Janet Dawson

Janet Dawson MBE (born 1935) is an Australian artist who was a pioneer of abstract painting in Australia in the 1960s, having been introduced to abstraction during studies in England. She was also an accomplished lithographic printer of her own works as well as those of other renowned Australian artists, a theatre-set and furniture designer. She studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960. She won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, "Michael Boddy Reading". She has exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections. In 1977 she was awarded an MBE for services to art.
Career.
Dawson was born in Sydney in 1935 and spent her early years in Forbes, then in Clarence Street, East Malvern while she studied (1952 to 1956) at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne under Alan Sumner. Art critic Robert Hughes in 1962 after Sumner's resignation wrote complaining that "since his appointment as the school's head in 1947, Mr Sumner seems to have produced no young painter whose work is of any significance whatever — except Janet Dawson, whose unquestionable talent comes, in part, from a revolt against the flaccid academism Mr Sumner has preached." In 1955 Dawson 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.' A 1955 newspaper article reports that "she concentrates mainly on semi-abstracts and enjoys working on large canvases. Murals are her particular interest" and that "her highest ambition is to win the school’s travelling scholarship" of £900 for three years study abroad, then held by West Australian painter Frances Woolley (b.1930). Indeed, the following year she was the joint winner, with friend Kathleen Boyle, of the award; the National Gallery of Victoria Travelling Scholarship, with which she went to London where she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art.
International study and travel.
In London, 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. 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 that enabled her to travel to Italy. There, she took up residence in the hilltop village of Anticoli Corrado where the British School at Rome retained workspaces for artists. During her three months there, Dawson made drawings of the landscape. Her art became almost exclusively abstract.
From Italy, Dawson travelled to Paris where she worked printing for School of Paris artists at the Dutch Tachiste Nono Reinhold's Atelier Patris that ran 1957–61 at 26 rue Boulard, where she was the only woman amongst five printers, and translated her Italian drawings into lithographs with bold colours, lines and strokes.
Gallery A.
Returning after nearly four years to Australia in late November 1960 Dawson founded the Gallery A Print Workshop, She worked at the studio as a lithographic proof printer for visiting artists, described by James Gleeson as 'pioneering' Australian graphic arts. In this role she introduced Australian artists including John Brack, John Olsen and Fred Williams to lithography. At Gallery A, Melbourne, Dawson held her first solo show and worked with dealer Max Hutchinson and furniture designer and sculptor, Clement Meadmore on the gallery's major 1961 exhibition "The Bauhaus: Aspects and Influence." Also in 1961, in November she issued a call amongst Australian printmakers for works, 10 of which were to be chosen to represent the country in "Prints of the World" being organised by collector and curator Robert Erskine in London. A special September 1963 edition of "Meanjin" devoted to French writing featured her work on its cover and as illustrations throughout.
Working as the gallery manager and technical assistant, Dawson's abstraction developed through her adoption of acrylic paint and shaped composition boards. Related to, and influential on her art, was her design of furniture for the gallery, one item of which is in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection from her ‘Living Art’ table top series of 1964 made at the invitation of the Australian Laminex company and fabricated by Steven Davis in Melbourne. Angela Goddard describes Dawson's tables as;
Having shown prints and drawings at Gallery A, she held her first painting solo there in 1964.
Partnership.
In 1968 Dawson married Michael Boddy (1934 - 2016), a British playwright and actor, educated at Cambridge, who migrated to Australia in 1960 and whom she met in 1963 in Melbourne while she was designing for the Emerald Hill Theatre and on the set of his play "You'll Come to Love Your Sperm Test". In 1973 Dawson became the third woman to win the Archibald Prize for her "Michael Boddy Reading". At that time she was working 1969-1971 full-time in the display department of the Australian Museum, Sydney, which she credits, because of the 'natural history' to which it exposed her, as an influence on her painting. 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. They partnered in a program in schools on the production and staging of plays. In 1973 they moved from Waverley to the village of Binalong, New South Wales, and in 1977 lived at Scribble Rock, a small property just outside the settlement, and there, from 22 December 1994 to May 1995 she produced the "Scribble Rock Red Cabbage" series purchased in its entirety by the National Gallery of Australia. In 1981 Dawson and her husband relocated to Canberra to help establish Theatre ACT, returning to Binalong in 1985.
Boddy died in 2016 and Dawson moved to Ocean Grove, Victoria. Michael had three children, including a son who pre-deceased Boddy.
Style and reception.
James Gleeson, comparing works of Dawson, Rapotec and Coburn in a group show at Hungry Horse Gallery in August 1964, notes “the serenity of spirit that lies behind the vivacious conversation of Janet Dawson’s colours,” and goes on to predict that;
Dawson was involved in the Colour Field movement; abstraction that used flat, solid hues to make colour its own subject. 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, (re-staged in 2018). Donald Brook, in year of "The Field," reviewed a May exhibition "Paintings by Janet Dawson" at Gallery A, and described her approach at the time to the painting as an object;
In 1970 Brook expands on this assessment:
During the 1970s Dawson moved away from such Hard Edge abstraction to a more 'painterly' style, but maintained her formal vocabulary; at the time of her 1979 survey show Mary Eagle noted "she sees everything in nature blending, flowing together..." 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.
Of Dawson's winning the Archibald Prize which marks a point in her career of departure from pure abstraction, art historian Patrick McCaughey praised the "loose painterly treatment of figure and supports" and considered her success "surprising and deserving" because "Miss Dawson is better known as a sophisticated abstract painter. To find her venturing into the staid area of the Archibald and then carrying all before her is a marvellous reversal of the expected..."
Remarking on work Dawson produced after moving to country Binalong, Daniel Thomas in a 1974 review declared her "one of Australia's very best artists", but "now 'modern' only in the sense that she knows all about colour and form and surface; she can clamp forms to the edge of her canvas, secure in the knowledge that all is masterfully under control." He considers the show evidence of "her perhaps reluctant return to the 'old-fashioned'. The exhibition is not only about pink and yellow singing together...It is also about agriculture and being cold, and needing rain, and about how the gum trees at the bottom of the paddock are primeval, grey, hairy monsters. If anyone does an exhibition of gum-tree painting, Janet Dawson now has to be included, along with Lister Lister, Hans Heysen and Sidney Nolan." In an August 1977 Gallery A show she augmented such imagery, though on a macro scale, without the gum trees, with collage, as Nancy Borlase notes in her review; 
Gary Catalano writing in 1988 about her solo show in Richmond, questions, then reluctantly concurs with, Eagle's comparison of Dawson's metaphysics with Blake's, and highlights the artist's surrealism: 
Catalano's 1997 interview with the artist allowed Dawson to give her own response to the question of metaphysics:
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;
Considering later work McDonald remarks that;