Art<\/a> School (at the precocious age of 11, she became the only child student accepted by realist painter H Septimus Power), and her formative years as an abstract painter while studying in the UK, France and Italy. And then her defiantly unconventional art practice built in conservative 1960s Melbourne, and her retreat to the quiet beauty of rural NSW, a property she shared with her husband, the theatre director and playwright Michael Boddy, in the 1970s.<\/p>\nA 1973 portrait of Boddy, who died at the couple\u2019s Scribble Rock property in the southern tablelands in 2014, saw Dawson become only the third female artist to win the Archibald prize.<\/p>\n
\u201cJanet Dawson is a rare figure in Australian art history,\u201d the AGNSW\u2019s director, Maud Page, said at Friday\u2019s preview of Far Away, So Close. \u201cThis exhibition shows that not only was she a formal innovator, but a deeply perceptive observer of the world around her, always alert to the play of light, energy, of nature and immediacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a celebration of a visionary artist whose work continues to shape Australian art.\u201d<\/p>\n
St George and the Dragon, 1964. Illustration: Janet Dawson<\/p>\n
Dawson\u2019s retrospective, which includes photos, media coverage and other ephemera as well as major works, moves across the four rooms chronologically.<\/p>\n
\u201cJanet was continuously rethinking and reworking ideas,\u201d says curator Denise Mimmocchi. \u201cAnd so each stage of her career comes across as something very distinct.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone said to me, it\u2019s like an exhibition of four different artists. But I like to think that there is a very strong thread throughout the four rooms \u2026 an incredible underlying energy to these works. They\u2019ve got such power. I spend my time looking at a lot of paintings, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever encountered ones that have this pulsating, underlying grab to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I was a working creature\u2019Janet Dawson, Self portrait, between 1951 and 1953. Illustration: Janet Dawson<\/p>\n
Dawson\u2019s early mastery of tonal realism is evident in the very first work of the exhibition, an exquisite self-portrait she painted at just 18. To its immediate right, an inkling of what would become the mercurial nature of the artist\u2019s style \u2013 a post-cubist style pigeon, also painted around the same time.<\/p>\n
A traveling art scholarship to Europe saw Dawson abandon realism and embrace abstraction. It was there that she \u201cstarted to understand her own visual language \u2013 one rooted in movement, emotion and fearless exploration,\u201d says Mimmocchi.<\/p>\n
When Dawson returned to Melbourne, she was a daring abstract female artist working in a conservative and male-dominated figurative art culture.<\/p>\n
The Origin of the Milky Way, 1964. Illustration: Janet Dawson<\/p>\n
Large-scale works in the 1960s such as St George and the Dragon and The Origin of the Milky Way soon earned Dawson the reputation of an artist who refused to stick to the rules. By the late 1960s she had embraced, then subverted, colour-field painting, whose most well-known proponent, Mark Rothko, championed wide swathes of unmodulated colour across expansive canvases.<\/p>\n
Dawson soon began defying the flatness of the colour-field genre, says Mimmocchi, introducing in works such as Rollascape 2, an \u201cunderlying pulsation of light\u201d, and making a style unmistakably her own.<\/p>\n
Rollascape 2, 1968. Illustration: Janet Dawson<\/p>\n
A move to Sydney saw Dawson becoming increasingly captivated by the beauty of natural environments, with her series of ripple paintings evoking what at first appears to be panoramic ocean views, yet with a subtle reference to the geometric abstraction of her previous practice.<\/p>\n
This marked a turning point for the artist, says Mimmocchi, which saw \u201ca closer immersion in the natural world \u2013 where fluctuations of light and atmosphere entered her abstract vocabulary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Balgalal series 5 \u2013 Sunday morning, 1975. Illustration: Janet Dawson<\/p>\n
Her husband\u2019s work in Sydney expanded her oeuvre to theatre design, producing sets for Boddy\u2019s plays including The Legend of King O\u2019Malley and Cash, and establishing a theatre in schools program.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a working creature \u2026 living the art and living the drawing,\u201d Dawson says, peering with delight into a display cabinet containing press clippings and theatre memorabilia from that time.<\/p>\n
A job as a production assistant in the display department at the Australian Museum also expanded her interest in natural history. Her anatomical drawings of Australian fauna for the museum would go on to inform her detailed works of wildlife corpses, such as Hare on Blue, retrieved from Dawson and Boddy\u2019s rural property, Scribble Rock.<\/p>\n
Hare on blue, 2009. Illustration: Janet Dawson<\/p>\n
It was there that Dawson began creating her Scribble Rock Red Cabbage series, a collection of kitchen still lifes that was bought in its entirety by the National Gallery of Australia.<\/p>\n
And it was at Scribble Rock where she returned to her haunting studies of the moon, which once again became her night-time companion.<\/p>\n
For some works, she painted what she saw with the assistance of technology, such as the 2000 work Moon at Dawn through a Telescope.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe moon has this beautiful poetry about it anyway, but Janet creates it into something beautifully glowing and energetic that is very difficult to harness in a painting,\u201d Mimmocchi says,<\/p>\n
\u2018I can look at anything and just look at it for itself\u2019 \u2026 Janet Dawson, pictured at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Jenni Carter<\/p>\n
At the age of 90, Dawson\u2019s exhibition is more than a retrospective. It is a celebration of a life lived through art, where nature and abstraction converge in luminous harmony, both informed by a keen and constant curiosity forged by a mother decades earlier, herself a talented artist who gave up painting to raise a family.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut she never stopped teaching me, she showed me things constantly,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I think what that gave me was an openness of vision. I can look at anything and just look at it for itself. It doesn\u2019t necessarily have to be a thing to be hung on the wall. It is, of itself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a young child, artist Janet Dawson learned to see the world through her mother\u2019s eyes, the eyes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-11143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}