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Returning to Australia in late 1960<ref>{{Cite web|last=Teffer|first=N.|date=|title=Know My Name: Janet Dawson|url=https://nga.gov.au/knowmyname/artists.cfm?artistirn=17602|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-08-13|website=nga.gov.au}}</ref> Dawson founded the [[Gallery A]] Print Workshop.<ref name=":2" /> In this role she introduced Australian artists including [[John Brack]], [[John Olsen (Australian artist)|John Olsen]] and [[Fred Williams (artist)|Fred Williams]] to [[lithography]].
Returning to Australia in late 1960<ref>{{Cite web|last=Teffer|first=N.|date=|title=Know My Name: Janet Dawson|url=https://nga.gov.au/knowmyname/artists.cfm?artistirn=17602|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-08-13|website=nga.gov.au}}</ref> Dawson founded the [[Gallery A]] Print Workshop.<ref name=":2" /> In this role she introduced Australian artists including [[John Brack]], [[John Olsen (Australian artist)|John Olsen]] and [[Fred Williams (artist)|Fred Williams]] to [[lithography]].


Dawson married [[Michael Boddy]] (1934 - 2016), a British playwright and actor, educated at [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]], who migrated to Australia in 1960.
In 1973 Dawson became the third woman to win the [[Archibald Prize]] for her piece ''Michael Boddy Reading'', a portrait of her husband, the actor and playwright Michael Boddy.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Archibald Prize Archibald 1973 finalist: Michael Boddy by Janet Dawson|url=https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/1973/19579/|access-date=2017-05-06|website=www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au}}</ref><ref name=":0" /><ref name=":0" />
In 1973 Dawson became the third woman to win the [[Archibald Prize]] for her piece ''Michael Boddy Reading''.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Archibald Prize Archibald 1973 finalist: Michael Boddy by Janet Dawson|url=https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/1973/19579/|access-date=2017-05-06|website=www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au}}</ref><ref name=":0" /><ref name=":0" /> At that time she was working for two years full-time in the display department of the [[Australian Museum]], Sydney. In 1973 she produced sets for productions of Boddy's plays ''The Legend of King O'Malley'' and ''Cash'', illustrations for a collection of essays on O'Malley and Boddy's "The Last Supper Show" at the Nimrod Theatre where he was playwright-in-residence.<ref>'The artistic life is a full-time job,' ''The Sydney Morning Herald'', Monday, Jan 8, 1973 p.13. In 1974 they moved to a farm in [[Binalong, New South Wales]],<ref name=":5" /> then in 1981 Dawson and her husband moved to [[Canberra]] to help establish Theatre ACT. They returned to Binalong in 1985.<ref name=":0" /> Dawson lives in [[Ocean Grove, Victoria]].


== Style and reception ==
== Style and reception ==
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* National Gallery of Victoria<ref>{{Cite web|title=Janet DAWSON {{!}} Artists {{!}} NGV|url=https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/artist/1823/|access-date=2020-09-20|website=www.ngv.vic.gov.au}}</ref>
* National Gallery of Victoria<ref>{{Cite web|title=Janet DAWSON {{!}} Artists {{!}} NGV|url=https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/artist/1823/|access-date=2020-09-20|website=www.ngv.vic.gov.au}}</ref>
* Art Gallery of South Australia<ref>{{Cite web|last=|date=|title=Collection Search|url=http://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/collection-publications/collection/|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-09-20|website=AGSA - The Art Gallery of South Australia|language=en}}</ref>
* Art Gallery of South Australia<ref>{{Cite web|last=|date=|title=Collection Search|url=http://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/collection-publications/collection/|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-09-20|website=AGSA - The Art Gallery of South Australia|language=en}}</ref>

== life ==
Dawson married [[Michael Boddy]] (1934 - 2016), a British playwright and actor, educated at [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]], who migrated to Australia in 1960. She worked in a natural history museum until in 1974 they moved to a farm in [[Binalong, New South Wales]],<ref name=":5" /> then in 1981 Dawson and her husband moved to [[Canberra]] to help establish Theatre ACT. They returned to Binalong in 1985.<ref name=":0" /> Dawson lives in [[Ocean Grove, Victoria]].


