Bellarine dusk

Janet Dawson is known as an artist who refuses to be bound by rules. Her distinguished career spans over six decades. During this time, she moved between abstraction and figuration, formalism and realism. She saw no contradiction in working between these diverse stylistic and aesthetic realms. Consistent to her art was her investigative vision: her art derives from her immense curiosity about material existence and states of the natural world.

In the late 1950s, Dawson studied in London and Europe on a travelling art scholarship. She returned to Melbourne in 1960, equipped with the knowledge of the powerful forms of European and American abstraction she had studied overseas. Propelled by these influences, she delivered her own bold new language of painting to Australian audiences. In the 1960s Dawson gained prominence as a pioneer of hard-edge abstraction and was credited with introducing colour field painting, (the type celebrated by 1968 exhibition The Field) to Melbourne. While Dawson created some of the most significant works of this genre, the modernist bravura of hard-edge painting didn’t long sit well with her. “I would call myself an edge-conscious painter, not a hard-edge painter” she once claimed. Throughout her career Dawson worked from these edges, resisting the aesthetic ghetto-isation of labels.

By the 1970s, Dawson was replacing the self-referentiality of hard-edge painting with works that were firmly located in the sensations, formations and experiences of the natural world. In 1974 she moved to a property in Binalong, north-west of Yass, where farming the land organically became part of her daily life and her art. She here made the surprising shift from abstraction to a new form of realism as she lingered over the ‘things’ the landscape offered – sprouting cabbages, cauliflowers, a dead sheep or brown snake for example, all feature in her art. As did the shifting atmospheres of the landscape. Often considered a split from her early practice, these paintings in fact continue her enduring investigations into the very nature of reality, a fact first claimed as the driving force of her earlier abstract practice.

In 2016, following the death of her long-time partner, Dawson moved from Binalong to Ocean Grove in Victoria. Here the ocean and bayside suburbs became new subjects for her art. Initiated the year of her move, Bellarine dusk is an exceptional work from Dawson’s late career. Here, Dawson paints revelations of her new world and illusions of its pulsating life. Inspired by the night sky over ocean waters, Dawson imbues this surban duskscape with a sense of the sublime, the glowing force of paintwork ignites the scene of the everyday into something remarkable. In this transitional landscape, where day is moving into night, Dawson continues her investigations of the ambiguous zones between light and dark, locating mystery and radiance in her surrounds and drawing on a small encounter in her everday world to trigger a sense of the transcendental in her art.