Janet Dawson's Printmaking, 1957-60

Janet Dawson’s Printmaking, 1957-60

John Landt

October 2020

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art History and Curatorial Studies (Advanced), College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University.

Declaration

I hereby declare that, except where it is otherwise acknowledged in the text, this thesis represents my own original work. The thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. All versions of the submitted thesis (regardless of submission type) are identical.

John Landt

October 2020

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Human Research Ethics

The ethical aspects of this research have been approved by the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee (Protocol 2019/494).

Covid-19

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in Australia in March 2020 has limited my research in a number of ways:

1. An appointment I had in April 2020 with the Collections Study Room at the National Gallery of Australia to view their holdings of Dawson’s prints and drawings was cancelled. The Collections Study Room then remained closed during 2020.

2. An inquiry with the National Gallery of Victoria has been unable to be answered as the curators have been working off-site and unable to access the relevant file. This related to a drawing (Figure 7) described as having been made in Melbourne, but which may have been made in London.

3. I have not received a response to an inquiry I made with the Redfern Gallery in London about Dawson’s prints. When Robert Erskine’s St George’s Gallery closed in 1962, the Redfern Gallery took over its holdings of Dawson’s prints.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the guidance provided by my supervisor Dr Sarah Scott in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University in Canberra. I would also like to thank Stella Downer, Andrea Fredericksen, Charles and Kate Nodrum, Nina Pearlman, Nancy Sever and staff in the research libraries and/or art collections of the Australian National University, the State Library of Victoria, the University of Melbourne, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, the National Library of Australia, Central Saint Martins and the University College London for their kind assistance.

Finally, I would especially like to thank the artist Janet Dawson and her family for their generous support during this project.

Abstract

Janet Dawson is an Australian painter, printmaker and graphic artist whose art was highly influential during the 1960s. Between 1957 and 1960 she lived in Europe and made a number of distinctive lithographs and drawings. This thesis discusses possible theoretical approaches to these works and finds that they were investigating the uncertainty of visual perception and exploring a corporeal form of perception.

Abbreviations

AGNSW Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

NGA National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

NGV National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

UCL University College London

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Contents

Declaration ...... iii Human Research Ethics ...... v Covid-19 ...... vii Acknowledgements ...... ix Abstract ...... xi Abbreviations ...... xiii Contents ...... xv Figures ...... xvii Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: London, 1957-59 ...... 5 Chapter 2: Anticoli Corrado, 1959-60 ...... 19 Chapter 3: Paris, 1960 ...... 32 Conclusion ...... 47 Plates ...... 49 Appendix A : Interviews ...... 63 Appendix B : Letters ...... 111 Appendix C : Gallery A catalogue ...... 171 References ...... 174 Notes ...... 181

Figures

Art works are by Janet Dawson, unless otherwise stated.

Figure 1: Lithograph, 1959 ...... 6

Figure 2: Landscape, 1960 ...... 20

Figure 3: Montant (Rising), 1960 ...... 33

Figure 4: 69 Eton Avenue, London, 2019 ...... 49

Figure 5: 69 Eton Avenue, London, c.1957 ...... 49

Figure 6: Interior, May 1959 ...... 50

Figure 7: Abstract Interior, mid-1950s ...... 50

Figure 8: Still Life, mid-1950s ...... 51

Figure 9: Art School Interior, 1956 ...... 51

Figure 10: Sesshū Tōyō, Haboku Sansui (detail), 1495 ...... 52

Figure 11: Philip Guston, Painting no. 9, 1952 ...... 52

Figure 12: Abstract, 1957-58 ...... 53

Figure 13: Untitled, undated ...... 53

Figure 14: Abstract in Black and Grey, 1957-58 ...... 54

Figure 15: Snowfall, 1959 ...... 54

Figure 16: Landscape, February 1959 ...... 55

Figure 17: Abstract: Black, Grey, Blue, February 1959 ...... 55

Figure 18: Anticoli Corrado, 1960 ...... 56

Figure 19: Anticoli Corrado, 1960 ...... 56

Figure 20: Anticoli Corrado, 1960 ...... 57

Figure 21: Italian landscape drawing, 1960 ...... 57

Figure 22: Still-Life, 1960 ...... 58

Figure 23: Landscape, 1960 ...... 58

xvii Figure 24: Italian landscape 1, 1960 ...... 59

Figure 25: Italian landscape 2, 1960 ...... 59

Figure 26: Italian landscape drawing, 1960 ...... 60

Figure 27: Italian landscape drawing, 1960 ...... 60

Figure 28: Vers l’ombre (Towards the shadow), 1960 ...... 61

Figure 29: Grand bruit (Big noise), 1960 ...... 61

Figure 30: Rêve du soleil (Sun dream), 1960 ...... 62

Figure 31: L’oiseau de nuit (Night bird), 1960 ...... 62

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Introduction

Janet Dawson was a pioneering abstract painter and printmaker in Australia during the 1960s and was one of the few female artists practising during a male-dominated era. Her iconic paintings of 1964 The Origin of the Milky Way and St George and the Dragon are frequently on display at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra (Figures A39 & A41).

Between 1957 and 1960 she lived in Europe and was primarily involved in lithography. There has, however, been little discussion of the art she made during this period. Broad surveys of Australian art by Bernard Smith and Andrew Sayers did not include her prints and focused on her paintings and drawings. 1 Sasha Grishin’s survey of Australian post-war printmaking concentrated on the prints she produced in Australia for other artists and simply commented that the lithographs she brought back from her time overseas “… looked strangely out of place on the Melbourne art scene.” 2

There have been two exhibition catalogues on Dawson’s art. Deborah Clark examined her drawings in a 1996 exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. 3 Christine France curated an exhibition that covered her overall career up to 2006. 4 Due to their broad scope, both passed quickly over her time in Europe, and neither examined her printmaking in depth. Similarly, insightful essays by Margaret Plant, Mary Eagle and Deborah Edwards focused on her paintings and later periods than this thesis. 5

This thesis sought to find out more about the lithographs and drawings she made during this period and to critically examine possible theoretical approaches to these works. I have made extensive use of Dawson’s 1965

interview with Hazel de Berg in which she discussed issues related to her time overseas and her art practice. 6

I interviewed Dawson three times in early 2020 prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (Appendix A) when she showed me some photographs taken in London and Anticoli Corrado. She also provided me with some of the letters she had sent home to her parents while she was overseas (Appendix B).

First, I examined the works from her time overseas now held in Australian collections. Between late 1957 and mid 1959 she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. There is only one work in Australian collections from that time, a lithograph from 1959 in the NGA (Figure 6). From late 1959 to early 1960 she lived in Anticoli Corrado in Italy and completed a number of drawings which are held by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney and the NGA in Canberra. The five lithographs she made at the Atelier Patris in Paris during 1960 are in the collections of the NGV, the AGNSW and the NGA.

Whilst examining Dawson’s works on the NGV website I noticed there was a drawing from the mid 1950s for which there was no image. Following my request, the NGV photographed this work and it is now displayed on their website (Figure 7). This drawing appears similar to the 1959 lithograph held by the NGA, suggesting it may have been made in London. 7 The drawing and the lithograph have a similar pictorial structure to an earlier still-life painting now in Dawson’s studio (Figure 8).

In February 2020, I discovered some previously unknown lithographs and drawings by Dawson in the art collection of the University College London (UCL) Art Museum. Following my request, the curators emailed me images of these works, which comprised seven lithographs made in

London and three charcoal drawings made in Italy, as well as one lithograph made in Paris. The London lithographs and the drawings made in Italy provided valuable insights into the development of Dawson’s art during her time overseas. 8 Of particular interest is the lithograph which was awarded the first prize in lithography at the Slade School in 1959 (Figure 1).

The following chapters discuss the works made by Dawson in London, Anticoli Corrado and Paris between 1957 and 1960. They fall into three main groupings, with the works made in London mainly examining interior spaces, the works in Italy situated in the landscape, and the works in Paris exploring abstract spaces evocative of the natural environment. I discuss the merits of various possible theoretical approaches to these art works, including traditional art history methods and psychoanalytical, phenomenological and deconstructive theories. The thesis has three main findings:

Firstly, Dawson’s art works in London (which have not previously been analysed) were investigating the visual perception of space. The frequent mention of her self-described psychological distress by previous commentators was found to be an inadequate basis for understanding these works. Phenomenological and deconstructive theories regarding the visual perception of space were more useful.

Secondly, Dawson’s corporeal interpretation of forms and space in the landscape, developed during her time in Italy (and largely disregarded by previous writers), was found to be an essential aspect of her visual language and crucial when examining her artworks from Italy and Paris, and later works in Australia.

Thirdly, Dawson’s Paris lithographs which have been viewed as having been influenced by various forms of European and American abstract art,

were primarily investigating the uncertain nature and ambiguity of visual perceptions and associated meanings.

In examining Dawson’s works from this period, I have tried to relate my own perceptions in a sympathetic manner to what I have discerned to be relevant driving factors in Dawson’s art practice, but I may be being overly selective. For example, I have drawn comparisons between Dawson’s works and those of artists active in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, as I know that Dawson was engaging with these forms of art during her time in Europe, as well as later in Australia in her famous paintings The Origin of the Milky Way and St George and the Dragon (Figures A39 & A41). I have mainly included works that Dawson was likely to have viewed at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. There are likely to be many other influential factors and works of art that I have not mentioned. Also, the examples of ambiguous meanings and associations I put forward in Chapter 3 are necessarily selective and are being used to illustrate some of the possibilities. As is the nature of ambiguity, there would be many other readings which could be pursued.

Chapter 1: London, 1957-59

This chapter examines the lithographs Janet Dawson made in London, which have not been examined in previous research. During her time in London, she was exploring the perception of space and a sense of the unknown. Previous accounts have focused on her psychological distress. This chapter finds that a fuller understanding of her art is provided by phenomenological and deconstructive theories regarding the visual perception of space, along with theories related to fabrics, architecture and empathy.

Dawson was 22 years old when she left Melbourne on 18 May 1957 as the recipient of the prestigious travelling scholarship at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. She travelled to Europe on board the Roma stopping at Singapore, Cochin, Bombay, Djibouti, Massawa, Cairo, Alexandria, Malta and Naples. She disembarked in Genoa in mid July, and then travelled to London stopping at Milan, Bern and Paris.

She arrived in London in late July and moved into the conservatory/studio at the side of a boarding house for music students in Finchley, near to Hampstead and Muswell Hill (Figures 4 & 5). Although the roof leaked and it was exposed to the weather, it had the considerable benefit of being open to the sky and nearby trees.

She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art for two academic years from October 1957 until mid 1959 and during this period also did some printmaking at small private studios near to her home and at the Central School in Camden.

The print by Dawson which won the first prize in lithography at the Slade in 1959, Lithograph (Figure 1), depicts or evokes a sense of space, likely an interior space. There are subtle marks and variations in tones and

textures in the central area of the print towards which the viewer is drawn, and which evoke a sense of life and energy. The similar lithograph Interior (Figure 6), now in the collection of the NGA in Canberra, has less sense of space and life, with the dark shapes in the lower half of the work giving it a heavier feeling.

Figure 1: Lithograph, 1959

Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 71.1 x 50.5 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7779)

The marks in the central area of both prints have a freshness and energy. The finer lines are where the activity is, rather than the larger shapes in the foreground space, which are suggestive of a barrier. The space towards which the viewer is drawn evokes a sense of uncertainty. Dawson does not specify or attach a meaning to the work beyond saying there is “… something beyond the marks … a space that the marks make alive.” 9 Something unknown is intimated by the abstract printed marks themselves and the sense of life in the space around them. It occurs in the creation of the work and during its life afterwards. 10

The indeterminate nature of this living space relates to the aspect of visibility which includes invisibility, and to the interrelationship and threshold between knowns and unknowns, or undiscovered possibilities, as outlined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. Merleau- Ponty described the invisible as “… what is not actually visible, but could be …” while Derrida stated that “… the heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility.” 11 For each of them, as noted by Mary Jacobus, “… the invisible is not a transcendental or mystical realm but rather the point at which we are linked to the world by what we cannot perceive: ourselves in the act of perception.” 12

Merleau-Ponty and Derrida were influential French philosophers who were living and working in Paris during the time Dawson was there, but she was not aware of their theories. They were both engaged with examining the uncertainties and limits around human perception and understanding. I have found Merleau-Ponty’s theories particularly useful in examining Dawson’s works because he was concerned with visual perception and the mysteries of art, particularly those he perceived in the works of Paul Cézanne. Derrida was also interested in visual perception, particularly in his later writings on vision and blindness.

Another Paris-based philosopher of whom Dawson was unaware was Gaston Bachelard, who examined the uncertainty and discovery involved in visual perception and the poetic resonances of elemental forces such as air, water, fire and earth. The freshness of the experience of being at the threshold of perception is a major theme of his book The Poetics of Space which was published in 1958. Bachelard stated: “One must be receptive, receptive to the image in the moment it appears.” 13

The threshold between visibility and invisibility has also long been a preoccupation of artists. Renaissance artists had grappled with how to represent the vanishing point of vision in their works based on linear

perspective. One method was to obscure the point by placing it behind a column, as in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation of 1344. 14 The method adopted by Chinese and Japanese landscape artists was often to leave that part of the painting empty, and this was also the method adopted in ancient Roman frescoes. 15 Another method was to use clouds to obscure that part of the painting. 16 Contemporary artists continue to use a variety of methods, including humour, to investigate the threshold of the visible. 17

Dawson’s exploration of pictorial space had started with her depictions of interior spaces when she was a student at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. They were based primarily on the organisation of planes parallel to the picture surface and the use of horizontal and vertical forms, as in Art School Interior (Figure 9). Dawson outlined the way vertical and horizontal forms gave structural integrity to this painting:

Lithograph (Figure 1) and Interior (Figure 6) each employ a simple pictorial structure based on planes arranged around a central recessed space, as in the earlier works Abstract Interior (Figure 7) and Still Life (Figure 8). Overlapping planes had been a characteristic of Medieval perspective, while deep space was a feature of Renaissance and Baroque architecture and painting, intimating infinity and divine presence. The large objects in the near foreground of Lithograph (Figure 1) and Interior (Figure 6) reinforce the sense of deep space. This technique, known as Repoussoir, features in landscapes by Claude Lorrain, including River Landscape with Tiburtine Temple at Tivoli of around 1635 in the NGV.

Theories applied to traditional Chinese and Japanese landscapes also appear to be relevant to Dawson’s works. By convention they have three (near, middle and far) depths parallel to the picture plane, with the middle depth forming “… an undefined void … an impression of immeasurable space.” 19 In such works, the viewer is usually led from the foreground at the bottom upwards and backwards towards mountains in the far distance or (as in Dawson’s works) deeper into the interior space. In mid 1958 Dawson had viewed the influential exhibition 2000 Years of Japanese Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 20 The exhibition included several works that embodied these principles, including the flung ink painting Haboku Sansui of 1495 by Sesshū Tōyō (Figure 10). 21

Lithograph (Figure 1) and Interior (Figure 6) also appear similar to works by Philip Guston from the 1950s and early 1960s (Figure 11). Guston’s abstract drawings and paintings from that time were also structured around a deep central space, which in his case related to Zen Buddhist notions of the void, nothingness and ambiguity. 22 Art historian Virginia Spate included a quote from Guston in her 1961 catalogue essay for Dawson’s first exhibition after she returned to Australia: “I know I work in a state of tension provoked by the contradictions I find in painting. I stay on the picture until these paradoxes vanish and conscious choice doesn’t exist.” 23 This reflects the sense of unknown or undiscovered possibilities that is evident in prints such as Lithograph (Figure 1) and Interior (Figure 6). This initial line of inquiry was not however pursued by subsequent writers, despite the uncertainties of visual perception and the sense of the unknown having been important aspects of Dawson’s art practice.