== Bibliography ==
== Bibliography ==

Revision as of 22:55, 20 September 2020

For the American mystery writer, see Janet Dawson (writer).

Janet Dawson
Born1935
Sydney, Australia
NationalityAustralian
EducationNational Gallery School, Melbourne, 1952–1956, Slade School of Fine Art, London1956

Janet Dawson (born 1935) is an Australian artist who was a pioneer of abstract painting in Australia in the 1960's,[1] having been introduced to abstraction during studies in England.[2] She was also an accomplished lithographic printer of her own works as well as those of other renowned Australian artists. [2] She studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960. [2] She won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, Michael Boddy Reading.[3] She has been exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections.[4]

Career

Dawson was born in Sydney in 1935 and brought up in East Malvern. When she studied (1952 to 1956) at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne in 1955 she won Gallery Art School Prizes including the Grace Joel Scholarship (Nude), Hugh Ramsey Portrait Prize, one for an ‘Abstract Painting’, another for 'A Panel of Three Drawings from Life', a 2nd prize for a 'Head study', and the 'National Gallery Society Scholarship for best subject drawing or panel of drawings in exhibition.'[5] In 1956 she was awarded the National Gallery of Victoria Travelling Scholarship and went to London where she she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. There, Janet attended an exhibition 'New American Art' at the Tate in 1959 and was impressed by the simplicity and glowing colours of paintings by Rothko, Still, and Motherwell and in Paris saw the work of Dubuffet and Miro which had a decisive influence.[6] She loved to draw, so she studied lithography, which allows an artist to draw directly on a printing stone. In 1959 she won the Slade School lithography prize which included a Boise scholarship[2] that enabled her to travel to Italy. There, she lived in a mountain village where the British school in Rome maintained a workshop for artists. During the three months she was in residence, Dawson made drawings of the landscape. [7] Her art became almost exclusively abstract.

From Italy, Dawson travelled to Paris where she worked at Atelier Patris to translate her Italian drawings into lithographs with bold colours, lines and strokes. [2] She worked at the studio as a lithographic proof printer for visiting artists.[7]

Returning to Australia in late 1960[8] Dawson founded the Gallery A Print Workshop.[2] In this role she introduced Australian artists including John Brack, John Olsen and Fred Williams to lithography.

Dawson married Michael Boddy (1934 - 2016), a British playwright and actor, educated at Cambridge, who migrated to Australia in 1960. In 1973 Dawson became the third woman to win the Archibald Prize for her piece Michael Boddy Reading.[9][3][3] At that time she was working for two years full-time in the display department of the Australian Museum, Sydney. In 1973 she produced sets for productions of Boddy's plays The Legend of King O'Malley and Cash, illustrations for a collection of essays on O'Malley and Boddy's "The Last Supper Show" at the Nimrod Theatre where he was playwright-in-residence.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).}}

Critic Mary Eagle identifies in Dawson's early painting "themes of architectural and atmospheric space and light and images of clouds, moons and rainbows" that continue into her abstract work. Dawson was involved in the Colour Field movement; abstraction that used flat, solid hues to make colour its own subject.[10] She was among the artists exhibited in The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. The exhibition opened to much controversy, but launched the careers of many of the young artists. Dawson was one of only three women artists in the exhibition,[7] (re-staged in 2018).[11]

In the 1970s she moved away from Hard Edge abstraction to a more 'painterly' style, but maintained her formal vocabulary; at the time of her 1979 survey show Eagle noted "she sees everything in nature blending, flowing together..."[6]

Gary Catalano writing in 1988 about her solo show in Richmond, questions, then reluctantly concurs with, Eagle's comparison of Dawson metaphysics with Blake's, and highlights the artist's surrealism:

