Janet Dawson was told to ‘stick to one’ thing. Instead, she broke all the rules

The first thing that strikes you about Janet Dawson is her voice, deep and resonant, a voice from another era. But the artist, aged 90, is not at all stuffy. “I’m a lucky old bat,” she says by way of introduction when we meet at her home on a sprawling bush property in Ocean Grove on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.

Dawson lives in a low-slung, 1970s modernist home with exposed brick walls and long rows of large windows that look onto eucalypts, shrubs and lawn. Her studio, or “pod” as she likes to call it, is in a sheltered corner of the garden. Clad in corrugated iron, the studio is crammed with paintings and drawings, some finished, some not, Dawson’s art books, and remnants of her former life in rural New South Wales. Above the creative clutter rises an incongruously giant white sculpture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse that Dawson bought from a nearby furniture warehouse.

“We’ve got to find a home for Mickey and Minnie because I love them so much,” Dawson says, her intensely brown eyes flashing with a hint of mischief, just like the photos of her as a younger artist.

Janet Dawson in her “pod” in a sheltered corner of the garden.Credit: Eddie Jim

I can tell this will be fun. But the interview almost didn’t happen. Dawson was in hospital recently after a fall. She’s recovered remarkably well and sits comfortably in her armchair, ready to chat about her six-decade-plus career as an artist, print-maker and organic farmer ahead of her times. I visit her on a sunny winter’s morning ahead of the first major retrospective of her work, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on July 19, a recognition long overdue.

Dawson made her name in the 1960s as a superstar of abstraction, one of only three women included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s landmark 1968 exhibition The Field. One of the key works in that exhibition, Rollascape 2, will be shown in the AGNSW retrospective. It’s big, bold and yellow, a series of exuberant curves that unfurl for three luscious metres.

“That’s one of my favourite paintings,” Dawson says as I show her an image of it on my laptop. “I think it works very well, and the fact that it means absolutely nothing is terrific.”

Dawson doesn’t play by the rules, never has. As a younger artist, she’d often be pressed by critics to explain the “meaning” of her abstract works. She’d patiently respond, in her cultivated tones, that “meaning” didn’t reside in the story a painting told, but in a painting’s shapes and colours, and the emotions and sensations it provoked.

Janet Dawson’s ‘Rollascape 2’ (1968).

When Rollascape 2 was exhibited again at the NGV in The Field Revisited in 2018, Dawson described it as “an expression of a painting trying to escape from the prison of the square”. That splendidly vigorous image could equally apply to the artist herself. Dawson has escaped categorisation, followed her own artistic instinct, regardless of fashion. When American critic Clement Greenberg visited Australia in the 1960s, he told her to “stick to one” thing. She ignored the advice.

“One of the great strengths of her work is that she didn’t conform,” says exhibition curator Denise Mimmocchi, the AGNSW’s acting head of Australian art.

That it has taken so long for a state gallery to stage a retrospective of her work may have something to do with Dawson’s resistance to neat definition. Her gender, and eventual retreat from the centres of art in Sydney and Melbourne may also have played a part, Mimmocchi says.

Australian artist Janet Dawson at her home studio in Wallington.Credit: Eddie Jim

After coming to prominence as a pioneer of abstraction, Dawson faded from the limelight as she moved towards realism in works inspired by the natural world. The shift coincided with her move to Binalong in regional New South Wales in the 1970s with her late husband Michael Boddy, a Yorkshire-born actor and playwright. Out bush, Dawson didn’t for a moment miss the art cliques of Melbourne and Sydney.

“Oh, they were awful,” Dawson tells me, pulling a face. “It’s nothing to do with artists, it’s all to do with …”

She completes the sentence with a series of comical gestures that indicate the tedious snobbishness of it all, sending me into fits of laughter.

We’re sitting in a small back room of the rambling house that she shares with her extended family – niece Penny, Penny’s partner Lee, and Dawson’s sister-in-law Jill, wife of Dawson’s late brother Cameron. He’d be pleased to see them all here listening in as Dawson tells stories about her adventure-filled life. It was Cameron’s vision to build a house with enough rooms for several generations to live comfortably together.