In Dawson’s lithographs the limits of the pictorial space were probed or explored through the use of fine active lines within the central area of an indefinite space. They served to give a sense of life and energy without constraining the space by depicting it in a definite manner. The sense of

life and activity around these lines and shapes reflected her training in abstract art under the guidance of Alan Sumner. His teachings about the active nature of pictorial space and the tensions created by the push and pull of shapes and colours reflected the theories of Hans Hofmann: “Space is alive, space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counter forces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life.” 24

Dawson had been awarded the Abstract Painting Award at the National Gallery School in 1955. 25 This contradicts the oft-repeated view that Dawson only discovered abstract art after she went overseas, as when Kirsty Grant and Cathy Leahy stated Dawson’s interest in abstract art : “… had first been aroused by the 1959 exhibition The New American Art (sic), at the Tate Gallery, London.” 26 Deborah Edwards stated there were: “… definable phases in the art life of Dawson: the experimental years of the 1960s, when the academically trained artist became receptive to the effects of formalist-modernism …” while Deborah Cark stated: “Janet Dawson’s training in Australia had been traditional and realist. In Europe she confronted contemporary art, and this exposure had a significant impact on the direction of her work.” 27

Dawson’s letters often described the difficulty of reconciling conscious intellectual artistic activity and unconscious intuitive processes. Her stated desire in her letters home to her parents was to move away from unconscious processes towards a more intellectual approach: “I can no longer paint just for the fun of painting … I have to think about it now …” and “… very painful transition from emotional and intuitive to considered, intellectual approach.” 28 However, it appears that successful works, such as Lithograph (Figure 1), had a large unconscious component.

This appears to have been due to the advice of her teacher Ceri Richards to just focus on technique and not worry about anything else. 29 Dawson

said her artistic development in this period had been an unconscious process: “… learn the technique of the medium and the aesthetics, or one’s growth as an artist perhaps, sort of slides in sideways.” 30

Ceri Richards’ art practice and teaching displayed his interest in the underlying mystery and dynamics of life. 31 Dawson said: “… he would have given some hint of the strangeness of life and objects … that life wasn’t just what you see on the surface.” 32 Richards loved music and poetry, and also respected the struggle involved in making art. 33

The prints made by Dawson in London have not been examined in the previous literature on Dawson’s art. It appears that the work at the NGA has been overlooked, while the works in the UCL art collection have remained unknown. These are serious shortcomings, as the exploration of space, as revealed in these works, was an important part of other works she made during her time in Europe and later in Australia.

There has, on the other hand, been frequent mention of the influence of contemporary British artists on Dawson’s works from this period. Art historian Margaret Plant stated “… her work was rather different from that of the American Abstract-Expressionist painters … and rather closer to European sources, more controlled and less apparently spontaneous – like Miro with his clarity of signs, and some of the English painters, like William Scott, Ceri Richards or Richard Smith.” 34 Curator Christine France said Dawson “… had long admired British artists such as William Scott and Victor Pasmore …” while critic John McDonald mentioned the influence of “… British artists such as William Scott and Terry Frost.” 35

There appears to be little evidence to support these views. Dawson told me she had not seen Ceri Richards’s works during her time in London and that she did not like William Scott’s works. 36 She stated she found much British art “… to be carefully artistic in a way that was irritating.” 37 Her

works in London suggest there was a strong sense of internal development while she was investigating the visual perception of space, rather than being primarily the product of exposure to the works of contemporary British artists.

There has also been frequent mention of Dawson’s account of her initial distress in London, of her inability to paint and subsequent move to printmaking at the Slade. 38

I couldn’t paint for two years and I found that the only way I could do anything at all was in print making … I felt quite hysterical, as I remember, for at least two years when confronted by canvas or brush or anything of the sort. 39

Dawson’s letters during 1957 and 1958 frequently mentioned her frustrating attempts at painting. She made many attempts to paint at her home, but none of these works has survived (Figure 5). Viewed in this light, the sense of deep space in the centre of Lithograph (Figure 1) could take on a negative aspect perhaps reflecting her frustrations and indicate a distressing sense of movement in and out of endless emptiness, as in the works of some other artists. 40

It could also invite a psychoanalytical interpretation, as in the theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein or Marion Milner, where the space could reflect a deep psychological emptiness, and her inability to paint be the product of the distress of being faced with an empty canvas. 41

These kinds of interpretations appear, however, to provide only a partial view of this work. When I recently showed Dawson an image of this work, she provided an alternative explanation, stating that its space was not psychological but optical. 42 She said that painting had been too heavy, and that printmaking had given her the space she needed to be able to move and to create:

… painting was not giving me space, and printmaking gave me space … painting became heavy and slow and too material, I wasn’t getting the air and the light into it … That’s where it opened up … Painting was too material … lithography gave me that optical space. 43

This view is supported by the sense of space and life evident in her London prints and by the way they appear to build on her earlier works of interiors in Melbourne. It suggests that a fuller understanding of Dawson’s lithographs is gained by utilising other theoretical approaches that focus on the optical perception of space, in addition to or instead of psychoanalytical approaches.

In my interviews (Appendix A) and in her letters (Appendix B), Dawson often mentioned the spaces in which she lived and worked. In London she was able to find contentment within quiet, sometimes subterranean, spaces: “Well, now I know what is meant by a sense of fulfilment – me and my basement – fulfilment, joy, peace and solitude – it’s really marvellous.” 44 She had experienced similar feelings during her student years in Melbourne at the old National Gallery School:

Every workroom had one of the huge great arched windows that went along the side of the big gallery. It was a wonderful place. It’s my idea of heaven, to go there and just be quiet and muck around and do a bit of drawing in this beautiful space. The space, well like great spaces, was very consoling, and very inspiring. 45

These statements have an obvious psychological import, as in the interpretations of dreams by Freud and Jung which often mention rooms and cellars. Freud viewed cellars as symbolic of female sexual organs, perhaps mainly reflecting the sexual anxieties of his male patients. 46 Jung saw them as symbols of the collective unconscious which may be more relevant to Dawson’s art, which appears to embody an unconscious aspect that may reflect ancient aspects of human feeling or perception. 47

The multiple evocative associations of space discussed by Bachelard may also be relevant. He described the nightmarish quality of darkness and

dampness in cellars, as well as the more comforting associations of huts providing shelter and warmth, as in ancient times. 48 Dawson’s positive experience of secluded spaces appears related to finding a sense of comfort whilst in a foreign place away from home and family, and also finding some peace and quiet away from the pressures of her public career as an artist.

Whatever the case, the lithographs she made in London reveal an interest in exploring the sensory experience of the human body within a space. This form of perception had been the subject of much attention by German intellectuals in the late 19th century. Robert Vischer’s notion of Einfühlung (feeling in or empathy), which has continued to be influential within architectural theories, had been based on this form of perception. Commenting on Karl Albert Scherner’s book Das Leben des Traums (The Life of the Dream), he stated:

Here it was shown how the body, in responding to certain stimuli in dreams, objectifies itself in spatial forms. Thus, it unconsciously projects its own bodily form – and with this also the soul – into the form of the object. From this I derived the notion that I call ‘empathy’ [Einfühlung]. 49

Heinrich Wölfflin’s writings on architecture were also based on this form of knowledge, obtained by the bodily experience of the world: “Physical forms possess a character only because we ourselves possess a body ... a body that teaches us the nature of gravity, contraction, strength and so on.” 50

Merleau-Ponty had also described how visual perception is based on the dynamic way human bodies interrelate with space: “… when my actual body comes to coincide with the virtual body that is demanded by the spectacle, and when the actual spectacle comes to coincide with the milieu that my body projects around itself.” 51

Dawson’s analytical and sensual understanding of architectural space is evident in her comments on the use of space in paintings by Jean-Siméon Chardin:

I look with intense pleasure at painters like Chardin where I find the sort of formal location and refinement of objects in space to take on both a very precise architectural quality, I should say a structural quality, and yet again convey a serenity, a spiritual quality, that’s very great. 52

This form of visual perception had been awakened in Dawson by a travelling exhibition of Gobelin tapestries which came to Sydney and Melbourne during 1956. The Gobelin tapestry workshop had been the centre of tapestry production in France since 1662 during the reign of Louis XIV. The exhibition included abstract works from leading School of Paris artists and was organised by Jean Lurçat, who had promoted the revival of tapestry production in France during the post-war period. 53

The large size of the tapestries in the exhibition extended beyond the visual field of the viewer and awakened in Dawson a non-visual form of perception, with the body relating directly to the work of art. The effect of the tapestries was enhanced by their being hung in the corridors and alcoves of the old gallery in Melbourne. 54 Art historian Mary Eagle noted a similar effect in Dawson’s later painting Wall II, based on the work Wall included in The Field exhibition of 1968: “Standing back to look at the work as a whole, I found that the image resisted being seen in its totality.” 55

In July 1957 on the way to London, Dawson had responded strongly to the bodily presence of Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta of 1564 in a round room at the Sforza Castle in Milan: “It was the most astonishing, tragic sort of thing … The actual physical power of it just incredible.” 56 The Lady and Unicorn tapestries of around 1500 in a similarly round room at

the Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris had elicited a similar response (Figures A5 & A6 in Appendix A).

This form of perception also relates to the ancient role of fabrics within human culture in clothing walls and enclosing spaces. Gottfried Semper viewed the tent as the archetypal form of architectural space and hanging fabrics as one of the earliest forms of art. 57 Dawson’s art appears to relate more closely to this feeling of the human body within a space and to the ancient origins of fabrics in housing and sheltering humans, than to more recent theories relating fabrics to abstract art, such as Yves-Alain Bois on the metaphor of weaving in relation to Mondrian’s art and Clement Greenberg on the texture of abstract paintings. 58 Whereas their approaches gave preference to the picture surface over depth, Dawson’s works plumb the depths within the pictorial space and the limits of visual perception. 59

Other prints Dawson made in London have a tactile sense of moving into a space, as in Merleau-Ponty: “… the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world.” 60 An early print Abstract (Figure 12) has a heavy Modernist style reminiscent of works by Georges Rouault, with warm textures and light radiating from a deep space. 61 Another early print Untitled (Figure 13) uses horizontal and vertical forms to frame the interior space, as in Rouault’s Le Christ et Mammon of 1936. 62 It also has hints of blue which suggest the sky and the outside world. It was likely made at a small private studio near to her home and resembles the conservatory where she was living (Figure 4). 63 Its pictorial structure is similar to that of a later lithograph she made at the Slade, Abstract in Black and Grey (Figure 14). That work has a sense of space and of light emerging through the centre of the work framed by heavy vertical and horizontal forms, as in works by Pierre Soulages such as Painting September 1, 1956. 64

The two versions of Snowfall (Figures 15 & A18) evoke the physical feeling of the earth and the snow. Landscape (Figure 16) has a sense of moving into the work between large three-dimensional shapes, perhaps rocks, towards the dark indistinct space in the upper central area of the work. It reflected her interest at that time in rocks and geological formations: “… I was quite preoccupied with the idea of earth formation, and rock stratic and such.” 65 It is also suggestive of her own struggle within her art practice, as if she was working against a barrier like Van Gogh’s iron wall: “What is drawing? … It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.” 66 The investigation of this sense of moving into the depth of space continued in her later works, as Jenny Bell noted: “… as if she were embarking on a geological expedition.” 67 Abstract: Black, Grey, Blue (Figure 17) which has the same first stage as Landscape, has a feeling of open space, less feeling of moving into depth, and an engaging freshness provided by the later stage marks.

In conclusion, a major shortcoming of previous discussions of Dawson’s time in London has been their failure to examine any of the works of art she made during that time. The lithographs she made in London evoke a living sense of space and appear to build on her earlier works of interiors in Melbourne. They explore the uncertainty of the visual perception of space and the threshold between visibility and invisibility.

Previous descriptions of Dawson’s time in London have often mentioned her self-described psychological distress. While such views appear to be insufficient as explanations of her art practice in London, it is not possible to discard them entirely. Dawson’s frustrations at being unable to paint may have contributed via unconscious processes to the energy and mystery evident in her lithographs. As Merleau-Ponty noted in relation to

psychoanalytical readings of Leonardo da Vinci’s art, these things cannot be proven but are also not things you necessarily want to dismiss. 68

Phenomenological and deconstructive theories provide productive approaches to Dawson’s works. Her lithographs feature subtle tones and marks and suggest that, whilst at the Slade, Dawson was consciously or unconsciously exploring the visual perception of forms in space, and a sense of the unknown. This exploration revealed a sensitivity to the way the human body relates to the space around it, and an openness to unconscious or unknown forces. Theories related to fabrics, architecture and empathy also provide useful insights into her perception of space. Her lithographs reveal the sense of being in some kind of space, often an interior space, which is full of life and energy, but which also evokes a sense of uncertainty.

Chapter 2: Anticoli Corrado, 1959-60

This chapter examines the drawings made by Dawson when she was living in Italy between late 1959 and early 1960. Her art evolved significantly during this period, with the exploration of space and visual perception continuing to be major themes. Most important, was the awakening of a corporeal understanding of the landscape which became an important feature of her visual language, which was also becoming increasingly abstract. Her own views on this development, which have been largely disregarded by previous commentators, provided important insights into her art practice.

Dawson finished her time at the Slade in 1959 winning first prize in lithography for the print discussed in the opening chapter (Figure 1). She also received a Boise travelling scholarship which enabled her to travel in Europe. After travelling through Germany, and visiting the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, she visited Bern as well as Venice and Florence, before settling in Anticoli Corrado near Rome. She stayed there for five months until the end of March 1960.

The landscape around Anticoli made a strong impression on Dawson. The village was perched on the crest of a ridge high above the flat land in the valley far below (Figure 18). In the hills along the ridge above the valley, there were rocky limestone outcrops (Figure 19). She stayed there through the winter, when misty clouds were surrounding the hilltops. She did do some paintings, watercolours and collages, but was not happy with the results and none have survived (one is shown in the lower background of Figure 20). She did not do any printmaking.

In Landscape (Figure 2), there is a strong sense of being in an outside space enveloped by the landscape and the weather. There is an active sense of space around the shapes and the finer lines are similar to the

active lines in the centre of Lithograph (Figure 1). As in that earlier work, the fine active lines are being used to probe the limits of the pictorial space or to draw more attention to those parts of the work that have a sense of energy and discovery, or an exploratory sense of the unknown aspects of the space where they are positioned or where they are leading.

Figure 2: Landscape, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing, 99.7 x 70.0 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-6956)

The lightly smudged shapes in Landscape (Figure 2) are suggestive of the landscape and clouds around Anticoli (Figure 19). The smaller round shapes suggest olive trees, perhaps also the apple trees she reported seeing in the Italian countryside on the way to Anticoli, which she described as containing the “… original golden apples of Eden.” 69 As in Cézanne’s paintings, the apples reflected her interest in the sensuality and fertility of ancient myths. 70 Her affection for the people in Italy and respect for their history was evident in her letters: “… a man with a loaded donkey and a woman with a bundle of sticks on her head and they were all crystalized in time against the stony old hills. Could have

been today or a thousand years ago.” 71 Her drawings from Anticoli are filled with her love for the people and the place, as she described:

This wonderful feeling of being at home, just superb. I think it’s just the temperament of the people that made the village, that was so embedded in the people that lived there, that had been for so many years, beautiful … Somehow, it gave it this condensed sort of quality, this was the village, you were in the village, the village life, and beautiful cobbles everywhere, humble villages, so beautifully made, oh dear it was a beautiful time. 72

Her drawings appear to be related to the close association between love and painting since ancient times, as in the story recounted by Pliny of the young woman who traced the shadow on the wall of her beloved who went to war. 73 Jacqueline Lichtenstein had similarly described how love and desire have been seen as the true origins of painting: “Love needs Painting because desire lives by images alone, just as Painting needs Love because desire always nourishes its images.” 74 A similar story in Chinese art history recounted the tale of a young woman held captive who had traced the image of a bamboo on a translucent screen. 75

In Landscape (Figure 2) there is the suggestion of a pathway leading diagonally through the shapes towards the top left corner, which is the most distant point in the work. The pathway was perhaps related to the main street in Anticoli (Figure 18). A pathway is a common landscape painting convention, as in Early Snow of around 1828 by Caspar David Friedrich and Adolph Menzel’s Path Lined by Bare Hedges of 1842-43. 76 In Chinese and Japanese landscapes, a pathway often leads the viewer up through the work towards some distant point, as in the painting A Single Road through Cold Mountain of around 1780 by Yosa Busan. 77 In such works, the pathway usually starts front right and leads upwards through the landscape. 78 This method of leading the viewer into the work had also been recommended by Dawson’s teacher in Melbourne, Alan Sumner: “You need to have an entrance, probably lower right, move up

then.” 79 As in her London works, the pathway led towards an indistinct vanishing point.

