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,[11] then held by West Australian painter Frances Woolley (b.1930).
[1] 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.
There, from late 1959 to early 1960, she took up residence in the hilltop village of Anticoli Corrado where the British School at Rome retained workspaces for artists.
[22] Dawson also founded the Gallery A Print Workshop,[25][26][3] working at the studio as a lithographic proof printer for visiting artists,[16] described by James Gleeson as 'pioneering' Australian graphic arts.
[30][31] 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.
[33] Working as the gallery manager and technical assistant, Dawson's abstraction developed through her adoption of acrylic paint and shaped composition boards.
Her use of Laminex’s strong flat colours echoes contemporary American abstraction, particularly Jasper Johns’s late 1950s Target paintings and Frank Stella’s Protractor series of the 1960s.
"[42]In 1970 Brook expands on this assessment: "Janet Dawson…uses oval supports and refers back a little to early Mondrian, to Kandinsky, and perhaps to the dynamism of Wyndham Lewis, or maybe to Rayonnism.
She contrives, with thick, very physical paint in dense and muted hues, an effect of flowing or oscillating liquids or filaments of irregularly stranded rope.
There is a little implied depth, but no implication that what confronts the viewer is anything other than tangible brushed pigment on a vertically mounted support attached to the wall of a room.
"[43]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.
To find her venturing into the staid area of the Archibald and then carrying all before her is a marvellous reversal of the expected..."[4] 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."
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.
She is using collage for the first time - painting with torn paper, feathers, a crumpled rag crushed behind the glass in Big Rising Moon 2.
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.
"[46]Catalano's 1997 interview with the artist allowed Dawson to give her own response to the question of metaphysics: "Naturalism and symbolism are fully reconcilable.
"[7] 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.
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.
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.
"In 1968 Dawson married Michael Boddy (1934–2014), a British-born 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.