"Dawson's metaphysic, it must be stressed, is not Blakean in Its constituents. Blake housed everything in the human body and thereby magnified its transformational energies; Dawson's vision, which ls neither anthropomorphic in its character nor politically radical in its thrust, reduces the world to the workings of water. There are, of course. many things in these paintings that defy common sense.  A hemispherical bowl brimming with water hovers in space at the top of the T-shaped 'Spirit Level I'; a cup tilts itself and water spills down the edge of the same palntlng, its flow arrested not by rocks but, rather, by a fictional fold in the canvas. But this playfulness has a serious intent. Quite simply, Dawson believes that  literal and imaginative truths are by no means incompatible."[12]

On the occasion of Dawson's 1996 drawing survey at the National Gallery of Australia, John McDonald of The Sydney Morning Herald remarked that the exhibition was;

"a revelation in its lucid intertwining of close observation and formal invention. The dividing line between abstract and figurative and is crossed and recrossed until one recognises only a single continuum, defined by the touch and personality of the artist. Nothing, in this respect, is better than a 1995 series of 13 drawings of a red cabbage that charts the entire life-cycle of the vegetable from first sprouting to decomposition. By using this single motif, Dawson is able to explore a full range of tone, lines and textures, in the same way that Monet painted Rouen Cathedral, haystack or poplars, over and over again, to capture the fugitive effects of light."[13]

Considering later work McDonald remarks that;

"By the end of the [1970s], she is working on the Foxy Night paintings, which turn moon and landscape into a series of geometric declensions, softened by feathery, gestural brushwork. I have alway found these paintings to be a slightly awkward attempt at forging a synthesis between Iyrical and geometric abstraction: and the lead-up drawings show Dawson plotting with the deliberateness of a cartographer. This raises a niggling question about the balance between drawing and painting in Dawson's career. In this survey, she emerges as such a natural and complete draftsperson that one wonders if there is anything in her paintings that she has not already accomplished as a graphic artist. To know what is added, or perhaps lost, in a different medium. we may have to wait for a painting retrospective."

Exhibitions

  • 1961: solo show, Melbourne.[14]
  • 1964, August: group show, Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney[15]
  • 1965: Introduction '65, Janet Dawson, Leonard Hessing, Robert Klippel, Colin Lanceley, John Olsen, Charles Reddington. Gallery A, Melbourne
  • 1966: included in an exhibition of contemporary Australian painting in Los Angeles and San Francisco[16]
  • 1966/7: Gallery A. Summer exhibition 66, Australian paintings drawings watercolours sculpture. Artists exhibiting were Sydney Ball, Jennifer Barwell, Henry Bastin, Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Donald Brook, Mike Brown, Judy Cassab, Peter Clarke, John Coburn, Martin Collocott, Jack Courier, Ray Crooke, Robert Dickerson, Russell Drysdale, Peggy Fauser, Maximilian Feuerring, John Firth-Smith, William Frater, Peter Freeman, Leonard French, Donald Friend, Marjorie Gillespie, James Gleeson, Thomas Gleghorn, Anne Hall, Pro Hart, Elaine Haxton, John Henshaw, Daryl Hill, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Leonard Hessing, Perle Hessing, Robert Hughes, Robert Klippel, Michael Kmit, Colin Lanceley, Richard Larter, Francis Lymburner, Elwyn Lynn, Mary MacQueen, Marsha Morgan, Sydney Nolan, Alan Oldfield, John Olsen, Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, William Peascod, John Perceval, Carl Plate, Peter Powditch, Clifton Pugh, Emanuel Raft, Stanislaus Rapotec, Charles Reddington, Stephen Reed, John Rigby, Jan Riske, William Rose, Rosemary Ryan, Gareth Sansom, Michael Shannon, Imre Szigeti, Michael Taylor, Stan De Teliga, Peter Upward, David Warren, Guy Warren, Richard Weight, Robert Williams, Les Willis, Ken Whisson, Peter Wright. Shown in both Melbourne and Sydney branches of Gallery A and continued until February 24, 1967
  • 1968:The Field exhibition. Two paintings included amongst 74 abstract works by 40 artists working in hard edge abstraction, colour field painting, using shaped canvases, and conceptual art. National Gallery of Victoria[17]
  • 1979: survey exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria[6][4]
  • 1988, Feb-Mar: solo show, 312 Lennox St., Richmond[15]
  • 1996, July/August: Janet Dawson; Drawings, survey show, National Gallery of Australia[13][4]
  • 1998-2019: Six solo shows at Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney
  • 2000: Challenge and Response in Australian Art, 1955-65, National Gallery of Australia 2002 Intimate Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
  • 2002-19: Ten group shows at Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
  • 2006: Survey Exhibition, Bathurst Gallery, NSW; S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney; University of Queensland Art Museum; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Vic. [4]
  • 2007-19: Group shows at Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney
  • 2008: Modern Times, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
  • 2012: Janet Dawson: A Personal View, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, NSW
  • 2015/19: Two solo shows at Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra
  • 2017: Abstraction: Celebrating Australian Women Abstract Artists, Geelong Art Gallery, Vic. and travelling
  • 2018: The Field Revisited, National Gallery of Victoria
  • 2019: Trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable chair - Paintings from the Cruthers Collection of Australian Women’s Art, University of Western Australia, Perth
  • 2019: Cloud Comics, Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra[18]
  • 2020: Know My Name featuring 150 female Australian artists from 1900 to the 21st century, National Gallery of Australia[7]