There is an elevated viewing position and a slight sense of vertigo as the viewer feels drawn toward the forms. An elevated viewing point was a feature of Chinese landscape paintings with deep scenes. 80 Also, as in Chinese landscapes, there is the suggestion of multiple viewpoints which convey a diminished sense of human beings within the landscape. As in Chinese art, nature is at the centre rather than the human subjectivity of European landscapes supported by linear single point perspective. 81 The deep tones within the marks and shapes may have reflected her experiences in etching at the Slade and Central Schools in London. As in Still-Life (Figure 22) and Landscape (Figure 23), the fine lines draw the viewer into the spaces between the objects and landscape forms, which while abbreviated and suggestive are more clearly defined than those in Lithograph (Figure 1).

Most importantly, during her time at Anticoli, Dawson discovered a corporeal sensitivity to the landscape. Her body was in the outside environment and she felt a natural part of that world:

Well, to me it was all the same thing, the landscape was a great body, and the body was a landscape … that was the feeling that Anticoli gave me, the physical experience of living there was so marvellous, that somehow your body was a landscape and the landscape was part of you in a way that I hadn’t felt before, or hadn’t perceived. 82

This resembles Paul Cézanne’s feeling that the “… landscape thinks itself in me.” 83 It also reflects Robert Vischer’s corporeal and imaginative perception of the natural world:

I wrap myself within its contours as in a garment ... I might imagine myself moving along the line of a range of hills … fleeting clouds might carry me far away … the forms appear to move, but only we move in the imagination. We move in and with the forms. We caress their spatial

discontinuities. We scale this fir tree and reach up within it; we plunge into that abyss, and so forth. 84

This all-encompassing sense of the landscape is reflected in the sense of perspective within Dawson’s works from Italy. No longer is the viewer drawn into a confined space, as in her London prints. Instead, the feeling is of being surrounded by nature with multiple viewpoints, as in the art of Adolph Menzel. 85 There is a moving focus with planes shifting in different directions as in Chinese landscape art, and the sense of discovery over time as one traces a path through the artwork as in a piece of music. 86

This form of perception related closely to her earlier experiences of the large tapestries in Melbourne and in Paris, and to the large paintings of the American Abstract Expressionist artists she had viewed at the end of her time in London. 87 On viewing Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles of 1952 at the Whitechapel Gallery, Dawson described the feeling as if “… you could walk right through it”. 88 Similarly, Mark Rothko had said he wanted to feel as if inside the painting: “I want to be very intimate and human … However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something that you command.” 89

In her interview in 1965 with Hazel de Berg, Dawson emphasised her corporeal perception of the forms in the Italian landscape and their dynamic and unified sense of scale:

One feels that one is dissolved into the landscape, there’s something about the scale of rocks … the scale of rocks, the scale of trees and of hill formations somehow one feels hold a tremendous similarity or a unified sense of scale related to the human figure, so that somehow one feels very much within it and also externalized in it. A very sensuous landscape … areas of flesh stretched across muscle or relaxed, tightened up, loose flesh, delicate little veins, bony areas are things that I feel with tremendous ecstasy … 90

She reiterated these ideas in her 1996 interview with Gary Catalano, but other writers have largely disregarded this view. 91 Deborah Clark favoured a traditional art history approach and mentioned the likely influence of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism:

… the Italian landscapes are abstracted lyrical responses to the physical experience of being there … not so much descriptive as sensual renderings of places, hills, trees and folds of valleys. The influence of European surrealism can be seen … the warmth and openness of American abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. 92

The “sensual renderings” simply become a part of her artistic repertoire and the process of making these drawings is viewed as unproblematic. Dawson is presented as a skilled artist making attractive drawings of the Italian landscape. Likewise, Christine France stated “… she produced a number of fine drawings, which suggest both the scale and sensuality of the area.” 93 This aestheticizes the process, rather than addressing the issue of corporeal perception outlined by Dawson.

In fact, her drawings continued her exploration of the uncertainty of visual perception evident in her London lithographs, as in Derrida: “… drawing always signals towards this inaccessibility, toward the threshold where only the surroundings of the trait appear”. 94 The forms are abbreviated and suggestive, as in the manner of initial visual perceptions before shapes fully come into view and become subject to clear meanings. As Merleau-Ponty outlined, haziness and ambiguity are normal but often unrecognised aspects of human visual perception: “… the nature of the perceived is to tolerate ambiguity, a certain ‘shifting’ or ‘haziness’ [bougé], and to allow itself to be shaped by the context.” 95

The dynamic forms, as in Italian landscape drawing (Figure 21), are suggestive of bodies, perhaps clouds, moving in space. The way clouds move across the sky, and the way their suggestive shapes evolve, also relates to the uncertainty and creativity of vision, as in Andrea Mantegna’s

Triumph of the Virtues of 1502 in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where faces emerge from the clouds. Merleau-Ponty described this process as follows:

… this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an ambiguous world of which we catch a glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly) but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in which every object displays the human face it acquires in a human gaze. 96

This phenomenon is known as pareidolia, whereby human subjectivity creates familiar forms, such as faces, from indistinct shapes such as rocks or clouds, or when forms emerge from the threshold between visibility and invisibility. It has a long history in human culture, as in Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra, with people relating stories and associating meanings with the evolving shapes of the clouds in the heavens above them. 97 Clouds have also been seen to embody divine forces, as in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, who objected to scientific approaches that would, as Joseph Leo Koerner outlined: “… empty nature of any ‘higher’ meaning and … violate the essential obscurity of clouds. “ 98

Pareidolia had a significant place in Western art history, as in Piero di Cosimo’s fascination with the shapes generated by sputum and when Leonardo da Vinci found stains on the wall and varicoloured stones to be inspiring forms. 99 It also became a controversial point of discussion regarding 18th century English landscape art due to the controversial book by Alexander Cozens which advocated the use of accidental inkblots to suggest natural landscape forms. 100 As noted earlier, the Japanese landscape Haboku Sansui (Figure 10), had been generated by working from the random shapes initially generated by flinging ink onto paper. Similarly, in Chinese art, a high value was placed on suggestive natural forms in rocks and stones. 101 Dawson’s interest in pareidolia was evident

in her later paintings and drawings of clouds, as in Cloud head (figure of woman, tree and unidentified subject) of 1989-91, now in the NGA. 102

Dawson told me that if she saw shapes that seemed like breasts or buttocks, as in Italian landscape 1 (Figure 24), she would put them down but not make them too obvious, she would soften them. 103 In her drawings the human body is manifested through the whole of nature, as in Chinese art, rather than as a distinct recognisable physical object. 104 The focus is on the internal feeling generated by being in the landscape, as in ancient Taoist beliefs, rather than its external appearance. 105 It may also relate to the depiction of the human body in indoor and outdoor spaces in the art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods which she had been viewing during this period. 106

Dawson’s interest in the underlying structures of hills and rocks was enhanced by the unusual limestone rock formations in the hills around Anticoli (Figure 19). Her drawings convey a dynamic and indeterminate sense of the landscape. This was not a tactile or multi-sensory experience, as in Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin. 107 Dawson said:

… it wasn’t a human thing, wasn’t even a touch thing, it was just the fact that your body was there and all around you was this living air and landscape, and you were in it in a way that was real and proper somehow, correct, you had the correct relationship, you almost felt that people for thousands of years not comprehending had felt like that, a non-verbal, non-emotional thereness. 108

It related to the full intertwining of the self and body with the world and landscape in a process where the self or body was the perceiver at the same time as being perceived. It appears closely related to the following thesis of Merleau-Ponty:

… the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body … this bursting forth of the mass of the

body toward the things, which makes a vibration of my skin become the sleek and the rough, makes me follow with my eyes the movements and contours of the things themselves, this magical relation, this pact between them and me according to which I lend them my body in order that they inscribe upon it and give me their resemblance, this fold, this central cavity of the visible which is my vision ... (emphasis in the original) 109

It also appears closely related to Chinese philosophies that reflect the intertwining of all aspects of life. For instance, mountains were seen to have an intimate connection with other natural elements, with inner and outer aspects closely related to the inner and outer aspects of human life and perception. 110 Chinese culture placed a high value on collecting rocks that featured unusual combinations of interior and exterior surfaces, which enabled quiet contemplation of the interior and exterior aspects of human lives, and of the natural world.

The ambiguous sense of the interior and exterior surfaces of rocks in Dawson’s drawings also appears to relate to Merleau-Ponty’s observations on the ambiguity of perception regarding interior and exterior surfaces: “… where the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things.” 111 The indeterminate boundaries of the rocks and other forms in her drawings is similar to their understanding in Chinese art which focused on textures and surfaces rather than lines, angles, planes and volumes. 112

Her work conveys the sensual corporeal experience of the world around her, as in the instinctual way that babies (and later on adults) get to know the world through the skin. 113 As noted in the previous chapter, the sense of movement in her works is often upwards and inwards towards the deep space in the central or upper part of the work, bringing together near/far and high/low, as when a young child reaches for the moon as if it were a plate. 114

The way Dawson was inserting her own self, and her body, into these works reflected her longstanding interest in the human figure. As mentioned earlier, she had in July 1957 been deeply impressed by Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta in Milan, and she would also have viewed his Pieta of 1498-99 in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome when she was living in Anticoli. She had been shocked by (and attracted to) the physicality of Pierre Bonnard’s Siesta of 1900 in the National Gallery of Victoria (Figure A7). 115 She had also been impressed by the works with bodily forms by Francis Bacon and David Hockney at the Tate Gallery in London. 116

There may be a psychological aspect to this strong interest, for instance reinstating the maternal breast, as in the theories of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. More likely, it was about inserting sensual feelings (triggered by seeing breasts and buttocks in natural forms) into the work. The intermingling of the coloured shapes in the gouache drawing Italian landscape drawing (Figure 26) has a sensual dynamism, which is also evident in Italian landscape drawing (Figure 27). This also relates to the uncertainty and creativity of vision, when human subjectivity generates imaginative meanings from initial impressions of emerging shapes.

The female breast is shown to be a potent creative and beneficial force, as noted by Dawson in relation to her famous later painting The Origin of the Milky Way (Figure A39), based on Jacopo Tintoretto’s painting from around 1575 at the National Gallery in London (Figure A40). 117 That work was centred on the female breast which symbolized fertility, creativity, peace and prosperity, as in Peter Paul Rubens’ Peace and War of 1629-30 also in the National Gallery in London and Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Peace Bringing Back Abundance of 1780 in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. 118

In Dawson’s Italian drawings there is a positive view of energy and sensuality, and of the peace and well-being of peasant life, as in Rubens’ The Kermis of 1635, also in the Louvre. 119 In the period following World War II, the value of peace and of human virtue in times of war were immediate concerns in Europe, as Dawson had noted and as in the reflections of Simone Weil on Homer’s The Iliad. 120 Dawson had been reading the Greek classics while in London, as well as books on the Roman Empire during her time in Italy. 121

Her interest in the lives of the people living on the land reflected an awareness of a sense of time that was archaic and feminine. 122 This was a time that respected the power, abundance and integrity of nature, as in ancient beliefs of the feminine power of the earth and its fertility and creativity. 123 Female strength and creative force appear to be the focus not, as in the French Revolution, the breast being used as a symbol of the proper place of women at home raising children. 124 Instead, its use by Dawson appears to be aligned with works by Georgia O’Keefe and other women artists which present “… woman as a fruitful being”. 125

Open forms, such as the flower/vegetation cross shapes in Italian landscape drawing (Figure 21), are also suggestive of fertility and growth, as in the shape like a new shoot that emerges from the horizontal form in the lower right corner. The pointed cloud like shape emerges from the darker cloud and moves towards the right (its direction suggested by its pointed shape). There is a sense of metamorphosis as the open form in the upper left corner emerges, like a new plant or flower springing up out of the cloud like shape.

Her drawings showed an increasingly dynamic and spatial conception, with the space around forms becoming an important part of the works. The landscape is alive and constantly changing and there is ambiguity about the shapes as they appear to morph into each other, as in the

holistic conception of Chinese art which viewed rock, water and botanical growth as closely linked elements within a comprehensive, coherent and subtle view of the natural world. 126 Goethe had adopted a similar view when he viewed clouds and mountains as being closely linked, the source of rain and thus life giving. 127

In Italian landscape 2 (Figure 25), there is uncertainty about the scale and position of the forms, which perhaps refer to clouds, rocks and/or trees. This perhaps reflects the observations of Merleau-Ponty about how visual perception of apparent size differs when the perceiving body is situated in the landscape compared to viewing the same image in a photograph or film, and accounts for why “… the train that approaches us in a film gets larger much more than it would in reality …” and why “… a hill that seemed quite elevated becomes insignificant in a photograph.“ 128

The abbreviated shapes in the Anticoli drawings, which related to the natural world and human body parts, came to form the basis of a pictorial language which Dawson continued to use in her later works:

… in Italy I found that I discovered a great many elements in the landscape which I’m continually using now. It’s formed the basis for a great many shapes, marks, blobs, squiggles that I keep putting down as being a particular language of my own. As I say, these have now developed from being landscape emblems, which they were originally, into emblems both denoting figure and landscape – or really elements of visual language. 129

The shapes may also have been influenced by the designs on the banners and floats that featured in the celebrations and processions in Anticoli and nearby Tivoli. 130 These included Christian motifs as well as other forms deriving from folk traditions, including trees, flowers, clouds, dragons and other creatures, as Dawson recalled. 131 For instance, Paolo Uccello’s dragon was a familiar theatrical device, and had been used by Andrea Mantegna. 132 Dawson’s later painting St George and the Dragon

(Figure A41) was based on Uccello’s painting of around 1470 with the same title at the National Gallery in London (Figure A42).

Another important development was the use of abstract forms bearing no direct relation to natural forms. For example, the cross in the bottom left of Italian landscape drawing (Figure 27) serves to activate that part of the drawing, rather than making reference to a feature of the landscape. Dawson continued to utilise this approach in later works such as her painting Cross to oval of 1960 (Figure A31).

In conclusion, Dawson’s drawings in Anticoli continued her previous exploration of the uncertainty of visual perception, including through the phenomenon of pareidolia. Most importantly, her spatial awareness was extended by an emerging corporeal sensitivity to the landscape, which has been largely disregarded by previous commentators. This awareness related closely to the natural world as in Chinese art and had a strong sensual aspect as well as being related to the creativity and fertility of women. There also emerged during this time an increasingly abstract and dynamic use of space and forms.

Chapter 3: Paris, 1960

This chapter examines the five lithographs that Dawson made in Paris after she moved there from Anticoli in April 1960. It reveals that in these prints she continued to develop themes relating to the perception of space evident in her works from London and Anticoli. Four of the lithographs employed colour and they evoked a strong sense of the natural world, particularly of the sky. There was an active sense of space around simple forms and increased use of painterly techniques, such as the scumbling of grey and roughly overlapping or adjacent colours. Theories related to the ambiguity of pictorial elements and of perception were found to be relevant.

Dawson moved to Paris in early April 1960, driving through the south of France and visiting Cézanne’s old studio at Aix-en-Provence along the way. 133 In mid April she started work at the Atelier Patris which had an established relationship with the Slade School. One of her teachers at the Slade, Stanley Jones, had spent an extended period there between 1956 and 1958, before returning to England and becoming an influential figure at the Curwen Studio. 134 Dawson remained there for several months, proofing prints for Corneille, Manessier, Sugai and other artists. In her spare time in the evenings and on weekends she made the set of five lithographs which she later submitted to the trustees of the National Gallery School in Melbourne in fulfilment of the requirements of her travelling scholarship.

Montant (Figure 3) was the first in the series of lithographs she made in Paris. It has two circular forms. The larger of them is surrounded by space and is centred in the upper half of the sheet. It comprises a dark blue circular centre, bounded by faint olive green, surrounded in turn by a larger orange band whose outer edges have suggestions of a faint

yellow colour. The concentric rings have a rough painterly quality and appear to vibrate in relation to each other.

