At the age of 90, Janet Dawson can look back on one of the most unusual careers in Australian art. Singled out as a star of the future, she went a long way to fulfilling her early promise before retreating to the countryside and embracing a very different set of values. During these years of self-imposed exile in the Bush, she maintained a shadowy presence within the commercial galleries, having a solo exhibition every year or two, apart from a nine-year gap from 1989 to 1998. Even during this quiet period, she was the subject of a drawing survey at the National Gallery of Australia.
A disturbing number of artists of this generation seem to have vanished from curatorial memory, but Dawson has never been forgotten. Having worked in the most cutting-edge forms of abstraction in the 1960s and 70s, she went on to make unfashionable paintings and drawings in a realistic manner – landscapes, still lifes and portraits. In a late series she reconciled the abstract and the figurative in evocative studies of the sky.