LAST FOXY NIGHT, 1979
JANET DAWSON
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
183.5 x 121.5 cm
signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Janet Dawson / Last Foxy Night / 5/79
Gallery A, Sydney (label attached verso)
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
The National Australia Bank Art Collection, acquired from the above in June 1979 (label attached verso)
Janet Dawson, Recent Paintings, Gallery A, Sydney, 19 May – 9 June 1979
The Seventies: Australian Paintings and Tapestries from the Collection of National Australia Bank, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 15 October – 28 November 1982
The Seventies: Contemporary Australian Paintings from the National Australia Bank Collection, organised by Regional Galleries Association of New South Wales, New South Wales, cat. 9; and touring, Tamworth City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 24 May – 24 June 1990; Dubbo Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 11 July – 6 August 1990; Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 17 August – 10 September 1990; Moree Plains Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 3 October – 31 October 1990
Hidden Treasures: Art in Sydney's Corporate Collections, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 12 January - 19 February 1994
Plant, M., ‘Janet Dawson’ in Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 17, no. 4, winter 1980, p. 344
Lindsay, R., The Seventies: Australian Paintings and Tapestries from the Collection of National Australia Bank, The National Bank of Australasia, Melbourne, 1982, pl. 29, p. 42 (illus.)
Taylor, P., Anything Goes: Art in Australia 1970 – 1980, Art & Text, Melbourne, 1984, p. 83 (illus.)
Dawson occupies a rare and remarkable place in Australian art, one which has included painter – from student tonalist to semi-abstraction to avant garde modernist – and a return to naturalism. A superb draughtsperson throughout her career, a master printmaker and a designer in various forms.1 Her prodigious talent was evident from her late teens winning various awards as a student at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. In 1956, she won the NGV’s Travelling Scholarship which took to her London where she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. In London, Dawson encountered the work of Rothko and Motherwell, and in Paris, Dubuffet and Miro, each leaving a strong impression. After her return to Australia in 1961, her confidence in vibrant colours, abstract forms and flat surfaces created paintings that were fresh and distinctive and attracted widespread critical attention, particularly through her association with Gallery A (Sydney and Melbourne) .
Dawson is often cited as one of three women artists included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s The Field exhibition. The domination of abstraction by men was obvious and something that Feminism in Sydney and Melbourne took to task in the following decade. But ‘Dawson’s most Field-like paintings were not in ‘The Field’ – they had preceded it.2 Her contribution, Rollascape, is a shaped canvas and using a roller is painted in a muted orange.3 In one sense it anticipates the paintings which followed, including her Foxy Night series with their use of half-tones and illusion of subtle depth.
In 1973, Dawson and her husband moved to Binalong, and in 1977 to nearby Scribble Rock, both about an hour north-east of Canberra.4 The Foxy Night paintings were borne out of the location itself. Dawson is untroubled by abstraction and naturalism occurring in a comfortable sequence – for her, they have seldom been opposites or competing forces with one effortlessly following the other. Last Foxy Night, 1979 is similar in style and treatment to other Foxy works in public collections.5 The slipping and cascading poise of shapes are held within a briskly painted surface and muted palette. The soft atmospheric effect seems almost Whistlerian in its nocturnal tonal range. Here we find the synthesis of Dawson’s observation and the feeling for her location, interwoven with her own intellectual and aesthetic disposition.
1. Self Portrait, painted between 1951 and 1953 (before the artist was twenty), oil on cardboard, collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
2. Thomas, D., ‘Golden Oldies. Four artists who were new in the 1960s and early 1970s and still going strong’, Art & Australia, vol 50, no. 4, Autumn 2013, p. 385
3. Rollascape, 1968, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria
4. Michael Boddy (1934 – 2014), English-Australian actor and writer, married Dawson, in Sydney, 1965. He was the subject of Dawson’s Archibald Prize winning portrait in 1973.
5. Foxy night 2, 1977, synthetic polymer paint on linen canvas, collection of the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, purchased 1977, Trustees' Prize (winning entry); Study for Foxy night series, 1978-1979, pencil, black ink wash, white gouache on white wove paper, collection of the Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, Gift of Peta Phillips, 2001
DOUG HALL AM