Just below this shape, and slightly to the right, is a smaller circular ring. Also roughly painted, it is olive green and has a scumbled translucent texture. Light grey horizontal brush-like strokes partly cover this form. Below it and to the left, a more solid grey form extends down to the bottom edge of the sheet. It has a vertical perhaps phallic shape, reminiscent also perhaps of smoke or mist, or of a shadow, perhaps that of the viewer or of the two circular forms which float above it. The chalky colours and gentle luminosity of the circular shapes suggest the moon, perhaps as it is rising in the twilight of early evening.

Figure 3: Montant (Rising), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from multiple stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 90.4 x 63.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (89-1638)

The title Montant is a play on words, rising (Montant) and moon (Mond), suggestive of elevation and presence in the sky, as well as of luminosity.

The overall feeling is of space and freedom and an upwards movement of the two circular shapes. The forms are located within a largely empty but seemingly vibrant space. They appear to be surrounded by auras and influence the sense of space around them, as in the writings of Henri Focillon: “For form is surrounded by a certain aura: although it is our most strict definition of space, it also suggests to us the existence of other forms.” 135

The fine lines which had activated the edges and spaces of her works from London and Anticoli have been replaced by the roughly painted colours around edges of the shapes, which activate the forms in relation to other colours and forms, and in relation to the adjacent spaces. The dynamic and uncertain nature of visual perception of luminous forms is apparent, as when there is variation in their apparent colours at the edges, as in her painting of 2000, Moon at dawn through a telescope. 136

Montant and the other Paris lithographs continued the exploration of the visual perception of space evident in Dawson’s works from London and Anticoli. While visual perception was their overall theme, other aspects of space, colour and ambiguity played important, intersecting roles.

Spatial depth and the active role played by coloured forms in the perception of depth were important features of these lithographs. As Merleau-Ponty said “… voluminosity varies with the colour in question, and it is somehow the expression of its qualitative essence.” 137 Rothko said colour: “… intrinsically possesses the power of giving the sensation of recession and advancement. 138 Dawson outlined how depth had interacted with the coloured forms in Montant:

With the depth, what really thrilled me is that what I wanted to achieve really worked. The lower green circle comes right forward and the upper circle goes right back, with the greys softening and holding it. 139

There was an active sense of space around and within the forms, as in Chinese art: “If the empty places are right, the whole body is alive.” 140 The active sense of space was similar to that around the abstract forms in paintings by Adolph Gottlieb, such as Burst of 1957, which Dawson had viewed in the New American Painting exhibition at the end of her time in London. 141 Dawson said she had used Gottlieb’s works and he was also mentioned by Virginia Spate in her catalogue essay. 142

This sense of living space had been a continuing theme in her works from London and Anticoli. Dawson’s description of the significance of the active space in her work from London, Lithograph (Figure 1), applied equally to her Paris lithographs:

There is some space in there that is agitated or produced by the marks which is not decorative space but is somehow a space that the marks make alive ... (and) somehow exist on different levels because you’ve created a living space around them … there is a living connection between them and a living space there. 143

Commentary on these works has not generally focused on their space or depth. The initial reviews of the Paris lithographs when they were exhibited in Melbourne mainly focused on the apparent obscurity of their shapes and marks. 144 An exception was the review by Alan McCulloch in The Herald, which briefly mentioned spatial relationships: “These works suggest a fine sense of balance and an intuitive eye for well-placed accents and spatial relationships.” 145 In her catalogue essay, Christine France mentioned the “… sense of space and placement in the manipulation of a soft, breathing surface …” but did not examine the interaction of shapes within the depth of the pictorial space. As in her description of Dawson’s drawings from Anticoli she adopted an aesthetic approach and described their “… quiet, sensual juxtaposition of colour and shape …” and mentioned the influence of William Scott. 146

Other commentary adopted a traditional art history approach and described the Paris lithographs as having been influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism:

This lithograph (Montant) is characteristic of the non-figurative, abstract style in which the artist worked during the early 1960s and reflects her interest in the concept (and use) of pure colour as proposed in the work of artists such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. 147

… beautiful, spare compositions such as Rêve du soleil and Vers l’ombre, in which like Miro and Gorky … Dawson detached biomorphic forms … and set them floating in space, thus welding surrealism to abstraction. 148

The forms in these lithographs appear to have been derived from those she developed in Anticoli. There are open forms suggestive of vegetation, closed forms as in Montant which are suggestive of the sun, moon or other bodies in the sky, and horizontal grounding forms. As well as making reference to aspects of the landscape and sky, these forms were sometimes employed in an abstract manner without making explicit reference to phenomena in the natural world. The forms became simpler and the edges and the spaces around them became more important. The spaces comprised dynamic fields and processes of energy, as in Chinese art: “… embodying the constantly and coherently changing configurations of phenomena as they mutate along the outwards and inwards movements between potentiality and actuality.” 149

The curved open forms in Vers l’ombre (Figure 28), open towards the edges of the print, interact with one another, and appear based on similar shapes in the Anticoli drawings, such as Italian landscape 1 (Figure 24). The title (Towards the shadow) may refer to the limitations of vision and comprehension, perhaps also to seeing patterns in the shadows as in the pareidolia discussed in the previous chapter.

Grand bruit (Figure 29) employs a subtle range of monochrome tones and textures, as in Chinese art. The open and closed shapes relate to each

other within the open spaces of the work. Dawson said the shapes reminded her of an ear, continuing the corporeal reading of forms via pareidolia as in her Anticoli drawings, and that it seemed a noisy work, perhaps reflecting a form of synaesthesia: “This was a bit like an ear, so I called it Big Noise, there is the sense of a body in there somehow, they’re organic shapes, and the sense of a loud noise, sort of optically noisy, but also the sense of an ear.” 150

The most striking difference between the Paris lithographs and the prints and drawings examined in the previous two chapters is their use of strong colours. Dawson’s use of colour in these lithographs had a painterly quality that enabled the colours to vibrate against one another. Art historian Bernard Smith noted that this painterly quality was a consistent feature of her later abstract paintings. 151 The colours employed may also have been related to the landscape she had seen in Italy:

Trees golden in farmyards … they glitter all over the countryside. Bare branches in orchards a red haze. Oh, the colour. Magical country. Olive trees, a silver grey. They look as though they were lit up from inside. Everything floating and shimmering in this incredible light. 152

The intensity of the colours in these prints appears also to be related to the colours in Corneille’s prints from that period, such as Enchantement de l’été of 1962 (Figure A30). She was producing long series of prints for Corneille at Atelier Patris and she stated she had unconsciously absorbed elements from the works she had been printing: “Because I was working with it I became familiar with it and I could see whether it worked technically, not consciously, but it all just sank in.” 153

Corneille was an influential Dutch painter and graphic artist who was very popular in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s. He had earlier been a founding member of the influential CoBrA art movement, along with other artists including Karel Appel. 154 He employed strong colours and

abstract forms in his poetic works of everyday subjects. During the late 1950s and early 1960s he produced a series of works that focused on the seasons and the natural world: 1960 was the year of his “… intoxication with summer …”, the following year he was in “… a boundless Garden of Eden.” 155

Rêve du soleil (Figure 30) perhaps has a similar focus as it evokes a dynamic feeling of the warmth of the sun, the movement of a summer breeze, and the rough texture of the warm earth. The curve of the spiral evokes the feeling of warmth, as in Bachelard: “… it is a poetic fact that a dreamer can write of a curve that it is warm.” 156 As in Focillard, the curve creates the space in which it is inscribed, conferring on it “… a new and original existence.” 157

There is also ambiguity, as the curve which is suggestive of the warm texture of earth also inscribes a dynamic spiral suggestive of the air and of the night sky, and of the Milky Way as it disperses life giving energy throughout the heavens, as in Bachelard: “And these abysses where life is consumed can in a moment be illuminated, liberated, and changed into Milky Ways.” 158 There was a similarly warm orange curve in her later work Cross to oval (Figure A31).

The deep blue centre of the upper form in Montant draws in the viewer and has a strong presence independent of the other elements in the work, as in the skies of paintings by Giovanni Bellini. 159 In Bellini’s Feast of the Gods of 1514, the deep blue of the sky interacted dynamically with the neighbouring colours, as Oskar Bätschmann described: “Never before had Bellini painted such a melody of colours in a unified rhythm.” 160 Likewise, Merleau-Ponty outlined the importance of the colour blue in achieving the dynamism and intensity of Cézanne’s paintings: “… Cézanne does not give up making the warm colours vibrate but achieves this chromatic sensation through the use of blue.” 161

There is a similar dynamism of interacting colours in Montant, when the blue centre vibrates in relation to the surrounding orange, which in turn vibrates against its rough yellow edges. The association of these warm colours with light and the earth also gives rise to ambiguous feelings in relation to rising and falling. As William Empson outlined in Seven Types of Ambiguity, which Dawson had been reading during this period, the sun and moon may fall while the dust of the earth may float up into the air like clouds. 162

Julia Kristeva had speculated that the intense attraction of the colour blue may have had its origins in early childhood when, as in the light of early dawn, it is the first colour to become visible to the baby. 163 In Montant it evokes the feeling of being drawn towards the sky, and towards the heavenly realms, evoking the feeling of recession, as in Goethe’s Theory of Colour: “As the upper sky and the mountains appear blue, so a blue surface appears to retire from us.” 164

It evokes an ambiguous feeling of either ascending or falling into a deep space – into the limitless sky or a deep pond, as in the feelings of attraction and vertigo in relation to the deep blue stillness of the ponds in Poussin’s paintings, such as Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice of 1650-53 in the Musée du Louvre. The still surface of the pond is like that of a mirror and also relates to the myth of Narcissus, which had been seen by Alberti as the origin of painting: “What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” 165

It also relates to the unknown and unknowable depth of the eye’s pupil – of the unseen, still centre at the heart of the constant movement and uncertainty of visual perception and, as mentioned by Mary Jacobus earlier, of the invisibility of seeing ourselves seeing. The deep blue in the centre of the upper shape in Montant is also like a seed. The kernel is blue and creativity is at the heart of this work, as in Bachelard: “In times

of great discoveries, a poetic image can be the seed of a world, the seed of a universe imagined out of a poet’s reverie.” 166

In L’oiseau de nuit (Figure 31), the lower shape with blue marks in the centre and the suggestions of green around its edges is like a pool towards which the viewer is drawn, as in a later work described by Deborah Edwards: “... the eddies of water around lichen-covered rocks.” 167 The predominant feeling in L’oiseau de nuit is of weight, as in Bachelard. 168 He wrote: “… something somber and heavy will cluster around images of night birds.” 169 The feeling of weight may also have been related (unconsciously) to the weight of the large lithographic stones and manual printing press she was using in Paris. The little sketchy hook shape in the open space at the top adds a contrasting feeling of lightness and freedom. The contrast between these aspects adds tension and life, as well as a sense of uncertainty or ambiguity.

While the colour blue has ambiguous aspects regarding levity and weight (due to its associations with air and water) its predominant force is of the movement into the depth of space, as in Bachelard: “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.” 170 Artists such as Turner had conveyed the feeling of plunging into ambiguous land and seascapes, which evoked a disorienting feeling due to the disruption of familiar bearings: “… precisely because of the loss of coordinates, the viewer faces a vertiginous loss of position or location.” 171

The mixture of upwards and downward directions also featured in Bachelard’s poetic investigation of verticality: “It allows us to understand that something within us rises up when some action penetrates deeper – and that, conversely, something penetrates deeper when something else rises.” 172

In the Christian art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, which Dawson had been viewing during her time in Europe, blue embodied a number of important themes. The blue of the sky was associated with heaven and eternity, and with the source of life-giving rain, and thus growth and renewed life symbolised by spiritual cleansing via baptism.

Upward movement and vertical forms suggested growth and new life, as in Dawson’s teacher Alan Sumner’s advice regarding the use of vertical and horizontal forms: “… vertical things are growing, going upwards, horizontal things are generally stable, you use your verticals and horizontals to get activity and to hold things.” 173

In Renaissance altar pieces, heaven is pictured in the blue sky, the timeless holy space, the location of the sacra conversazione (holy conversation) where divinities such as the Madonna and the saints and angels interact. In her letters Dawson had mentioned the blue circle in the centre of the 6th century Byzantine mosaic in the apse of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare near Ravenna: “… a magical thing of blues and greens with white sheep and a cross in a superb blue circle.” 174 A similar effect is created in her later work, Stencil no. 1 of 1963 (Figure A34), where deep blue areas are enclosed by the surrounding black areas, like blue stained glass within dark lead surrounds. 175

The green and yellow rings/edges next to the orange orb are like the retinal after-images after looking at a bright shape, as in Goethe’s writings on the bodily production of complementary colours. 176 Vischer had also mentioned this process whereby the after image is created by the body itself not, as in the pareidolia discussed in the previous chapter, by human subjectivity. 177

The shadowy, perhaps phallic form at bottom of Montant appears to intrude from a space outside the pictorial space. A similar shadowy form

intrudes from the bottom edge of her later painting Cross to Oval (Figure A31). While it has a formal pictorial role in stabilising and grounding the work, it may also relate to shadowy forms beyond consciousness, like ‘the shadow’ in Jung or ‘the uncanny’ in Freud: “ (the) ’obscure’ area of the soul, where inner negativity is born”. 178

The painterly light grey strokes across the lower green ring in Montant appear to have been inspired in part by works of Kumi Sugai, such as Violet of 1959 (Figure A24). Dawson had enjoyed working with Sugai at the Atelier Patris. 179 He was a renowned Japanese painter and printer who had a successful career in Europe and the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. His abstract works were influenced by traditional calligraphy and often featured a simple form in the centre of the work which faced the viewer.

In contrast to Dawson’s earlier works, Montant and the other Paris prints face the viewer, rather than inviting the viewer into their pictorial space. This frontality was a new feature in her art and became an important aspect of her art practice after she returned to Australia. Dawson attributed this development to the influence of Sugai’s works:

The frontal address to the viewer is something I learned from Sugai because those earlier interior things in London I’m not actually addressing the viewer. But the prints I did for Sugai, when you pinned them up, the print addressed you. And I really liked that and I saw that it worked. And particularly a small or medium sized work on paper, that’s what you need, because you don’t want to go scratching around seeing what the thing’s all about. Since then, I’ve always had that feeling, the work is a living thing, it and the viewer address each other. 180

The scumbled grey strokes in Montant have an ambiguous presence. They suggest clouds or smoke, as well as the ground, due to their horizontal alignment and rough texture. They may also suggest a partial erasure of the lower circular shape, and perhaps a link to the lower solid grey shape. As in the case of the lower grey form, they provide a sense of

grounding and act to stabilise the upwards movement of the two circles. They achieve this by their association with the earth and its rough texture. Their horizontality acts against the overall vertical movement in the work.