Janet Dawson with her Laminex coffee table, one of a series exhibited at Gallery A, Melbourne, 1968.Credit: Nine Media/Fairfax Photos

Dawson’s works are scattered throughout. In the room where we sit, there’s a buoyant still life of a leafy, broken-off branch of a loquat tree brimming with velvety-yellow fruit that spill across a bustling domestic table. At the bottom right of the composition, we glimpse the artist’s hand capturing the moment. The pastel work was created at Binalong, at Dawson and Boddy’s rural property, Scribble Rock, where the couple lived for almost 40 years.

In style, the loquat painting couldn’t be more different to Rollascape 2, and yet both works share a sense of energy, motion and light. Mimmocchi tells me that even when Dawson was “meant to be doing colour field painting, which was all about the flat surface, she instilled elements of light and painterliness into her aesthetic”.

Featuring more than 80 works, the AGNSW retrospective reveals an artist of versatility, skill, and moods, unafraid to range across artistic styles, from the cascading abstraction of Rollascape 2, to the meditative realism of Moon at dawn through a telescope (2000), to glorious still lifes such as Scribble Rock pomegranates (1999).

What first inspired Dawson to take up art?

“Very simply, my mother,” Dawson tells me. “She was gifted. When she was a young girl she thought that she would be an artist, but then of course she met my father and became a wife instead.”

Robert Walker’s “Janet Dawson in her Paddington studio” (1966).Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales

Dawson was born in Sydney in 1935, to parents Olga and Kingsley. Before she had children, Olga had attended Julian Ashton’s esteemed Sydney Art School, whose alumni include William Dobell and Joshua Smith. With her knowledge of art, Olga recognised her daughter’s unusual talent and encouraged it. She even sought the advice of state gallery directors, including then AGNSW head Will Ashton who recommended supplying the child with paper and pencils – “no rulers, no rubbers, no copying” – and leaving her be.

“I loved drawing,” Dawson says. “I drew and drew and drew. She used to give me big papers and charcoals. It was normal in our house that I always lay on the floor and drew, and this, I think, was intended to give me confidence right at the beginning. All my gift comes from my mother.”

They just thought I was a silly little tweet, you know, dear little thing.

When the family moved to Melbourne in 1940, Dawson began Saturday morning art classes with the realist painter Harold Septimus Power, at his studio on the corner of Elizabeth and Little Collins Street. Dawson was the only child in the class, aged 11.

“He was a lovely, funny old fella,” Dawson says. “He was a very good artist, wonderful training. To me, his studio was the beginning of my art work. There was this little easel – it was really funny – the other big artists all around me. I just remember it being very comical. They just thought I was a silly little tweet, you know, dear little thing. No, I shouldn’t be rude. They respected that a child was to be taught early.”

Dawson went on to study at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. A tonalist self-portrait created in the early 1950s while she was a student there, depicts a poised, beautiful young woman, silk scarf knotted around her neck, confidently meeting the viewer’s gaze. (Dawson would later model for Italian-born fashion photographer Bruno Benini in a series of studio portraits and shoots in Melbourne.)

Janet Dawson’s self-portrait painted between 1951 and 1953.

In 1956, Dawson won the NGV Travelling Scholarship, another significant step in her career. She studied at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where, frustrated with her attempts at painting, she began to explore lithography and printmaking. Her passion for painting was reignited when she saw The New American Painting exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery in 1959, on tour from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and featuring the work of abstractionists including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb.

At Slade, Dawson won another scholarship, which funded further travel through Europe, including a six-month stay in the small village of Anticoli Corrado, north of Rome. The area’s picturesque valleys, hills and rolling clouds spurred Dawson’s first significant series of abstract landscapes.

“A painter can live here without anyone thinking him queer or bohemian – I’m a farmer – I’m a painter – same thing,” she wrote home to her family while living in Anticoli Corrado. In her catalogue essay, Mimmocchi notes that these thoughts “had a prescient correspondence” to the life that Dawson later found at Binalong.

Janet Dawson, pictured at her Waverly home with her husband Michael Boddy after winning the 1973 Archibald Prize.Credit: Peter John Moxham/Fairfax Media

In 1961, Dawson returned to Melbourne and had her first solo exhibition at the innovative Gallery A, in Flinders Street, founded by designer Max Hutchinson and sculptor Clement Meadmore to promote modern art and design. When Gallery A moved to a larger space in South Yarra, Dawson established a print workshop there and became the manager and master printer. In the following years Dawson also worked on props and sets for the experimental Emerald Hill Theatre company in South Melbourne, and in 1965 met her future husband, Michael Boddy, there.

