Centre for Australian Art

Australian Prints + Printmaking

Janet Dawson

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Name

Janet Dawson

Other names

BODDY, Janet (married name)

BODDY, Janet Dawson

Culture

Australian

Gender

Female

Birth date

10 January 1935

Birth place

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia View on map Close map

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Movements

London 1957-59, Italy, France 1959-60

Occupations

Artist (painter) | Artist (theatre) | Artist (water-colouristist) | Designer (furniture) | Designer (stage) | Drawer | Graphic designer | Printer | Printmaker

Summary

Worked: Australia (VIC, NSW), England, France. Etchings, Lithographs, Stencils

NGA IRN

17602

Context

Australia

Addresses

  • 1960
    Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  • Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  • 1974-77
    Binalong, New South Wales, Australia
  • 1977
    Scribble Rock, Balgalal Creek, New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Janet Dawson is an artist and has been the subject of several survey exhibitions, including at the National Gallery of Victoria (1979) and the National Gallery of Australia (1996). Her work is to be found in major institutional and private collections in Australia and overseas. She learnt how to print proofs for professional artists in the legendary workshop Atelier Patris in Paris for several months in 1960. After working for free during her stay Dawson was ’paid’ with the privilege of printing a suite of five of her own lithographs. On her arrival back in Melbourne in December 1960 these prints were the only artworks she had to represent her three years abroad in London, Italy and France. Max Hutchinson and Shirley Venn of Gallery A in Flinders Lane were impressed enough by the prints to give Dawson both a solo exhibition that year and a job as gallery manager. At Gallery A, Dawson established one of Melbourne’s first master printmaking workshop from 1963. Although Dawson and the Gallery A Print Workshop moved to Sydney in 1965, Dawson had introduced Melbourne to professional master-printmaking as it was practiced in cosmopolitan centres abroad. [Prints, printmaking and Philanthropy, 2019]