The reading of the grey strokes as clouds supports the feeling of levity. Clouds are also associated with water and dynamism and metamorphosis – they do not stay still and do not maintain a fixed form. The following quote from Bachelard that joins different tactile, visual and psychological sensations of shadows and halos – their darkness and light, and obscurity and clarity, could be a description of Montant:

We brush away the shadows from our forehead, we brush away from our forehead what obscures our gaze; we brush away cares like ashes, then like smoke, then like far-away haze. This is how the halo seems to be a gradual and quiet physical conquest of the mind that little by little becomes aware of its clarity. 181

The scumbled grey combines the sensations of the earth (warmth, solidity, being grounded) and of cloud (cool air, dampness, softness, fluidity and levity). As in her Anticoli drawings, the dynamism and the intersection of contrasting sensations or associations provided a sense of freshness: “… like a sunny day, when the cloud comes through.” 182 This was also a feature of paintings by Stanley Spencer, who Dawson had met when she travelled to see an exhibition of his works prior to starting at the Slade. 183

In Montant much of the force comes from such contrasting or ambiguous elements. In Chinese art, clouds had a multitude of possible meanings as well as grey being a key feature of the works themselves in terms of tone, gesture and depth. 184 The various connotations of grey, which included shadows, clouds, fog, water, night, early morning and smoke, provided dynamic multi-faceted possible meanings, as in Bachelard: “… the presence of smoke: this is the point of departure for a metaphysics of the imagination.” 185

The ambiguity of the grey strokes relates to a range of associations, including light and dust, levity and gravity, and erasure. The resultant ambiguity could also prompt consideration of deeper aspects of life and death, as in Empson:

… on the one hand, it is the bright motes dancing in the sunbeams, which fall and become dust which is dirty and infectious; on the other, the lightness, gaiety, and activity of humanity, which shall come to dust in the grave. 186

The interaction between the grey strokes and the circular forms invites other associations related to the moon – as when clouds interact with the moon in the night sky, which became a frequent motif in Dawson’s later works. The presence of the moon in the opening scene of Goethe’s Faust had made a strong impression on Dawson when she was a student in Melbourne in the mid 1950s. 187 It remained with her when she was living in London and viewing the night sky through her conservatory roof:

… in bed, bathing in moonlight, with the studio like a silver bubble – just watching the moon … She’s walking on the roof again. I must go to bed and talk to her. 188

Ambiguity relates not only to multiple possible meanings, interpretations or associations. It also involves a sense of uncertainty about which of these might be relevant in a particular context, how they might possibly combine and so on. It relates to the earlier discussion of visual uncertainty and the position of the viewer in relation to the work, and the meanings they might bring to their interpretation of the work. As in Renaissance art works commissioned for private viewing, ambiguity can play a key role in providing condensed layers of meanings. 189 Ambiguity had also long been a key part of theatricality and ritual related to the mysteries of the Christian faith, in Medieval as well as Renaissance art. 190

The apparent ambiguity and multiple associations in Montant reflect the many possible aspects of ambiguity as outlined by Empson, including

multiple meanings, obscurity, imprecision and various kinds of uncertainties about comprehension. Ultimately, visual art is well suited to handling ambiguity as it enables the compression of multiple possible images, associations or meanings within a single pictorial space. As Empson noted: ”… ambiguity is a phenomenon of compression.” 191

In Dawson’s art ambiguity and uncertainty were related to visual perception itself, “… the trickiness of all seeing …” as Margaret Plant described it. 192 Her art was not reflecting on the uncertainties of modern life. 193 It did not question established meanings or social structures but did examine the ambiguous nature of visual perception and human understanding. As in the discussion of ambiguity in relation to modern art in Umberto Eco’s The Open Work, its focus was on “… the very heart of our existential situation.” 194 Merleau-Ponty also described this fundamental situation: “… I only know myself in my inherence in the world and in time; I only know myself in ambiguity.” 195

While ambiguity in visual art provides the opportunity for multi-layered associations and richness, it may run the risk of being obscure for viewers not familiar with the language or devices being employed. This appears to have occurred with Dawson’s Paris lithographs when they were first exhibited in Melbourne in 1961, which seemed incomprehensible to the critics who searched for recognisable symbols with established meanings among the forms. 196 Margaret Plant did, however, later (in 1980) discuss the ambiguities of visual perception in relation to Dawson’s works from this period. 197 Other commentary by Deborah Clark and Deborah Edwards discussed the ambiguous sense of space evident in Dawson’s later paintings. 198

To conclude this final chapter. Dawson’s Paris lithographs investigated aspects of visual perception, building on the themes and motifs evident in her works from London and Anticoli. There was more colour and an

active sense of space around simple forms, due in part to the scumbling of grey and roughly overlapping or adjacent colours. There was an emphasis on the natural world, including atmospheric themes related to the sun, air, moon and clouds. The ambiguity of perceptions and possible meanings were important features of these works.

Conclusion

This thesis has examined Janet Dawson’s lithographs and drawings from the period between 1957 and 1960 when she lived in Europe. There has previously been little discussion of the art she made during this period.

Some previously unknown works by Dawson in the art collection of the UCL Art Museum provided valuable new material regarding her artistic development whilst at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and at Anticoli Corrado in Italy. Interviews with the artist in early 2020, along with access to letters and photographs from her period living in Europe, provided other insights. There are three main conclusions:

Firstly, the lithographs Dawson made in London between 1957 and 1959 (which have not been examined in previous research) revealed that previous accounts by art historians about her time at the Slade School which have been couched in terms of psychological distress were inadequate. Whilst at the Slade, Dawson was exploring space, and a sense of the unknown. Phenomenological and deconstructive theories regarding the visual perception of space and the threshold between visibility and invisibility provided valuable insights, as did theories related to fabrics, architecture and empathy.

Secondly, the drawings Dawson made in Italy in late 1959 and early 1960 explored the perception of space in the landscape. Dawson’s own views on the corporeal perception of the landscape (largely disregarded by previous writers) were found to be crucial aspects of the visual language she developed during this time and also provided insights into the lithographs she made in Paris.

Thirdly, Dawson’s Paris lithographs which have generally been viewed in relation to contemporary European and American abstract and surrealist

art trends, were found to be primarily investigating the uncertain nature and ambiguity of visual perceptions and associated meanings.

Taking account of these issues contradicts previous readings of Dawson’s art, which have been largely based on Modernist and formalistic art theories. That analysis has resulted in Dawson being viewed as an artist who, having been exposed to new American and European abstract art during her time overseas in the late 1950s, was able to introduce this new style of art to Australia when she returned in 1960. It has tended to reduce her art to a generic abstract type, indistinguishable in many respects from the abstract art of other artists active in that period.

This thesis suggests that a fuller picture of her artistic practice is gained by examining the process of development evident in the lithographs and drawings she made in Europe between 1957 and 1960 – when she was exploring the visual and corporeal perception of forms and spaces, moving from interior spaces in London, to landscapes in Italy and abstract spaces in Paris.

The body in space was found to be a unifying theme throughout these works. It provided a link between the deep spaces evident in her early still lives, the indeterminate spaces of her London lithographs, her corporeal readings of the Italian landscape and the colourful bodies interacting in the abstract spaces of her Paris prints. It also provided a link to her later works, as in the fertile, creative body at the centre of The Origin of the Milky Way (Figure A39).

Plates

Figure 4: 69 Eton Avenue, London, 2019

Figure 5: 69 Eton Avenue, London, c.1957

Figure 6: Interior, May 1959

Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, printed in black ink from single stone on cream wove lithographic paper, 77.6 x 53.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94.1114)

Figure 7: Abstract Interior, mid-1950s

Drawing in blue crayon and pencil, 79.6 x 58.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, (363-5)

Figure 8: Still Life, mid-1950s

National Gallery School, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 31.0 x 32.0 cm, The artist

Figure 9: Art School Interior, 1956

National Gallery School, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 76.0 x 60.0 cm, Private collection

Figure 10: Sesshū Tōyō, Haboku Sansui (detail), 1495

Ink on paper, 148.6 x 32.7 cm (full scroll), Tokyo National Museum

Figure 11: Philip Guston, Painting no. 9, 1952

New York, oil on canvas, 122.5 x 153.0 cm, Private collection

Figure 12: Abstract, 1957-58

Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph in red, black and grey, 37.1 x 47.7 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7424)

Figure 13: Untitled, undated

Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 47.7 x 44.1 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7841)

Figure 14: Abstract in Black and Grey, 1957-58

Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 43.7 x 56.5 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7740)

Figure 15: Snowfall, 1959

Slade School of Fine Art, London, colour lithograph, printed from multiple stones, on paper, 53.6 x 76.6 cm (sheet), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (807-5)

Figure 16: Landscape, February 1959

Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 46.2 x 58.0 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8955)

Figure 17: Abstract: Black, Grey, Blue, February 1959

Slade School of Fine Art, London, colour lithograph, 42.9 x 52.7 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8804)

Figure 18: Anticoli Corrado, 1960

Figure 19: Anticoli Corrado, 1960

Figure 20: Anticoli Corrado, 1960

Figure 21: Italian landscape drawing, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing on thick ivory wove paper, 77.0 x 90.0 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (108.2001)

Figure 22: Still-Life, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing, 46.6 x 63.9 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8922)

Figure 23: Landscape, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing, 46.6 x 64.0 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8924)

Figure 24: Italian landscape 1, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing on paper, 99.6 x 70.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (92.1411)

Figure 25: Italian landscape 2, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing on paper, 97.4 x 68.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (92.1412)

Figure 26: Italian landscape drawing, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, gouache drawing in brush on paper, 99.0 x 70.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94.1254)

Figure 27: Italian landscape drawing, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing on thick ivory wove paper, 99.0 x 77.0 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (107.2001)

Figure 28: Vers l’ombre (Towards the shadow), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from three stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 76.0 x 56.1 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (72.602)

Figure 29: Grand bruit (Big noise), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in black ink, from one stone, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 90.5 x 63.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (72.601)

Figure 30: Rêve du soleil (Sun dream), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from three stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 63.4 x 91.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (76.1381)

Figure 31: L’oiseau de nuit (Night bird), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from multiple stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 75.8 x 56.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (66.56)

Appendix A : Interviews

During February and March 2020, I interviewed Janet Dawson twice at her home near Ocean Grove and once at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The interviews focused on her printmaking and related activities, and covered the following locations and time periods:

1. Melbourne (up to 1957) and the trip to London (1957)

2. London (1957-59) and Anticoli Corrado (1959-60)

3. Paris (1960) and Melbourne (1960-64)

The following transcripts have been read and checked for accuracy by Janet Dawson. I have attached images of the art works mentioned (Figures A1-A42).

Interview 1

11 am, Saturday February 1st, 2020

First of all, let’s talk about Melbourne before you went overseas. You won the National Gallery School Travelling Scholarship in 1957. Was there a work that won you the scholarship?

Oh yes, that was a big one. I think, traditionally, what happened about scholarship work: there was a major painting with four or more figures, including heads, hands and feet, and there were other works included as well. I think, a still life and a portrait. There were about four or five things that one had to do. So, I rattled fairly easily through the small ones. The big one, of course, was very ponderous. It’s a very ponderous work. I don’t know where it is now.

It was a group of people on the steps of the then National Library and National Gallery School, all in the one beautiful great building at the top of Melbourne. The steps to go into the library had in those days many people sitting all over them, just resting, or sad people with nowhere much to go, or lonely people or people who had been out of work, fairly hard times socially in that period. We

students used to go out and sketch them slyly, little sketch sideways, you know, make a note of the figure. So, my scholarship work was an arrangement of a group of rather downcast looking people resting on the steps of the front portico with parts of the vertical columns behind them. This was an easy way to do figures because one could go back and check for accuracy at a very convenient place for all the legs and hands and feet so that they looked right. My painting was a very doleful looking thing, very much due to Henry Moore, his big, soft, moody, bodily shapes. Henry Moore was quite big on the list of proper artists in those days for people like us. Sort of modern but also involved with the human figure, and sculptural. Because the scholarship endeavour was such a serious one, the work all tended to be very serious and very proper.

Yes, there’s a lithograph of it there (Figure A1), based on sketches for the painting, I think. Well, actually the lithograph is much more interesting than the final painting which had to eliminate a lot of those interesting bits. I can’t remember where I did that.

Figure A1: Figure group, 1956 National Gallery School, Melbourne, lithograph, printed in black ink from single stone on cream wove lithographic paper, 30.4 x 40.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94.1112)

I don’t know where the painting is now.

I would say it would be at the National Gallery of Victoria, right in the depths. I hope it stays there. It’s a pretty doleful work. I was competing with my friend John Howley for the scholarship – his work was much livelier, but mine was considered more serious. I think I had a very good record at that stage of steady

work. I think the trustees were more interested in a student who seemed to be going long haul.

You see, I was very well taught by Alan Sumner, he was a great teacher. I’ve been enormously lucky in my teachers, because however much people think that people like Septimus Power and William Dargie were not all that marvellous, they were wonderful teachers, and they were also tremendous painters. I look at that Dargie portrait of the Queen and I think it’s a magnificent painting, it’s so alive and fresh. I’ve seen portraits, other paintings of his which are very deep, very powerful, expressions of the human face, and beautifully painted, flesh and all the rest of it. They were great technical teachers, they taught you all the things that I still think of every day of my life when I’m working. Something emerges and I have a bit of trouble and I think oh yes I remember that, that angle goes like that because there’s the bone there and there’s the flesh there, and the flesh goes across the bone like that, that was one of Alan Sumner’s teachings about the forearm. Things like that never leave you.

There was Septimus Power, a funny old man, always had an unlit hand-rolled cigarette on his lower lip, which jiggled up and down as he talked. He was very kindly, and also a very good technician, and just taught basic things. I went through from the age of 11 and a half in his Saturday morning class. My mother took me to the first session which was on the corner of Elizabeth and Little Collins Streets. There was a little building there, we went up in a rattle-bag, iron-frame lift up to the third floor. It was a building of offices. There was a beautiful room that took the morning sun, obviously very carefully chosen, had lovely creamy white walls, and took about 10 or 15 students and easels, plus a dais for the model, and a chair – there was always somebody sitting, either for a head model or a body model, and the beginners were around the edges. I remember we had the Roman Emperors there, the one with the bald head and the pointy chin – I remember I did many drawings of him. I started with charcoal and I went through Septimus Power to a little bit of still life, a little bit of portraiture, it was all very much a beginning, but I got my box of paints, the paintbox with all the compartments to put the paint and everything in it.

What kind of paint would that have been?

Oh, oil paint, always oil paint, and charcoal. The two basic things, pastels sort of later. I did mostly work in charcoal for the first year or so. I went on Saturday mornings – I was still at school. I was allowed, after a while, I could go on my own, I would get the train, walk down from Flinders Street Station, up in the lift, and there was the class, and go back again.

And so, because my parents knew that I was gifted and knew that I had to be trained properly, and my mother – very gifted, beautiful drawings of hers that I’ve still got – she wanted me to have, not the sort of training that she didn’t have, it was nothing to do with resentment or feeling of misplacement, but all to do with recognising talent and knowing that it had to be fed, and taught. Both my parents, I was very lucky with my parents, they were very positive people. I stayed at Saturday art classes all through my school days.

The little still life you have here, is that from then?

Oh no, that’s the first still life I did at the National Gallery School. Alright, I’ll leap from there – I left school and started at the Gallery School. When I started full-time at the Gallery School, that’s when my life started. The little work that you mention was my first still life at the Gallery School and it’s a painting that I cherish (Figure A2). The big work rooms had workstations, platforms, and a great arched window that brought light all through this beautiful quiet room. You know, my idea of heaven is the still life room at the National Gallery School.

There were oddments, as in all art schools, you know Van Gogh’s art school paintings, bits and pieces everywhere, pieces of velvet, bits of casts and jugs and ginger pots, you know the Chinese ginger pots, bits of plaster casts that were broken. That first still life of mine, with a bit of broken cast of a head and a ginger pot, was the first still life I worked on and completed. You know it would take some weeks to pursue and finish one still life. It would take a lot of thought and, of course, there was the life of the studio going on all around. There were people coming in, people nattering and chatting, and people going out. The teacher would come around two or three times a day and have a look.

Figure A2: Still life, mid-1950s National Gallery School, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 31.0 x 32.0 cm, The artist

There is a real warmth and vitality in that work, that is due to the colouring.

That is true. I have a funny feeling that it was because of Septimus Power. He used colour quite rashly sometimes. He loved colour and his paintings of gladioli or portraits are colourful almost to the point of harshness. There’s a racy quality about his work that I rather love.

(Looking at the painting)

Yes, well that funny thing at the back is actually an oil board with something on it, something like a landscape of trees or something that I have put sideways to just give me that angle there to bring it down into there. I didn’t even know that I could compose well, at all. It was sort of premonitory in a way. I still have it, as you know, and I can still look at it. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done, but it was really unpremeditated, in that I wasn’t striving for anything much – I was just trying to get it right. And that was of course a piece of velvet.

There was also an abstract painting from that time ...

Yes, I remember that work and I’m actually quite proud of it, because it’s one of those strange works that just… it’s a sort of a premonitory work for what was to come, because I think I had been studying the more modern painters and artists. This work was of the big old life-class room at the National Gallery School which was actually the length of one of the huge old galleries. The school was a

broken-up set of partitions, which actually had been an original huge old gallery. And so, the great gallery structure was all around the school and the school was a set of partitions underneath that. Like a biscuit box.

