The Drawings of Janet Dawson

The drawings of Janet Dawson in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia span nearly forty years of the artists’ work – the earliest drawing in the collection dates from 1957 when she had just completed her art studies in Australia.

Drawing has always been integral to Janet Dawson's practice as an artist: at times as a tool for exploring her ideas about formal problems in making art; frequently as a way of coming to terms with her subject matter. In her sketchbooks and working drawings the genesis of much of Dawson's painting is evident, particularly in her continuing investigations into landscape. In tandem with these sketches are finished drawings in various mediums. These attest to the fact that drawing has occupied a place as significant as painting, and printmaking, in the artist's career.

Janet Dawson was born in 1935 in Sydney and lived in the New South Wales country town of Forbes until the age of six when her family moved to Melbourne. She and her brother recall a particularly happy childhood. Janet showed an early talent for drawing and her supportive parents enrolled her at the age of eleven in H. Septimus Power's private art school, where she took drawing classes on Saturday mornings for several years. In 1952 she began studying at the National Gallery School with William Dargie, from whom she learned the techniques of tonal realism. In 1954 Alan Sumner replaced Dargie as Head of the School; from Sumner she gained a broader understanding of art history. Dawson credits her parents with developing her love of the physical experience of handling and using materials, and to Alan Sumner she gives credit for translating this enthusiasm into the business of actually making art.

Dawson studied full time at the National Gallery School for two years, then she worked in a solicitor's office for eighteen months while attending night classes. During her final scholarship year she supported herself with part-time work. In 1956 she was awarded the National Gallery of Victoria Travelling Scholarship. This enabled her to go to England and study at the Slade School of Fine Art at London University. Before going overseas in 1957, her first solo exhibition was held at a private house attached to a doctor's surgery in the Melbourne suburb of Armadale where Dawson had been working as an evening receptionist. Most of the works were sold. Figure on crutches, the earliest work in the Gallery's collection, is from that first exhibition. This is a sensitive drawing. What might otherwise appear as a morbid subject has been softened by the use of lithographic crayon on textured paper, and the effect is shadowy and haunting rather than stark. The same empathy for human subjects is evident in the lively and affectionate sketches Dawson made of crew members and fellow passengers during her voyage to Europe on the Roma later that year.

Janet Dawson's training in Australia had been traditional and realist. In Europe she confronted contemporary art, and this exposure had a significant impact on the direction of her work. Initially daunted by the new European and American painting, she turned away from working in the medium herself. At the Slade she took up lithography. While their curriculum was fundamentally academic, the School also offered courses in contemporary art, and one of the more innovative teachers, Ceri Richards, encouraged Dawson to experiment with lithography and to work in an abstract manner. Lithography demanded that she focus on specific technical problems of making art, and the skill Dawson developed in that medium subsequently allowed her to confidently explore the possibilities of expressive abstraction in other mediums.

In 1959 Dawson won first prize for lithography at the Slade School and was awarded a small scholarship. Travel to Italy followed and, for some months, she lived and worked in Anticoli Corrado, a village in the Sabine mountains near Rome. The drawings she produced of the Italian landscape are abstracted lyrical responses to the physical experience of being there. The soft black charcoal shapes are not so much descriptive as sensual renderings of places, hills, trees and folds of valleys.

The influence of European surrealism can be seen in Dawson's use of particular marks and symbols, and her admiration for the warmth and openness of American abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko (whose work she saw at the Tate Gallery in 1959) also emerges, but her use of formal devices of abstraction is embedded in a genuine response to the sensations of the landscape itself.

After a stint working at the Atelier Patris in Paris, proof printing lithographs by artists such as Pierre Soulages, Fritz Hundertwasser and Kumi Sugai, Dawson returned to Melbourne in late 1960.

Janet Dawson was extraordinarily influential in Australia during the 1960s, as a pioneer of the new movement in abstract painting, and as a force in establishing contemporary printmaking. She was closely associated with Gallery A, which was the only gallery in Australia in the early 1960s committed to non-figurative art. Founded in Melbourne in 1959 by Max Hutchinson and Clement Meadmore as an outlet for the integration of design and art, Gallery A began as an extension of Hutchinson's furniture design business, but rapidly became a focus for contemporary art — as did the second Gallery A, opened in Sydney in 1966. Dawson had a solo show of paintings with Gallery A in 1961, and in the same year was curator of an exhibition of Bauhaus work for the gallery. In 1963 she established the Gallery A print workshop. From 1963—67 she printed sets of original lithographs for many Australian artists including John Olsen, Fred Williams, Roger Kemp, Russell Drysdale, Albert Tucker, Charles Blackman and Colin Lanceley. Dawson moved to Sydney in 1966, but took less of a role in the print workshop.

