17 Facts About Janet Dawson

Janet Dawson studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960.

Janet Dawson won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, Michael Boddy Reading.

Janet Dawson has exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections.

Janet Dawson started to take a keen interest in art at age 11 beginning her formal art tuition in Saturday morning classes at H Septimus Power's private art school from 1946 to 1949, before living in Clarence Street, East Malvern working as a doctor's receptionist while she studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne first under William Dargie, who was then replaced by Alan Sumner as head of school.

Landing in Genoa in mid July 1957, and stopping at Milan, Bern and Paris, Janet Dawson arrived in London.

In London, Janet Dawson 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.

Janet Dawson loved to draw, so she studied lithography, which allows an artist to draw directly on a printing stone.

Janet Dawson founded the Gallery A Print Workshop, working at the studio as a lithographic proof printer for visiting artists, described by James Gleeson as 'pioneering' Australian graphic arts.

Janet Dawson sometimes allows her colours to waver, overlap and blend.

Janet Dawson was involved in the Colour Field movement; abstraction that used flat, solid and graduated hues to make colour its own subject.

Janet Dawson was one of only three women artists in the exhibition,.

Mary Eagle identifies in Janet 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.

Janet Dawson is showing three series: Foxy Night, Practical House Designs, and Traditional Portrait Drawings.

Janet Dawson is using collage for the first time - painting with torn paper, feathers, a crumpled rag crushed behind the glass in Big Rising Moon 2.

Catalano's 1997 interview with the artist allowed Janet Dawson to give her own response to the question of metaphysics:.

In 1968 Janet Dawson married Michael Boddy, 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.

Boddy died in 2014 and Janet Dawson moved to Ocean Grove, Victoria.