Awards and Recognition

Collections

  • Royal Society, London[19]
  • Art Gallery of New South Wales[20]
  • National Gallery of Australia[3]
  • National Gallery of Victoria[21]
  • Art Gallery of South Australia[22]

Bibliography

  • Deborah Clark, The Drawings of Janet Dawson, 1956 to the Present, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, 1996.
  • Gary Catalano, ‘A Natural History (Interview)’, Art & Australia, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1997, p. 332-341 and illus. cover.
  • Andrew Sayers, Intimate Portraits, exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2002.
  • Daniel Thomas, ‘Golden Oldies’, Art & Australia, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2013, p. 582-589.

References

  1. ^ "Rêve du soleil (Sun dream), 1960 by Janet Dawson". www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  2. ^ a b c d e f "Janet Dawson". nga.gov.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  3. ^ a b c d Patrick McCaughey, 'Archibald Prize to Sydney Artist,' The Age, Saturday 19 Jan 1974, p.2
  4. ^ a b c d "Janet Dawson | Stella Downer Fine Art - Dealer Consultant & Valuer". stelladownerfineart.com.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  5. ^ ’Gallery Art School Prizes,’ The Age, Friday Dec 16, 1955 p.10.
  6. ^ a b c Mary Eagle, 'Paintings of private eccentric,' The Age, Saturday 14 Jul 1979, p.19
  7. ^ a b c d "Know My Name". nga.gov.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  8. ^ Teffer, N. "Know My Name: Janet Dawson". nga.gov.au. Retrieved 13 August 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ "Archibald Prize Archibald 1973 finalist: Michael Boddy by Janet Dawson". www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au. Retrieved 6 May 2017.
  10. ^ "Themes in American Art: Abstraction". National Gallery of Art. Archived from the original on 8 June 2011.
  11. ^ "The Field Revisited | NGV". www.ngv.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  12. ^ Gary Catalano, ’The world reduced to the workings of water,’ ’’The Age’’, Wednesday, Feb 24, 1988, p.14
  13. ^ a b John McDonald, 'Country pleasures,' The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 10 Aug 1996, p.149
  14. ^ "Janet Dawson". National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 23 June 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  15. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference :6 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ "Janet Dawson: Clouds All the Way". Nancy Sever Gallery. Retrieved 6 May 2017.
  17. ^ Webb, Carolyn (16 December 2016). "The NGV needs you: appeal for missing pieces from radical 1968 show". The Age. Retrieved 6 May 2017.
  18. ^ "JANET DAWSON". NANCY SEVER | GALLERY. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  19. ^ "Derek Denton (b.1924), AC, FRS, FAA, FRCP | Art UK". www.artuk.org. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  20. ^ "Works matching "Janet Dawson" :: The Collection :: Art Gallery NSW". www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  21. ^ "Janet DAWSON | Artists | NGV". www.ngv.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  22. ^ "Collection Search". AGSA - The Art Gallery of South Australia. Retrieved 20 September 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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