In her painting throughout the 1960s Dawson was experimenting with formal problems of abstraction. Early in the decade her work was full of saturated colour and bold, simple marks. The paintings have a joyful vibrant quality which points to their expressive content. A constant in Dawson's work from then until now has been the quest to resolve the personal and lyrical sources of her art with pictorial exploration into space and volume.

For Dawson, abstraction was never a retreat from reality but a means of translating it into new forms of visual language. Her Sea breeze 1966 is an elegant play across abstraction and the evocation of landscape: space is presented as ambiguous the marks, which take our eye into the work, continue across planes, pulling the drawing into pictorial space. This work prefigures Dawson's major landscape series of the 1970s.

There are few extant drawings from the 1960s, in part because of the breadth of the artist's activities. In addition to making and exhibiting her art, and her pedagogical and printmaking activities, between 1962 and 1965 Dawson designed and painted sets at the Emerald Theatre, where she met Michael Boddy, the writer, actor and director, whom she married in 1968. They shared the same ideas about how plays should look and be presented, and in the 1970s and early 1980s, Dawson designed the sets, costumes and properties for the premier productions for all but three of Boddy's plays, and for most of the other plays he directed during that period.

In 1968 Dawson designed a number of circular Laminex coffee tables in bright colours. The National Gallery has two of these tables, and a sheet of drawings for them is included in the exhibition. The tables relate closely to a shift in Dawson's painting in the late 1960s, when she was using flat colours and crisp edges in the manner of Colourfield painting. This period of her work was short-lived, although she retained an interest in design as an exploration into space. She recently made a large floor sculpture based on the early Laminex tables.

Finding Colourfield painting too restricting, Dawson moved towards a more tonal and subdued palette in which she could further explore spatial illusion. She was represented in The Field exhibition Of 1968 by two works which interestingly demonstrate this divergence: Rollascape 1968, flatly painted on shaped hardboard, and Wall 1968, a painting in tones of grey, one of a series which continued into 1969. The works in the Wall series were painterly, and ambiguous in their relationship to abstraction. In the drawings for the Ripple series (1968—70) there is a similar movement between abstraction and realism, in the play of feathery lines across gridded paper.

In 1969, feeling the need for some retraining, Janet Dawson took up a position as a production assistant at the Australian Museum in Sydney. She worked there for two years producing scientific illustrations for exhibition displays and museum publications. In an environment where the close observation and rendering of nature was her primary work, she developed her fascination with the physical reality of the natural world. As with her adoption of lithography ten years earlier, Dawson found the acquisition of the particular technical skills required for museum illustration to be liberating. Drawing the veins and bones of animals and fossils in minute and accurate detail provided a focus for her preoccupation with natural phenomena and the mechanisms of life itself. The intensity of this focus emerged in her art several years later when she began drawing, with extraordinary tenderness, dead birds and animals retrieved from the roadside.

The charcoal drawings of Boobook owl (1974), Galahs (1978), and Possum (1994—95) have the detail of scientific illustrations, but the animals' stillness goes beyond scientific inquiry. While the splayed limbs and wings attest to the violence of their deaths, in her attention to rendering the delicacy of patterning on the feathers of the galahs and the wings of the owl, Dawson has succeeded in giving them life. The velvet haunches and arrested tail of the possum convey its very particularity as a living creature as much as its open mouth signals its demise. These beautiful images are poignant but not mawkish; the animals are not anthropomorphised as suffering characters in a bush tale, rather they are observed with penetration and sensitivity as representing the expiration of life within a larger story.

Janet Dawson had moved to the country by the time she began to make the first of these drawings. In 1973, with her husband Michael Boddy, Dawson relocated her life to a rural property on the Balgalal Creek at Binalong, New South Wales. She has lived in the bush over since.