“He wasn’t fat then. He had a lovely face, really. I thought he was beautiful, actually beautiful, that’s all,” Dawson says. “I certainly rejoiced in his presence, and looked forward to his presence, and made sure that when I knew he was coming to the gallery, I’d be there, all that sort of thing.”

In a living room in another part of the house hangs Dawson’s 1973 Archibald Prize-winning portrait of Boddy. It was her first Archibald entry, and she became the third woman to win the prize in its 52-year history. She depicts Boddy as a gentle giant in a lilac t-shirt and worn hat, fingers clasped on his generous belly as he reads. Behind him fans, a rake and a spade, symbols of their rural existence.

The painting won’t be in the retrospective, nor will another blazingly good portrait, Summer 1986, in which the older Boddy – tall, fleshy, bespectacled, grumpy – lies naked, bar slippers and socks, in a pose reminiscent of Monet’s Olympia. Boddy said he much preferred it the Archibald-winning portrait.

What I’d like to do is a really honkedy-donk-donk last set of works.

The 1973 portrait has just been returned to Dawson after being on tour for several years in the Archie 100 exhibition. Mimmocchi had originally included Summer 1986 in her loan requests (it’s in the National Portrait Gallery collection), but after much thought, decided it didn’t “fit” the retrospective, “both physically within the space but also given its overpowering presence.”

In a more subtle tribute to the significant men in Dawson’s life, Mimmocchi has included a smaller pencil portrait of Boddy, and one of Cameron.

Dawson and Boddy married in 1968, the same year that Dawson’s abstract works would be celebrated in The Field. In 1974, the couple moved to Binalong, and three years later ensconced themselves even further in the bush, buying the property they named Scribble Rock. Boddy famously remarked: “Our marriage is one long conversation. We moved to the bush so we could talk to each other without so many interruptions.”

“That was absolutely true,” Dawson confirms. “Yes, we just rattled on together for years.”

Janet Dawson’s “Hare on blue” (2009).

She describes the move to Scribble Rock as the “absolute coming together” of her work. The natural world was a fount of inspiration, and so too the bounty that she and Boddy grew. Cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, onions, sprouting potatoes and more inhabit Dawson’s wondrous still lifes. Dead animals feature too – a kookaburra, a young wedge-tailed eagle, a hare, a tawny frogmouth – all rendered with exquisite care, homages to the transience of life, and evocative of 17th century Dutch still lifes. Dawson tells me that Boddy would often bring the dead creatures in for her to paint.

Janet Dawson’s “Balgalal series 5 – Sunday morning” (1975).

“He’d say ‘there’s a dead bird down there, I think you’d like it, go and get it or I’ll go and get it for you if you like’. So he would bring it up for me, or I’d go and get it, and then we’d talk about it, and he might even write something about it.”

At Scribble Rock, Dawson and Boddy immersed themselves in the local community and produced a newsletter, Kitchen Talk, which Boddy would write, and Dawson illustrate, promoting the principles of organic farming.

We look at one of the abstract landscapes Dawson created in Binalong, Balgalal series 5 – Sunday Morning (1975), named for the creek that ran through Scribble Rock, a vast triptych that stretches for almost four metres.

“Well, they’re not really abstract,” Dawson corrects me. “They’re trees,” she says.

“They’re living things, and you actually see that – that’s out here and that’s behind it, and that one’s there, and that’s next to it and coming that way,” she says. “So when you start looking you see that they’re actual solid tree shapes, but they’re just simplified.”

After Boddy’s death in 2014, Dawson moved back to the Binalong township before relocating to Ocean Grove in 2016 to be with family. Her recent fall has kept her from the studio of late, but she’s keen to go back.

“When everything settles, I’d love to go and work in the pod,” Dawson says. “I feel I’m sort of ungracious by not working in it. What I’d like to do is a really honkedy-donk-donk last set of works,” she says, emphasising the sentiment with a theatrical growl.

What will the works be about?

“I don’t know,” she says, and makes another long, low, growling sound, as though summoning ideas. “But it’s coming.”

Janet Dawson: Far Away, So Close is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 18.

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