by As a small child, the artist Janet Dawson learned to see the world with her mother’s eyes, the eyes of a woman who could find a miracle in both cosmos and in the kitchen.
“She brought me out in the early evening and explained the moon,” Dawson recalls and gracious in her wheelchair in the art gallery of New South Wales (AgnSw) on Friday. “She taught me that the moon had a job – to raise and return. She gave him the purpose, and so I looked at him carefully and waited every evening.”
This nightly ritual triggered Dawson’s lifelong fascination with contrast: the vastness of heaven against the intimacy of domestic life.
“It was my first idea to wait for something big,” she says. “And then we went into the kitchen – so small, so detailed.”
It is therefore fitting that your embarrassingly lengthy retrospective-in-age of 90 years of the title Janet Dawson: far away, so close. The exhibition, which was spread in four rooms of the AGNSW, extends over the work of the Australian artist for more than six decades.
There is her teenage years in the National Gallery of Victoria Art School (at the early age of 11 she became the only child student who was accepted by the realistic painter H. Septimus Power) and her formative year as an abstract painter during his studies in Great Britain, France and Italy. And then her defiantly unconventional art practice in conservative 1960s Melbourne and her retreat to the calm beauty of rural NSW, a characteristic that she divided in the 1970s with her husband, theater director and playwright Michael Boddy.
In a portrait of Boddy from 1973, which died in the couple’s scribble in 2014, Dawson was only the third artist who won the Archibald Prize.
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“Janet Dawson is a rare figure in Australian art history,” said the director of Agnsw, Maud Page, in the preview of Far Rea on Friday. “This exhibition shows that she was not only a formal innovator, but also a deeply sensitive observer of the world around her, always attentive to the game of light, energy, nature and immediacy.
“It is a celebration of a visionary artist whose work continues to shape Australian art.”
The retrospective of Dawson, which includes photos, media reporting and other Ephemera as well as important work, moves chronologically through the four rooms.
“Janet was constantly rethinking and ideas was revised,” says curator Denise Mimmocchi. “And so every phase of your career acts as something very special.
“Someone said to me, it’s like an exhibition of four different artists. But I like to think that there is a very strong thread in the four rooms … an incredible underlying energy for these works. They have such. I spend my time looking at many pictures, and I don’t think I ever looked at these pulsating, underlying, underlying images.”
“I was a working creature”
Dawson’s early mastery of tonal realism is shown in the first work of the exhibition, an exquisite self -portrayal, which she painted at the age of 18. To his immediate right, an idea of what the Mercurial nature of the style of the artist would become-a post-cubist pigeon, also painted at the same time.
In a traveling art grant in Europe, Dawson gave up realism and included abstraction. There she began to “understand her own visual language – one in motion, emotions and fearless research,” says Mimmocchi.
When Dawson returned to Melbourne, she was a daring abstract artist who worked in a conservative and dominated figurative art culture.
Great works in the 1960s such as St. George and The Dragon and the origin of the Milky Way soon brought Dawson to the reputation of an artist who refused to adhere to the rules. In the late 1960s she had colored painting paintings, the best -known supporter, Mark Rothko, in extensive screens.
Dawson soon started to defy the flatness of the color field genre, says Mimmocchi, who in works such as Rollascape 2, an “underlying pulsation of light” and introduced a style unmistakably.
In a move to Sydney, Dawson was increasingly fascinated by the beauty of natural environments. Her series of Ripple paintings reminded what seems to be a panoramic view of the ocean at first, but with a subtle reference to the geometric abstraction of her previous practice.
This was a turning point for the artist, says Mimmocchi, who “experienced a closer immersion in the natural world – where the light and atmosphere entered her abstract vocabulary”.
The work of her husband in Sydney expanded her oeuvre to theater design and produced sets for Boddy’s pieces, including the legend of King O’malley and Cash, and the foundation of a theater in schools.
“I was a working creature … to live art and live the drawing,” says Dawson, having joy into an exhibition cabinet that contains press sections and theater memory from this time.
A job as a production assistant in the exhibition department in the Australian Museum also expanded her interest in natural history. Her anatomical drawings of the Australian fauna for the museum would be your detailed works by Wildlife Corpses such as Hare on Blue, which were called from Dawson and Boddys rural property, Scripble Rock.
There Dawson to create her scribble Rock Red Cabbage series began a collection of kitchen left -wing life that was completely bought by the National Gallery of Australia.
And it was at Scribble Rock, where she returned to her urgent moon studies, which again became her nightly companion.
For some work she painted what she saw with the help of technology, like the 2000 Work Moon in dawn through a telescope.
“The moon has this beautiful poetry about it anyway, but Janet creates it for something nice, bright and energetic, which is very difficult to use in a painting,” says Mimmocchi.
At the age of 90, Dawson’s exhibition is more than a retrospective. It is a celebration of life through art, in which nature and abstraction come together in bright harmony, both from a sharp and constant curiosity that was forged by a mother decades ago, a talented artist who gave up to educate a family.
“But she never stopped teaching me, she kept showing me things,” she says.
“And I think that gave me an openness of the view. I can look at everything and only look at it for myself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one thing to be hung on the wall. It’s for itself.”