From about 1970 onwards Dawson's work increasingly had been concerned with the representation of landscape, which was partly fuelled by an extended visit to Tasmania in the early 1970s. She designed and painted a number of naturalistic backcloths and gauzes for the Hobart Theatre Royal's original production in 1972 of Cash! — a musical play about the nineteenth-century bushranger, Martin Cash, written by Michael Boddy and Marcus Cooney, and directed by Boddy. This work confirmed her ability to experiment with traditional forms of landscape painting. In the same year she produced a series of pastel and charcoal drawings, inspired by the Tasmanian landscape, which synthesised formal concerns of the previous decade with personal responses to the natural world.

Sunshine landscape and Rainclouds (both 1972) radiate with energy; in these drawings the landscape is experienced through the atmosphere — the banking clouds, the streams of sunlight, the drenching rain. They are elemental in their concerns and, like her charcoal drawings of the Italian landscape, they are distillations of sensation rather than naturalistic descriptions of features. Dawson's application of pastel exploits its electric qualities, its potential to capture and deflect light. Her gestures are expansive in their evocation of skies, and highly controlled in the detail she brings to the clouds and trees charged with sunlight and ferment. Spools of soft pastel broadly describe the terrain, scribbled across with vibrant marks of pure light. In these drawings you can hear the thunder, and feel the sun.

Dawson's treatment of landscape in the early 1970s was immediate and personal, but her exploration of its rhythms went beyond emotive responses to nature. Her paintings and drawings of the landscape close to her became an investigation into how much of the natural world is external fact, and how much is a projection of human intellect. In her work over the next twenty years she returned again and again to these questions, moving between close scrutiny and the big picture. Her drawings are never naive in their relationship to nature. In the Oval series of paintings and drawings which began around 1970, the artist's treatment of the frame and the spatial relationships within the works makes explicit the construction of the images. The spatial illusions and ambiguities Dawson had explored so vigorously in her painting in the 1960s resurfaced as visual contradictions within landscape. In the many drawings which exist around the oval theme, it is possible to see the artist working through the vocabulary of cubism, interrogating the business of seeing without compromising the idea of representing the landscape itself.

In another series of drawings and paintings begun around 1976, Dawson again introduced geometry into images of landscape, breaking up the surface with lines and simple shapes. A repeated motif is a hemisphere, or crescent, standing in for the moon. In some of these drawings it provides a single source of light, in others it is repeated, suggesting the effect of moonlight playing over the landscape, deceptively altering the appearance of the bush. Dawson called this series Foxy Night, and the works point to a particular way of thinking about the landscape as an inhabited space. No actual creatures are evident, but the criss-crossed lines through the drawings are like the paths and tracks of animals, variously native, domesticated and feral. The spatial ambiguity of these drawings — where ground and sky become a series of planes that shift in and out — operates as a metaphor for the complex relationships between living things in the bush. The landscape here is visualised as a contested site.

In spite of the rigorous attention to structure in these drawings of the landscape, the works are lyrical and evocative. Dawson uses sombre tones of gouache and brighter translucent watercolour, smudged and punctuated with ink and fibre-tipped pen. The studies have the immediacy of something captured moonlight through the trees, the rapid movement of a fox across a clearing. At the time Dawson was making these works she and Michael Boddy were living on the organic farm they had made on the Balgalal Creek. Virtually self-sufficient, they also sold surplus produce. Janet and Michael raised free-range poultry and pigs, and had a market garden with olive trees, fruit trees and vegetables. Thus their relationship to the landscape was itself complex and close. For Dawson the observation of nature was part of an intense involvement in its myriad manifestations. Fundamental to these drawings are questions about what is 'natural' in nature, and what is cultivated.

The Balgalal series of paintings and drawings began at the time Dawson and Boddy began farming and they reflect the artist's immersion in the landscape of the river gums which grow on Balgalal Creek.

In some of the watercolours and gouaches the trees fill the landscape, and the paper. Dawson's use of colour in these works is restrained, and the tree trunks are painted primarily in tones of blues, browns and greys. But across and between the pattern of trunks, hints of red and yellow flicker, bringing to life the details of light through the trees and the mood of the weather. These drawings convey the temperament of the landscape through the effects of seasonal changes. They are images of atmosphere.

