"[2] David Pagel, in a Los Angeles Times review intended to be complimentary, described his paintings as "vulgar beyond belief..."[3] Dunham was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949.
[4] His parents were Carroll Dunham IV (1919-1995),[5] a Harvard-educated poultry farmer and residential real-estate realtor "active in trade associations, politics, and civic affairs"[6] who "came from great wealth, which he had squandered on a series of misguided investments,"[7] and Mount Holyoke College and Yale School of Nursing alumna Carol Marguerite (1915-2000),[8] née Reynolds, a nurse and realtor.
Various dualities and contradictions play out: between wood and pain; abstraction and representation; geometry and biology; the phallic and the vaginal; body and mind; nature and culture.
[1][16] Kate Linker writes,These motifs have provided an armature for a continuous and seemingly self-generating practice in which paintings appear to evolve and differentiate from earlier versions of themselves.
"[17] Further to this point, Linker notes, "the figure is deployed as an iconic tool around which a space is built in accordance with the demands of the flat rectilinearity of the picture plane.