It’s now the State Library.

Yes, I’m so sad. I went there with Jenny Bell to see if there was anything of the school left. A very kindly person took us around, but there’s only little bits. A lot of it is now storerooms and things. But the great windows … Every workroom had one of the huge great arched windows that went along the side of the big gallery. It was a wonderful place. It’s my idea of heaven, to go there and just be quiet and muck around and do a bit of drawing in this beautiful space. The space, well like great spaces, was very consoling, and very inspiring.

Anyway, the huge life classroom had the dais for the model and then there were all the easels around it. But the end wall had a number of big paintings by Hugh Ramsay, some of the greats – they were beautiful nude figures. The one that is in this little sketch is based on a Hugh Ramsay work of a figure with a back, with an arm up. And then, in the corner of the room, is a little hand basin which we were all able to wash our hands and our brushes with, and other bits of studio stuff (Figure A3).

Figure A3: Art School Interior, 1956 National Gallery School, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 76.0 x 60.0 cm, Private collection

And this particular little abstract painting I did, was a very simplified, very flat, drawn really, almost of a painting, in a flat style of just an indication of the big painting on the wall with the figure and a bit of another painting, the little basin and something above it and some other stuff at the front. And it actually came so quickly and easily, and it actually did hold together. The tone and colour were very sympathetic, sort of greys and warm ochres, and it just came out very easily, very graphically, really. Sort of almost like drawing on the canvas. And I was quite surprised by it and it was one of those paintings where you say - well that’s alright. People liked it, and I think somebody bought it.

When you say it came out alright, the colours and tones, was there also a formal structure you were looking at?

Yes, I think I was making some sort of record – with a feeling of just locating the various things on the canvas, like the basin and the arm of the nude figure up there, and something vertical here. I always had a stream of still lives, or other works, they more or less tagged along behind the more exploratory and awkward, and probably sillier works. These quiet works, you can tell that there’s less emotional effort in those, they just come together, and you paint them just as they are. And this is what I’m always looking for, something that just comes through you and out, and on to the canvas with that ease that you just – “there it is”. And these days I’m canny enough not to pursue hard-worked work and think that it’s good, just because I’ve done a lot of hard work to it.

Is there something about interior spaces and still lives, that comes out naturally?

Canvas boards are usually rectangular or square, and elements of the room are usually rectangular or square, cupboards, tops of chairs, tabletops, they all give substance and weight, a nice strong structure to a painting. So, they’re quite easy to do, you don’t have to worry too much about design, because the design finds itself. It’s much harder to do something that hasn’t got those keys to it.

I’m going to leap a bit now – one of the wonderful bits of advice that Alan Sumner … he was tremendously good at giving little bits of advice that stuck in your head, and you just bring them up when you need them. One of the things

he said was, that with a painting you must give the viewer something. You are not just painting a painting for yourself, you’ve got to allow people to move into the painting visually and imaginatively, and you’ve got to help them move around the painting, and in and out, and you want them to go on a certain voyage through the painting, in the way that you want, not in an unexpected or silly way. You need to have an entrance, probably lower right, move up then, a movement, to pick up something – maybe a blob of light or a little turn of a corner, somewhere sort of lower mid-left, and then you come over to another accent with another little accent of some sort that leads the eye from that to that, and then up to the right again, and then down perhaps to the middle, and then you can maybe let the eye out more or less centre right.

So, it’s the structural elements within an interior that allow you to do that. That sounds a bit like Renaissance or Baroque art.

Figure A4: Giambattista Tiepolo, The Banquet of Cleopatra, 1743-44 Venice, oil on canvas, 250.3 x 357.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (103-4)

Of course. Those old guys knew what they were doing, they knew all that. I’ve been looking at Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra (Figure A4). You actually see all those little devices, because they’re so wonderfully, flagrantly obvious. You can trace, I’ve done little drawings of where the eye is led to. It’s a beautiful adventure. For something as complex as that, you see one little curl of a dog’s back, and another little curl of a piece of satin, and the curls go bmp, bmp, bmp – up towards the middle. You do that and you can just enjoy the adventure of wandering through these accents. Then you take another thing and look at the

way the colours call and answer each other. But everything in that Banquet of Cleopatra comes to that great pearl, and there’s the arch behind that settles the pearl. The devices are so obvious and blatant it’s almost cheeky, but they’re such a joyous adventure. And I was taught all these things by these very patient, kindly men. These teachers were serious people and they taught all these pictorial basics that I think probably aren’t taught these days.

So, you won the scholarship.

First, my father said if I was going to be an artist I first of all needed to get some experience of the world and save up some money. So, I worked in the city at a legal firm for nearly a year and went to art school at night, where I was taught by Charles Bush, who was a very good teacher. People thought he was a bit of a rowdy, funny one, and rather a coarse sort of painter. Maybe, but I’ve seen some beautiful paintings of his. There’s a beautiful painting of his, a beach, in the Geelong Gallery. In fact, the Geelong Gallery has a painting by each of my teachers there, Septimus Power, William Dargie, Charles Bush, Alan Sumner, Murray Griffin and they’re beautiful paintings by each of these artists. I’d love to put them all together, it would be such a homage.

I also worked at the Fowlers Vacola jam factory for a couple of months before my scholarship year began at the National Gallery School. A significant event was a big exhibition of automated machinery for bottling and canning at the Exhibition Building. We were all taken there on buses, I remember, us factory workers were on either side of this enormous belt for Tom Pipers plumb pudding, and we all looked at this enormous belt in silence and somebody said “that’s all our jobs gone” and within a short space of time that’s what happened.

Anyway, I saved some money and then started the scholarship year. I won the scholarship and the following year I left on the voyage to England. The Roma sailed from Melbourne, it went up to Queensland and then to Singapore and then the Suez Canal. It was wonderful, and very funny. I was sort of the ship’s artist and I was making little programs and posters and little presentation objects.

You went with Marian. Who was Marian?

Marian Kirsner was the daughter of family friends who lived in the street around from our lovely old house in East Malvern. The next street was a rather posh street, Finch Street, a beautiful street full of trees, and the Kirsners lived there. They were a Jewish family, very elegant and cultured, quiet, delightful family. The mother, Bertha, was very fond of me and she was very learned, had a great mind, and was very well read. She was actually for two or three years a friend of mine. She was actually helping me to learn to think, because I’d go around there and she would “Oh Janet, coffee” and she would bring out coffee, and beautiful cakes and we’d sit in the sitting room. They had very elegant, quiet sort of, beautiful artworks of this and that, everything modest, everything discreet. The father was a doctor, a GP, and very silent, very strong, very quiet fellow. And, of course, they’d had bad times in their family life, and coming out. But she was a lovely woman, she educated me really with literature and books and things to read. She was actually bringing me into the European civilization. So, a lot of the stuff I am talking about, mainly originated with Bertha. I’d go there and she would talk about this, that and the other. She was really a mentor to me for some years.

What kinds of books?

Oh, just general good quality literature, things like Goethe – Faust.

It was his dramatic works, not his colour theories?

No, I loved Faust, I was mad about Faust. I can still spout great parts of the 1912 Everyman edition of it. I learnt by heart whole modules of it. I used to go around, staring at the moon:

Oh, broad bright moon, if this might be The last of the nights of agony, The countless midnights of toil and ache, I’ve passed at this dreary desk awake! Then, sad-eyed friend, thy wistful looks Found me imprison’d ‘mongst paper and books; But oh! Might I wander in thy dear light O’er the trackless slopes of some mountain height,

Round mountain caverns with spirits sail, Or float o’er the meads in thy hazes pale; And freed from the fumes of a fruitless lore, Bathe in thy dews and be whole once more! 199

Was it the drama of that that was appealing?

No, it was the richness of the imagery, and the whole incredible inventiveness of it. Because it’s a wonderful production. Somebody, oh Michael, gave me a new edition of Faust but also of The Odyssey – I was always reading these old editions of The Odyssey – Michael said “now you’ve got to read The Iliad”. I said “no, I won’t read it, it’s just blokes bashing each other, no I won’t”. He said “no, you’ve got to understand” and we had one of the great nights of our life … explaining it to me in the moonlight.

And how old was Marian?

Marian was younger than me, about two years younger than me. She was very gifted – she was an oboist, played the oboe marvellously well, and she was also doing book design at the tech, and we saw a lot of each other, we were friends. Again, Marian was one of the bossy, kindly, organising sort of people I always collect. I always have one of them in my life.

Was she studying at the Conservatory in Melbourne?

Yes, I think she was. And she was doing graphic design, and book design. After I won the scholarship, Bertha asked if I would be willing to have Marian as a travelling companion. They thought it would be good for her to go to Europe, and they had relatives there. We got on very well together, shared a cabin together, and set up the studio in Eton Avenue together, and she was in it when I left it, she stayed there and stayed in Europe, and had a very distinguished career in graphic design and also book design, she made some very inventive things. She was involved in the new Swedish and Danish areas of pure design, and also extremely well read.

We had the cabin to ourselves after about the first week, it was right down low, just above the waterline, it had a porthole, couldn’t see much. Lovely little ship, the Flotte Lauro Roma, beautiful ship, beautiful shape, quite a small liner. There were Italians going back to Italy, but its job really was to pick up migrants coming to Australia. On the way back it was a bit of a rest voyage for the ship, for the whole crew, because we went to a number of places that normally weren’t on the schedule. Massawa in Ethiopia – it was a most magical place, a big harbour with a closed entrance, it was twilight and these beautiful streets with children running around everywhere and people cooking outside and the most wonderful festive air, it was just glorious… spectacularly clean and beautiful houses. It had been an Italian fort, beautiful Italian-style houses, all painted in lovely stripes of blue, cream and gold, all round the harbour. We went to Bombay, Djibouti, the Suez, Cairo, Alexandria, then Malta – Malta was heavenly, children running around, then up to Naples and Genoa.

Figure A5: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà Rondanini, 1564 Stone, 195.0 cm, Sforza Castle, Milan

First, we went to Milan and then up to Switzerland to see a Paul Klee exhibition in Bern. Milan was where the marvellous stuff by Michelangelo was, it was just in a circular room. It was astonishing, I couldn’t believe it, the way he’d hacked off the arm, there’s this arm sticking up the back, and all down. The whole thing had been brought down into this incredibly tragically hunched little thing. There, that arm, there’s a huge spare arm. It was all much bigger, and he

brought it down, down, down, left that arm there. I think it was the last thing he did before he died. It was the most astonishing, tragic sort of thing. It had been much bigger, there was just the huge spare arm left. The actual physical power of it is just incredible. Vulnerable, the whole thing is like that, very tender, tenderness. There’s the mother, holding him up. I couldn’t believe it, sitting in this little round room. It was just there.

This is the Rondanini Pieta in Milan. How did you know about it to go there?

Well, we didn’t. Wonderful things there, we just went there to the gallery, and there it was. Absolute astonishment. And deep, deep. Once seen, never forgotten, takes resonance.

You knew about Paul Klee, to go to the exhibition?

Yes, Marian studied everything and plotted an itinerary for us. I wasn’t all that impressed with the Klee, after something like the Michelangelo it looked a bit dinky, but of course it wasn’t, and looking at some of the work now I realise how interesting it was. I think his work is more ephemeral, is more to do with air and light, whereas to me there’s always some body or substance that I am seeking. Some sort of thing – touchable, breathable thing and that’s the difference in it. So, it doesn’t draw me in particularly. Bern was a lovely town though. When I went back there later, I loved it. I had a lovely little room in a very proper little place. Seeing old René Vittoz again.

In your letters from Paris, you described the Japanese works René Vittoz took back with him to Bern, was that something you had a feeling for, the Japanese paintings or landscapes?

Not so much, I’d known about Japanese art. I didn’t have any much more feeling for the beautiful touch of the Japanese works until I worked for Sugaï, and of course that was revelatory, really, because there is sort of nothing there, but everything is there. It’s just extraordinary. Very gentle, quiet, funny little chap …

Your letters describe how you worked with him in Paris …

Oh yes, well I was just put straight on the press to print. It was the most beautiful press, because it had a spoked wheel, and you could pull it like a ship’s wheel, like this. I loved that motion, and it was such a magnificent press, straight through and out. These were presses made for hand work.

So, it was very much first-hand experience of his work.

Oh yes, and with the other artists too, Corneille ... Did I tell you, before going, about this exhibition of Gobelin tapestries? There’s this general notion that it was all amazing for me over there and I’d not seen anything like it, but it isn’t true. I’d actually seen quite a lot. There was this exhibition of Gobelin tapestries, huge pictorial tapestries, which were put into motion after the war, commissions to keep the Gobelin workshop going. There were around twenty of these great wall hangings in the beautiful great spacious rooms of the old art gallery in Melbourne. The sight of these enormous tapestries, bigger than The Banquet of Cleopatra, was absolutely magnificent. Some were quite intricate and others were more Surrealist, and not to my taste. But, right down the end through the long vista, looking through the great long galleries, was an alcove with an enormous blue tapestry with sky blue and four or five long, rather awkward black or deeper blue vertical marks, like a set of flat posts that went right from the top to the bottom, with bits sticking out here and bits sticking out there. To see this great work through this long, long vista, down the end, still shimmering with rich colour, was an astonishing experience. I had an early experience of the importance of doing big works (which the Americans did later, and in The Field exhibition) which give you the physical sensation of becoming part of the work, because when you stand in front of a work that goes beyond your visual field your body reacts differently and you feel embedded in the work or enclosed by it. I kept going there and looked at it and tried to understand this different experience. I found that I didn’t sort of consciously understand or analyse it at the time. I just knew there was something there that was quite important. The sensation of this great blue thing, it somehow had the sort of dignity of being there on its own, just there and that’s what I found so entrancing. Anyway, so I had that experience before I went.

Your letter back from Paris, your first visit there with Marian, you talked about visiting the Cluny Museum and the old tapestries there.

Figure A6: La dame à la licorne: A mon seul désir, 1484-1500 Tapestry, wool and silk, 377.0 x 473.0 cm, Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris (Cl.10836)

Oh yes, that’s another, yes, because you know, the tapestries are in a circular room, and they are all around you, and that sensation of being embedded, enveloped by, all around you, its own world, its own atmosphere, and then they had the big Narwhal tusk that people made out to be the unicorn’s horn. But that was a lovely experience, wonderful tapestries.

One particularly important thing was a very small gallery in Paris, the Galerie Louise Leiris, elegant sort of gallery, quite small, brilliantly white walls, I walked in and this small, rather narrow gallery had an end wall, a big, good hanging wall, and on it was a gigantic Léger painting, one of the acrobats, his wife and a child, and a hoop, and it was just the black and the gold and the red on the white, was so powerful, and had such an enormous sort of dignity. That was a very important sensation, I kept thinking, it kept coming up into my head for a long time, I can bring it up almost now. I’d admired Léger, but I’d never really thought much about him much, but this work …

Was it the size of the work that got you into it?

The bigness, yes, but also the relationship also with your self as a living thing standing there looking at that thing standing there, that connection that way, that physical connection. It seemed very flat, and the white seemed very

atmospheric. It was the fact of its thereness, it’s just there, and it’s independent of you and it’s living its own life, inevitableness, which is what I try for. I don’t often get it, but when I do, I’m really pleased. I think a really good work, you don’t think of the artist painting it. It just has its own nature. Its nature is itself and that’s it. And this is what I, I suppose most painters, strive for. You don’t often get it, when you do it’s remarkable. You feel a great sense of connection and some sort of sense of relief, you’re just there and it’s just there. It’s alright, it’s on its own and there it is, but it has some connection with you, and you’re there. And you can look at it and enjoy it, and it’s there. Inevitableness, I suppose, is what I like about a painting. And, if you don’t get it, you know you haven’t got it, and when you do get it, it might happen after one day’s painting, and oh there it is, and if you don’t get it, you can bash around. But there are others where it comes very quickly.

Do you find that when you look at other people’s works?

Figure A7: Pierre Bonnard, Siesta, 1900 Paris, oil on canvas, 109.0 x 132.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2053-4)

I was interested in the works by Bonnard and Manet in the NGV. With Bonnard’s Siesta I was shocked that anyone should paint that, the licentiousness, untidiness of it. I was a young girl, 15 to 18, I got quite physically agitated by it, I kept going back to it. It’s a wonderful painting.