In her drawings Dawson unfolds an extraordinary capacity to move between the vast expanse of nature and its infinite detail. This is nowhere more evident than in her pastel and gouache studies of clouds. Her skies are both metaphysical and documentary. The artist has looked up at the sky and has seen in it one of the fundamental sources of life itself. In the shape and weight of her clouds, we can read the season and the time of day. In these sweeping skies the idea of the sublime in nature is also evoked, something so extraordinary that it is beyond description and can be experienced only through intuition. Spring clouds 1980 bear the promise of spring rain, in a sky which emanates light as a substance of being. The cloud studies span over a decade, and recall the earlier pastel landscapes from 1972.

Dawson's own practice as an artist has been characterised by seasons and cycles, and she frequently returns to subjects and themes in her drawings which she explored a decade before. Her work has become more contemplative since the 1980s, largely as a result of changing the focus of her personal and professional life. In 1977 she and Michael Boddy moved from their farm at Binalong to start again on a more remote property on the Balgalal Creek and to concentrate on farming fruit and vegetables. Two years later they established The Bugle Press, a private press publishing fine art prints, books, pamphlets and, since 1989, Kitchen Talk Newsletter, a subscription journal of food, farming and natural history. A number of Dawson's illustrations for the newsletter and books by Boddy on alternative farming and kitchen gardening are included in this exhibition. Like her work at the Australian Museum, they are detailed and particular, concentrating on the passage of time in nature. She closely follows the progress of a corn plant from first shoots to its appearance as polenta on the table.

Michael Boddy is a partner in the production of these images, as the author of the garden as well as the writing. The Dawson—Boddy collaboration runs through all aspects of their lives, from the studio to the kitchen. They plant and cultivate vegetables, herbs and fruit in prescribed garden beds, and they also make use of the wild harvest on their property mushrooms, rabbits, hares and yabbies. The still life drawings of fruit and vegetables, animals and bones reflect Dawson's embrace of the confluence of nature, random growth with ordered cultivation, native with feral. Like the Foxy Night series, the interior landscapes play across human intervention in the natural world, and the presence of nature in the kitchen and the studio.

Dawson has referred to her still life subjects as portraits, suggesting that she approaches them with the same respect she feels for her human subjects. The progress of life is strikingly observed in a series of thirteen drawings in pastel and charcoal of a single red cabbage, grown and tended for this purpose. The Red Cabbage series is the most recent work in this exhibition, drawn over some months from late 1994 into 1995. Unlike true still lifes, these drawings are not of nature devoid of animation: through the series the drama of life and death unfolds, from the first bloom of youth to withering decay.

The drawings focus tightly on the cabbage which fills the frame. At first the heart is firm and round, and its leaves are full and soft. Gradually the leaves begin to wilt and droop around the heart which opens and dries out, while new buds sprout beneath the leaves and dry out in their turn. This progression is conveyed through the artist's use of colour in the pastel drawings. Soft greens and purples describe the weight and voluptuousness of the vegetable in its early stages; as time passes and the leaves become increasingly brittle, the colour becomes more variegated, with scribbles of black, brown and white eating around the edges. As the leaves fall away, cascading around the stalk, subdued tones of brown and red replace the green life force of the plant.

Perhaps these drawings are portraits, but the subject is not anthropomorphised. No grandeur and heroism is present, simply moving observations on the life of an individual being. The final drawings have a quality of ineffable loss. Dawson's portrait studies of people have similar qualities of intimacy and tenderness. In her tightly cropped charcoal studies from the 1970s, the faces at first glance seem like daguerrotypes, traces of the subject captured on the surface of the paper. The simple broad strokes of charcoal that shape the hair and contours of the face appear spontaneous in their execution, but the drawings have been built up and rubbed away to achieve a powerful corporeity.

In Janet Dawson's drawings an immense curiosity about material existence is evident. At times the artist has explored the natural world with the gaze of a scientist, seeing its minutiae and the visible signs of growth and ageing on living things. In exploring the interrelationships which exist in nature she has also sought to understand how we construct the natural world through philosophical and scientific inquiry. Dawson creates a meeting ground for those two paths, in the rigour of her drawing with its attention to veracity and its search for pictorial structure.

Deborah Clark
Assistant Curator, Australian Drawings
National Gallery of Australia