battle panoramas he’d seen as a child. Called Panorama of the American Landscape, it is made up of fourteen canvases, each of which measures 68 by 94 feet, that encircle the viewer. “I made it about driving up Interstate 81, about that whole valley in Virginia and its history.” There are images of encroaching industrialization in the form of a cooling tower and factory, a Civil War statue at Antietam, dogs, of course, and deer heads, which are among the most powerful images in the piece. “The dogs are the hunters, and the deer heads are the hunted,” he says, explaining that he’d been on the first real hunting trip of his life just before he started the project, and shot a buck. He and his party roasted the backstraps, but the deer did more than feed them for the night. “When I got back, I found a sketch I’d made of three deer heads along with some drawings of Antietam, and I thought, ‘There it is.’ You’ve got the deer on one side, you gotta have the dogs on the other, and the whole thing just came together.” For six months he didn’t do anything but paint. “I had no social life,” he says. “But it was the most fun I’ve ever had in a studio.”

“Dunlap was ahead of the curve in making paintings that address history and place, often through multilayered images that engage the imagination of the viewer,” says David Houston. “It’s a strategy that is much like Dunlap himself—open, democratic, and participatory. It also encourages a dialogue that grows richer over time.”

The dialogue is especially encouraged in what Dunlap calls “those trippy things I do”: hybrids of paintings and sculpture that incorporate the found objects that fascinate him. Philip McGuire says that on his first day at work he was dispatched to the yard with a large Mason jar and instructions to fill it with the dried husks of locusts clinging to a giant oak. “For years they perched on a shelf in his studio in McLean like a jar of macabre preserves,” McGuire recalls. “Eventually they ended up in one of his assemblages.”

So do a lot of other things. “In one there’s a piece of linoleum that came out of my grandmother’s kitchen—that’s my version of Vitruvian Man,” Dunlap says. “All that stuff is charged in some way. I’m just trying to jog people’s memories.”

His own memory was jogged several years ago when he bought Starnes House to keep it from being bulldozed to make way for a Piggly Wiggly. He then moved an old Church of Christ onto the property to use as a studio. He probably spends ten days a year there, but the ground is literally fertile with inspiration. Among the first things he found in the dirt was a decaying leather dog collar with a brass nameplate bearing his grandfather’s name and five-digit phone number. Later, it showed up in an exhibition called Objects: Found and Fashioned—a show whose works also embody what William Ferris calls the artist’s “appreciation for the funky underbelly of the South, for worlds that both frighten and attract the uninitiated.”

Even with the more straight-ahead paintings, Dunlap sees himself as a symbolist—he’s even coined a term for his work of late, “hypothetical realism.” Though he first meant it tongue in cheek, “it is nevertheless fairly accurate,” he says. “These places I paint are not necessarily real, but they could be. It’s kind of like language in that everything stands in for something else. The dogs stand in for people, the places are generic but they’re specific. At a show in Boston, I heard someone say, ‘Oh, those are the White Mountains of New Hampshire.’ They were the Southern Appalachians, but it didn’t matter. He’d filled in the blanks.”

A painting he made for the chef Donald Link’s private dining restaurant, Calcasieu, is set in southwest Louisiana where Link’s family has a hunting camp, but he took a lot of liberties with the landscape. “You can’t stand anywhere on that property and see everything that’s in the painting. It’s really about the day.” He and Link drove from New Orleans to meet Link’s extended family. “They out-ate me, out-drank me, and there were all these dogs and children running around. And I saw one of the most powerful places on the planet through the eyes of a guy who grew up there. I don’t want to dis another part of the world, but I can’t imagine doing something like that in Ohio or Nevada or Utah.”

He did a similar commission for Eli Manning, who asked him to create a work incorporating a store near Philadelphia, Mississippi, that’s been in his mother’s family for generations. “I went and looked at it, and I visited with the family about it. I told Eli I couldn’t make the painting that was in his head, the painting of that exact place, but I could make it about the place. It’s all there—the storefront, the dogs running across the road—but I moved things around. It’s an implied narrative, and everybody else brings things to it.”

Last we talked, Dunlap was about to take one of his extended driving trips through the Delta, but despite his affinity for his home state, he doubts he’ll ever settle there. When he and his family are not in McLean, they are in Coral Gables, Florida, where Linda’s family lives. He says he likes the dual existence—and the distance from “home”—just fine.

“I love coming back. I want people from my gene pool, from my world, to see what I’m doing. That means more to me than you might think.” So does the debt he feels he owes to the place. “I don’t want to be bound by regionalism, I want it to be a launching pad,” he tells me. “The world is kind of wide open to me, and I’ve lived in it, and there’s something about growing up in the American South that has made that possible. You come out equipped with manners, and you know how to have a conversation.”

Fortunately for all of us, home and “home folks” are his favorite topics. Says Ferris: “In Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when he speculates that at the end of time we’ll hear man’s ‘puny inexhaustible voice, still talking,’ I’m pretty sure he had in mind the voice of Dunlap, still talking about the American South and her artists.”