Figure A8: Édouard Manet, The Melon, c.1880 Paris, oil on canvas, 32.6 x 44.1 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2026-3)

What I absorbed from The Melon was the thereness of something, it doesn’t have to explain itself, it doesn’t have to be of anything, it’s just there. I love that feeling. I picked out some works from the recent Archibald Prize, where I can feel the people sitting alive inside the work.

Benjamin Law by Keith Burt, Esme Timbery by Blak Douglas, Idris Murphy by Marc Etherington, that one’s by Vincent Namatjira, Art is our Weapon – Portrait of Tony Albert.

It’s beautiful isn’t it.

Figure A9: Vincent Namatjira, Art is our Weapon – Portrait of Tony Albert, 2019 Acrylic paint on army surplus camouflage material, 122.0 x 92.0 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Interview 2

3 pm, Saturday February 29th, 2020

Figure A10: Abstract, 1957-58 Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph in red, black and grey, 37.1 x 47.7 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7424)

This is the first of the works I got from the University College London Art Museum.

Good Lord, quite nice isn’t it, there are three colours, possibly four. That would have come from somewhere like Rouault, still life, heavy Modernist still-life, and the simplification.

And from the work of Ceri Richards?

No, he gave absolutely no indication of his own work at all. He just looked at your work, had a lovely chat, made a few little jokes, made little criticisms in a funny sort of delightful way. Wait a minute … he’d have talked about … in a charming chatty sort of way he would have given some hint of the strangeness of life and objects, just because he was like that, very witty, kindly, and very careful in his speech to students. He’d have indicated that life wasn’t just what you see on the surface, that there are all sorts of things happening underneath. And also, he talked quite a lot about music, because he loved music. And he worked to music, I think, and a lot of his works have musical titles. To my shame, I didn’t look up his work while he was teaching us, I didn’t sort of think about it, he was just Mr Richards, Ceri Richards who came and talked to us, and he was absolutely lovely, and we loved having him there. He would have

advised me about colour and placing … it’s not too bad, I’m pleased with that. Right, go on. Life is full of surprises, really.

Figure A11: Untitled, undated Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 47.7 x 44.1 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7841)

I think that was done on my own in a little lithography studio nearby or at night classes at the Central School. It looks like the glass ceiling in our room.

Figure A12: Abstract in Black and Grey, 1957-58 Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 43.7 x 56.5 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7740)

I think that’s probably done at the Slade, it’s more confident. I was looking at what other people were doing around me, but I don’t think anyone was doing anything like that.

You seem to be breaking out...

Well, I think someone like Ceri Richards would have said “Don’t worry about what you’re doing, use the technical side of it to get somewhere else”. He would have encouraged me to experiment, without worrying about making a nice picture, just experiment with the technique, to see what I could get out of it, so that’s where it opened up.

Figure A13: Lithograph, 1959 Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph (lithography 1st prize ’59), 71.1 x 50.5 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-7779)

Now, that’s interesting. I do remember that, I remember being pleased with that, it has variety of space in it and also variety of tone, and it does imply something beyond the marks. There is some space in there that is agitated or produced by the marks which is not decorative space but is somehow a space that the marks make alive. There’s a big difference between putting marks on a thing and implying that it’s a building, and marks that have a position on the page that somehow exist on different levels because you’ve created a living space around them, then you’ve got a good work. I can feel the changes of space there and the movements in the objects purely by the positioning and the marks that I’ve made that there is a living connection between them and a living space there.

Is that like a psychological space?

No, it’s optical, it tells your brain optically, there is some life in there that’s more than just the flat page, it’s imaginative, it’s optical, whatever it is, you have an implied space that I always try to get in my paintings. That is probably the essence of what I do, and it is the essence of what a really good art work is, if you’ve got the living tension of activity in there, that’s somehow arrived and you’ve got it, and there it is, so that will just stay alive, because it’s happened and that’s probably the first time I could recognise it and I was really thrilled to bits actually. I remember being very pleased with that. You see, this object here is actually floating and there is space around the objects. You feel that structure of the air around it and when you get that you’ve got a good work.

Figure A14: Interior, May 1959 Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, printed in black ink from single stone on cream wove lithographic paper, 77.6 x 53.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94.1114)

So, that’s another one, but that one’s not so good. It’s alright up here, you’ve got movement up here, but it’s not as good, it’s a bit heavy.

This abstract drawing is dated by the NGV as mid-1950s, suggesting it was made at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, but it has a similar shape to the two lithographs you made at the Slade School (Figures A13 & A14), which would suggest it was made around the same time as those lithographs.

I don’t know, but it’s beautiful. There’s a face in there, probably of a cast in a still life setting.

Figure A15: Abstract based on an interior, mid-1950s Drawing in blue crayon and black pencil, 79.6 x 58.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (363-5)

Now, that’s nice. Where is that?

It’s in the UCL collection. It says it’s an early state.

Figure A16: Abstract: Black, Grey, Blue, February 1959 Slade School of Fine Art, London, colour lithograph, 42.9 x 52.7 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8804)

I like that. You see, what I’ve done there is: I did that, and then I put a film over it, and these jump out this way, so again you’ve got that wonderful optical movement of space there, this is forward and that is back, and this is forward and this one is back, and this one is settled half way there, you’ve actually got three levels going and the page is just holding them. Oh, such a relief. I thought they were just blobby so not very interesting, just bits of shapes, but there is actually something there. There’s some mind going on there.

And it was recognised, by people like Ceri Richards?

Yes, he said I should get a group of them together. But I really wasn’t thinking about it, I had thought that I really started to work when I was in Paris. But, that’s a beauty.

Figure A17: Landscape, February 1959 Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 46.2 x 58.0 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8955)

That one’s a bit of a mish mash. It’s not marvellous, not very interesting.

Figure A18: Snowfall, March 1959 Slade School of Fine Art, London, lithograph, 53.3 x 71.8 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8953)

This one’s called ‘Snowfall’.

Now, we’re getting somewhere. I’ve got a grey, put a film, and put black over grey, that’s alright. That’s not too bad. If that grey, the first layer had been paler, it would have been a better print, that would have jumped forward, but I didn’t do that.

When you were living in London with the glass roof, and the snow falling on the roof, is that coming through in this, capturing that sensation in some way?

And rain, sun falling on the roof. I suppose so, I wouldn’t have connected it. I would have thought it was just snowing, my experience of the snow, and played around with the idea, that to me looks a bit of a landscape actually, I don’t know. Yes, it was wonderful lying in bed, hot water bottles down each side. Well, we got through the winters, just lying and watching, things happening on the roof …

This is the one in Australia that’s also called ‘Snowfall’.

Oh, I like that one. A bit of landscape, a chunk of earth. That type of shoe shape comes through quite often.

Figure A19: Snowfall, 1959 Slade School of Fine Art, London, colour lithograph, printed from multiple stones, on paper, 53.6 x 76.6 cm (sheet), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (807-5)

So, those are the works at the UCL from your time in London.

That’s astonishing, they’ve got so many. Brilliant. When did they arrive?

The night before last. I looked at them, there are ideas there around printmaking, the presence of the image, space. A letter you wrote in January 1958 says you were exploring form and space.

Space, yes, now I think that’s why I wasn’t interested in painting or couldn’t paint. The records show that I was actually painting in that studio, but I realise what it was, that painting was not giving me space, and printmaking gave me

space. That’s what it was. I’ve suddenly remembered, painting became heavy and slow and too material, I wasn’t getting the air and the light into it, that’s what it was. Now I know what it was, I couldn’t work it out. I thought it was because I couldn’t paint, and painting was so difficult and so on, and so I thought oh well printmaking. But I deliberately went to printmaking and that’s why I’ve got to make this correction. That’s where it opened up. Painting didn’t do it, because it’s so material, and that’s what’s so marvellous about painting, that it is so material, but at that stage I didn’t want that, I wanted this, and possibly it was something to do with coming to a new world and opening up, seas, all the things that had happened to me, openness, that’s what it was about. Now, I understand … frontalism, space. This is wonderful, it’s finally made sense to me. Painting was too material, and it was the flat surface … lithography gave me that optical space.

The UCL also have some drawings you did in Italy.

Figure A20: Landscape, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing, 99.7 x 70.0 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-6956)

Now, that’s nice, that was probably the first that opened up, and looked like something ...

It seems quite realistic, the sense of a path or a valley…

They’re also sort of, quite body parts … Well, to me it was all the same thing, the landscape was a great body, and the body was a landscape, and you relate

one thing to the other. That was what I did feel, especially in Anticoli after working at the Slade, that was the feeling that Anticoli gave me, the physical experience of living there was so marvellous, that somehow your body was a landscape and the landscape was part of you in a way that I hadn’t felt before, or hadn’t perceived.

You obviously loved living there…

Oh yes, they were such beautiful people, I didn’t have any romances or affairs or anything like that at all. It was just the community, it was so alive and full of fun, just going down to the trattoria, and talking to people, and coming back and working, and going out in the bush, and getting a bus into Rome, and coming back, and I just remember one time coming down the mountain and a couple of workers were coming up the mountain, and they say “Dove vai Jan? Ah Roma, bona, bon!”, and off they’d go. This wonderful feeling of being at home, just superb. I think it’s just the temperament of the people that made the village, that was so embedded in the people that lived there, that had been for so many years, beautiful … Down the steps, across the plain, the highway, left was to Rome, right to Subiaco, across the valley on the hill opposite was Robbiano, another village up there, villages like nuts on a cake, perched on the crests of the hills. Somehow, it gave it this condensed sort of quality, this was the village, you were in the village, the village life, and beautiful cobbles everywhere, humble villages, so beautifully made, oh dear it was a beautiful time.

Figure A21: Still Life, 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing, 46.6 x 63.9 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8922)

Now I’m getting a bit more interesting, yes that’s actually quite interesting.

Figure A22: Landscape (Anticoli), 1960 Anticoli Corrado, Italy, charcoal drawing, 46.6 x 64.0 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London (LDUCS-8924)

Oh Lord, that’s beautiful, that’s a very nice drawing, it’s got space in it, it’s got objects, it’s got the hills, beautiful. I didn’t know my work was so sophisticated, so early. Wonderful.

Interview 3

12 pm, Sunday March 1st, 2020

Let’s talk about Paris. Was there a sequence for the five well-known prints you made in Paris?

First was Montant, then Vers l’ombre, Grand bruit, Rêve du soleil and L’oiseau de nuit was the last. I think Montant and Rêve du soleil were the best, L’oiseau de nuit was complicated and not very successful.

So, there’s colour in these prints.

And clarity. I was working with other artists and mixing colours for them and proofing their works, I probably just learnt a lot fairly quickly. And also the fact that the stones were so big, they were so impressive and so beautiful, just an empty stone standing there, and I was looking at it. I would have had four stones lined up and you’d have been very careful about putting anything on it that wasn’t any good. I know with Montant, because it was so big, I could put different colours on the one stone, because they’re so separate. I probably used three stones, there’s different shades of green, dark blue, grey on another stone, probably on the same stone as the yellow ochre around the edge of the upper shape, red going over the green was probably the last.

Figure A23: Montant (Rising), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from multiple stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 90.4 x 63.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (89-1638)

There’s a lot of space around the shapes and a sense of depth.

Well, it just fascinated me that optically the space around the shapes worked. That was the beginning of it really. I had an intuitive sense of it earlier as a student, but it was here that I could see how to use it as a definite tool to work with. With the depth, what really thrilled me is that what I wanted to achieve really worked. The lower green circle comes right forward and the upper circle goes right back, with the greys softening and holding it. I had the circles working well, but they were floating. I added the greys and they stabilised it.

The grey could also be read as a shadow.

Yes, it’s meant to, like a sunny day, when the cloud comes through. The main thing was that it was a bit too open and I needed to soften it down.

The grey over the green circle reminds me of Kumi Sugai’s ‘Violet’.

Yes, probably I was aware of it (looking at ‘Violet’), it settles it down and holds it in place.

Figure A24: Kumi Sugai, Violet, 1959 Lithograph on paper, printed in colour inks, 66.04 x 50.48 cm, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (60.16.2)

Yes, it was all around me, it’s a technique, the ones I proofed I would hang up and examine them and learn from them, that scumbling tickles the eye, the washes are beautiful. I was very impressed with Sugai. The artists I worked with at Patris, Corneille and Sugai, were doing long series of works, they would finish

one and start another, so they filled my time there. Because I was working with it, I became familiar with it and I could see whether it worked technically, not consciously, but it all just sank in. The frontal address to the viewer is something I learned from Sugai because those earlier interior things in London I’m not actually addressing the viewer. But the prints I did for Sugai, when you pinned them up, the print addressed you. And I really liked that and I saw that it worked. And particularly a small or medium sized work on paper, that’s what you need, because you don’t want to go scratching around seeing what the thing’s all about. Since then, I’ve always had that feeling, the work is a living thing, it and the viewer address each other. When I got more sophisticated and learned more about abstraction, especially with colour field, that is important because the painting actually addresses you, and the fact that it is beyond your field of vision means that you get a physical relationship with it which is much stronger and affects your bodily stance as well, which is why it’s big. The size of colour field is a particular condition of the painting, the viewer and the painting have a different relationship, more physically. Painters doing large works know this, but a lot of the public don’t know this, they’re astounded when you tell them, they don’t feel their own body, their presence or self, reacting to the painting.

Is that a sort of tactile sensation?

Yes, people don’t register it that way, but it is.

That sounds similar to how you described being in the hills around Anticoli, feeling the rocks …

Yes, I wouldn’t have been as conscious of it to tell myself that, but walking around, I was certainly aware of my body being in the landscape, in a way that I don’t think I had felt before then.

Did it make you feel like you wanted to hug the rocks, or something like that?

No, it wasn’t a human thing, wasn’t even a touch thing, it was just the fact that your body was there and all around you was this living air and landscape, and

you were in it in a way that was real and proper somehow, correct, you had the correct relationship, you almost felt that people for thousands of years not comprehending had felt like that, a non-verbal, non-emotional thereness. And this is what I love to try and get in my painting, this thereness. You’re there, the landscape is around you, there! It’s a marvellous feeling when you get it, it’s like Anticoli.

After you came back from overseas, you were using flat strong colours and shapes. Was that deriving from the frontality of the works you did in Paris, and someone like Sugai?

No, I don’t think so, because Sugai’s work was calligraphic, always. And I wasn’t, I had by then enough knowledge to know that paintings don’t have to be calligraphic. The shapes don’t have to be calligraphic. They can refer to other things. A flat wobbly thing can be like the top of a tree, but it isn’t the top of a tree, but it can get something like the feeling of it.

Calligraphic implies the human hand…

The human hand, that makes the shape, the written shape that addresses you, that’s like reading a piece of writing in a way, or an emotional connection that has to do with meaning, a shape that addresses you emotionally but also your intellect. Whereas good abstraction, I think, is wordless. So, a really wonderful painting, if you stand in front of it, has that wonderful … like Anticoli.

So, this work by Sugai ‘Violet’, the big violet shapes are definitely the human hand, but the scumbled area coming across, is like it’s come from somewhere else…

The wind … or just pushing it back a bit. Well also, without that it could float in a way that could be a bit unsteady. A lot of these images, if you have just the image it doesn’t know where its space is, so it’s slightly uncertain, optically with you, and sometimes you use that and enjoy that, and other times you want to anchor it in some way, so you just give it a little bit of a softening here, and that just holds it to the paper. It’s not iconographic, you lose the severe iconographic image and you get a little bit of … your eyes touch it as if you’re touching it. You see, this one here, I love that one (looking at ‘Sundream’), I think

that really works. It has so much activity, but it’s all balanced, that’s pushing that way, that’s turning round, and that’s sort of standing there, but somehow the balance is right, so that they’re all acting near each other, but they’re all self- sufficient in themselves, and the scumbles are making an atmosphere in which they’re acting, and I was really very proud of that.

It seems to open towards the edge…

Yes, that’s right, but for some reason you find ... you can’t explain it to yourself … I could do exactly that and it wouldn’t work, I could do exactly that and it would work, it’s just the touch and the exact positioning and the fact that this actually softens that piece of space so that this white space is intensified, see that there (the oval shape on the right side of ‘Sundream’), the white is intensified against the dark, and this accents that, this holds that brilliance there because if it was just flat you wouldn’t get that sense of the brilliance of white there, but that holds it in so you then see that brilliance. That’s the sort of thing that real abstraction is about. You position it and make it live by various means.

Figure A25: Rêve du soleil (Sun dream), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from three stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 63.4 x 91.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (76.1381)

It’s almost as if the wind, the air is moving it…

Yes, that sort of motion, that’s going this way, this going this way and this one’s sort of holding it, almost like a dance ... that’s coming in, that’s performing and that one’s holding, and that’s just to show you that they’re all optically close together on the same plane, but the brilliance of white around that is evident

even in this thing (on an iPad screen), and in a print it is very clear, that the accent of that little bit of brilliance of white in there ...

It sends out the spiral …

Yes, it just lifts the tone of the spiral …

This shape, the dark upright oval, is similar to some of these marks in the bottom right of ‘Grand Bruit’ …

Oh yes, I use it a lot … the interesting thing about abstraction is you can’t be too clever, you’ve got to have a sense of the life of the line, it’s not necessarily dominating the line, the line has to somehow have its own entity, and it’s quite hard to do, you harden and soften. I can see that I’ve drawn in a light wash in a soft grey, gives it a little shimmy, a little dance, then the dark marks to push it. This was a bit like an ear, so I called it Big Noise, there is the sense of a body in there somehow, they’re organic shapes, and the sense of a loud noise, sort of optically noisy, but also the sense of an ear …

Figure A26: Grand bruit (Big noise), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in black ink, from one stone, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 90.5 x 63.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (72.601)

Is there a kind of synaesthesia there, where the ink and the paper are trying to capture the sensation of being hit by a noise?

No, you don’t think like that, you just … blank mind, do it, things occur to you as you do it. Afterwards, it seemed a noisy one, it looks sort of thumping, vigorous and confident, boom boom boom, the dark fist sort of thing …

You said you were very pleased with ‘Grand bruit’ …

It’s just got life, it seems to have stayed alive for what is it, 60 years or so, it still looks vigorous and interesting, and alive. Well, there are a couple of them, I like the Montant particularly because that is actually optically terrific, the push and pull of the orange and green shapes, that one definitely pulls out and the other definitely pushes back, it does work. We’ve done Sun dream already. And that one is a funny one, but it works.

This is the one called ‘Towards the shadow’…

Figure A27: Vers l’ombre (Towards the shadow), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from three stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 76.0 x 56.1 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (72.602)

I’d have done the dark shapes in one go, but then they looked a bit flat, very bare, so then I scumbled a bit there with a half tone, all on the same stone, a bit of sponge work there, and then put the grey on a second stone afterwards, to knock that back and give that lovely cool bluey haze over that, so that those two (the dark shapes) bunch forward, acting very firmly to each other. The overall movement is from left to right, not towards the bottom shape, which might be seen as shadow, that shape acts to stabilise the work, if you took that out it would be a bit uneasy, it would need a base, and that just holds it.

Often, in these prints, there’s a stabilising factor in the bottom part of the print …

Yes, well Alan Sumner told me, vertical things are growing, going upwards, horizontal things are generally stable, you use your verticals and horizontals to get activity and to hold things, those very simple maxims were very important to me, so easy to understand, and so easy to see in a work, and shapes have connotations, boxes, doorways, balls, eggs, oranges, whatever.

In this work, the dark shapes in this work are coming together from off the paper, the darker shape on the right is slower moving than the more active shape on the left, the blue shape is accenting the action below it in the centre of the work and the others are just holding. The shape in the top left corner is definitely further back. The blue shape and the grey shapes are optically on the same plane. The dark shapes are definitely frontal, right up front, on a similar plane, the right-hand shape perhaps more forward, with the bottom stabilising grey shape further back.

This one we haven’t done, ‘Night bird’ …

I find this a bit weird and decorative. I like it, but it looks a touch derivative, not of Sugai, maybe Miro possibly … I like the little shape, the little hook at the top, balancing, a bit quirky, it has its own life. I’ve tried to stabilise all of it by putting it in this band of tone, and there’s the closed shape and the open shape, you play with closed and open forms …

The closed form is the dark circle with orange and the open form is like a flower…

Yes, opening up, moving … that’s got an organic or growing quality. It’s alright, but I do feel it has a slightly derivative air to it, I like the orange around the circle that activates the grey … Just the top part by itself would make a better print, the bottom part all looks a bit made up …

Figure A28: L’oiseau de nuit (Night bird), 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, from multiple stones, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 75.8 x 56.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (66.56)

This work by Sugai..

Ah, that one I know very well, I’m almost certain we printed that together. I remember it, I remember it being pinned up on the back of the cupboard too.

Figure A29: Kumi Sugai, Blue, 1960 Atelier Patris, Paris, lithograph, printed in colour inks, on thick cream wove Arches BFK Rives paper, 65.5 x 44.7 cm, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (P00125)

Wonderful. Yes, I love it, I think it’s a beautiful work, three stones, blue over the grey and then the black, a gorgeous work, I can almost feel myself working on that. The three diagonal lines give it a base, pulls it out, gives it depth … They do grow on you, his images, they’ve got their own meanings and they address

you in a way that’s very attractive and engaging. But it is very interesting that I was actually doing things before I got to Paris. I had thought that Sugai set me off on a lot of this stuff. I’m so relieved, actually.

And this work by Corneille

Yes, that seems very familiar.

Figure A30: Corneille, Enchantement de l’été, 1962 Colour lithograph, 56.2 x 76.0 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (A 24188)

Okay, so let’s leave Paris and move back to Melbourne…

Figure A31: Cross to oval, 1960 East Malvern, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 102.0 x 76.0 cm, The author

That’s the one the old woman attacked with the umbrella. Some man pointed out to me that it looked like a breast with a nipple … it hadn’t occurred to me,

but whatever, so what … That to me is so far back, the small oval at the top, nothing to do with a nipple … the orange shape is forward, a shape like that I would have done ten times before I finally got one that really has the life in it. You don’t just do it and put it away.

It’s calligraphic in that it’s sort of line work, but you know when you’ve got the right line, and you don’t know why you’ve got it, you can’t verbalise it, you can’t even explain it, but if it’s not right you know it’s not right, so you just scrub it out, go and do something else, and come back and try again.

Is it also the way the mark is made, the yellow under the orange there?

Yes, you see I scuffed and scraped that, I didn’t just leave it alone, I scrubbed and scraped back the orange, it’s one mark but it’s got the little scrubbings and things to soften it. One thing you can’t do with non-objective painting…you can’t be too smart, it can’t look too smart, because people don’t relate to it, and also it doesn’t have a sense of life, it doesn’t have its own inner life, and you never know when you’re going to get it or why you get it, you just have to stumble along until you get it.

The top right-hand corner…

Yes, whoosh, in a way it expands slightly, it’s nice, as though it has sort of come out a bit, when it’s finishing.

Was there a particular colour you were interested in for the cross?

Yes, sort of violet. I’d have done a little pale one and done that, and then decided it needed something and I’d have scrubbed it a little with paint on my finger.

And the shadowy shape at the bottom, is similar to the one in ‘Montant’, just stabilising it?

Yes, you think of the elements as tools, they’re just pushing the air and the space around and presenting you with some sort of relationship between them.

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There’s a strong sense of space, particularly in the bottom part...

Yes, the cross is forward, the little shape in the bottom right is back and actually slightly under the orange curve, the shadowy shape at the bottom is in the middle holding it. That was the first one I got right in my new studio in East Malvern. My parents, wonderful, had been busy.

This one was the following year: ‘Circle and black bar’...

Yes, it was later, after my first exhibition.

Figure A32: Circle and black bar, 1961 East Malvern, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 195.0 x 167.0 cm, Private collection

The colours … the orange and green work against each other …

Yes, there’s a sort of aggressive glow to it, it takes an awful lot of scrubbing out that goes on in these, you don’t just put them on, all those shapes would have taken a lot …

The grey rectangular shape sings with sweetness …

Yes, well grey is wonderful … I’d have scrubbed around the dark shape quite a lot to get that, and there’s a shape behind that, I put the black on top.

This grey seems almost blue next to the orange…

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Yes, the way colours talk to each other is just so wonderful, they just sing away together, it just gives you a lift …

Do they also act spatially?

Oh yes, they come forward and go back …

It seems quite stable and balanced …

Well that was what I was trying to do, I was just trying to get shapes on a canvas that were alive and just had the right relationship with each other and to the canvas, it’s excruciatingly simple and excruciatingly hard … the green shape at the bottom provides stability and balance and is pushing up, it’s addressing the light orange shape above it.

Figure A33: Brown form with stripes, 1961 East Malvern, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 76.6 x 101.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (837-5)

This one is in the National Gallery of Victoria …

That’s right, they bought that at that first show, it would have been Eric Westbrook, he was very supportive, very kind. I was absolutely astonished, it’s a funny little fellow, it’s still alive … It would be quite dim without the white, the slightly awkward but interesting joint under the white shape on the left is the sort of thing I liked to do, it didn’t just go across there, but went up there too, gives a sense of different planes, the orange curve under the three dark stripes is just holding and pushing them up a bit. In the top right corner, you’ve got some quite subtle shapes and marks that are actually quite important. They push the

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action back and give the stripes a bit of a prod. If you didn’t have the horizontal blue-grey shape coming in from the right side of the canvas it would be much less stable. They also talk to the little bit of blue-grey near the corner of the orange shape in the bottom left corner, also the little bit of yellow in the top right and the bottom left corners.

Moving on to the stencil prints …

Figure A34: Stencil no. 1, 1963 Gallery A Print Workshop, South Yarra, Melbourne, stencil, printed in colour inks applied with airbrush, from multiple paper stencils, on cream wove Hayle Mill Linen 1958 paper, 57.4 x 76.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94-1125)

I do love the stencil prints, I think it’s because the edges are so beautiful, sharp and clean and vivid and alive. That’s a beauty, I love that one. From all the things we’ve looked at, that’s a sort of coming together of the elements, each one of those shapes is working properly and it’s very lively. And what is lovely is the clarity of the shape gives a sort of tingle, an optical sort of tingle around the edge of it, the white is going zzzzst all around it. I do love stencil prints. I must do some more …

There’s blue in the middle of the black shapes…

Well I never … it has a singing quality, singing away … The shapes are almost an accumulation of all that stuff we’ve been looking at, because I’m so confident by this stage. After that, sometime after that, I then went on to other things. But that’s a beauty, I’m so pleased to see that.

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Figure A35: Stencil no.1, 1963 Gallery A Print Workshop, South Yarra, Melbourne, stencil, printed in colour inks applied with airbrush, from multiple paper stencils, on cream wove Arches paper, 57.8 x 76.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94-1109)

This one’s also called ‘Stencil no.1’ …

That, to me, looks a bit more derivative, it doesn’t look as immediate and instant, you can tell I’ve thought about it, I don’t find that as successful, it’s nice and clever and all that, but I don’t think it’s as successful as the first one. It doesn’t have that joyous whheeet, there we are.

Figure A36: Stencil no.2, 1963 Gallery A Print Workshop, South Yarra, Melbourne, stencil, printed in colour inks applied with airbrush, from multiple paper stencils, on thick cream wove Arches paper, 57.2 x 76.3 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94-1117)

This one’s also called ‘Stencil no.2’ …

Oh I love that one, it’s addressing you, it’s all on one plane, it’s the shapes that contain shape, I think that’s good, I like that one. Everything is dancing around the grey rectangular shape.

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Figure A37: Stencil no.3, 1963 Gallery A Print Workshop, South Yarra, Melbourne, stencil, printed in colour inks applied with airbrush, from five paper stencils, on thick white wove Arches paper, 57.2 x 76.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (63-109)

This one’s also called ‘Stencil no.3’…

Oh yes, that’s probably towards the end, when you’ve done an awful lot, and you just do something as simple as that, and you think “oh yeah”, it’s just got that “there you are”, and this is beautiful, the black is back there, and this grey form is forward just like that, and they are relating to each other, and this is bouncing up the middle, and you’ve got this green penumbra around the little black circle at the back behind the other shapes, just holding and drawing you towards it. They don’t mean anything, but they’ve got a sense of living in them referring to something alive, it could be growth or petals or life or whatever. And the fact the blue curve is not pointing into the indented point on the side of the black shape is good, if it was going there it would start being a bit mechanical. Yes, that’s a really nice print.

This is ‘Stencil no.3’ …

It’s alright, a bit empty, very strange, I don’t remember doing those cream bars, they do hold it up a bit, and this little fellow ‘the yellow mark at top right’ is dancing away on his own, it’s alright, it comes alive as you’re looking at it.

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Figure A38: Stencil no. 3, 1963 Gallery A Print Workshop, South Yarra, Melbourne, stencil, printed in colour inks applied with airbrush, from multiple paper stencils, on cream wove Hayle Mill Linen 1958 paper, 57.4 x 79.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (94-1118)

Did what you were doing in the stencil prints contribute in any way to your well-known paintings?

I’m surprised that they’re earlier than the ‘Milky Way’ and ‘St George’, I think the stencil prints are actually more sophisticated than those paintings, isn’t that interesting. You see, what happened with the Origin of the Milky Way, was I had a little book from the National Gallery in London and in it was the Tintoretto Origin of the Milky Way, and I loved all those paintings, I loved the Renaissance, all those fellows, and I particularly liked the Origin of the Milky Way, it’s such an astonishing concept, way back, way back, the concept is of this humble human breast, the offshoot from a humble breast shot off into space and made the Milky Way … the peacocks, everything, was formed by the sprouting breast.

I kept looking at it and I used some of the movement in the Tintoretto, I think some of them can be related to it, but it was mainly just to get the idea of it, things bursting out of the centre, and developing their own life as they came out, the sky and all the rest of it, this the central section is vaguely related to the human body, she is white and the breast, and it’s just the idea of things exploding out of this tiny central ...

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Figure A39: The Origin of the Milky Way, 1964 Melbourne, oil on canvas, 165.2 x 196.6 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2011.1278)

Figure A40: The Origin of the Milky Way, c.1575 Jacopo Tintoretto, oil on canvas, 149.4 x 168.0 cm, National Gallery, London (NG1313)

And St George and the Dragon was based on the painting by Paolo Uccello, the spear is in the dragon’s eye, she is just a cut-out, just sitting there, and it’s the agony of the dragon that is so impressive in this work, he’s a bit of a toy boy, but the sense of the agony of the dragon is so strong in the painting, these dragons, the towns in the country had all these festival objects, dragons and other mythical things that they paraded with, and costumes and made huge constructions. I used the general structure in the Uccello, the diagonals and the centre.

I spent a fair amount of time in the earlier days at the beautiful new gallery at Toorak Road, I had this little book, and whenever there wasn’t much to do, I would get it out and look at these paintings and think about them. Max had rented the big old gallery next door, which was all dusty but empty, and I was

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allowed to paint there, so I set up and I had the freedom of this huge old space, and nobody else around me, and set up and did these paintings over a long period of time.

Figure A41: St George and the Dragon, 1964 Melbourne, oil on canvas, 166.0 x 197.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2011.1277)

Figure A42: St George and the Dragon, c.1470 Paolo Uccello, oil on canvas, 55.6 x 74.2 cm, National Gallery, London (NG6294)

I notice you often mention the spaces in which you were working, yesterday in the car you mentioned the old sculptor working in the old theatre…

Yes, Wallace Anderson, he was very well known, he did ceremonial sculptures, he had done a beautiful sculpture of Simpson and the donkey. He had this studio out in Hawthorn which had been a theatre, a cinema, and he had all these sculptures and stuff, it was all dusty and quiet, you know to me quiet workplaces are just what … you know the Bernard Shaw quote, I learnt that when I was about ten I think, “Hell is an eternal party, heaven is a quiet cool place where people just get on with their work”, and I thought “That’s right!”

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and I’ve kept that concept all my life. It was lovely going over there, I would have been eighteen, Dad wanted this family shield made, bits of our family are Welsh and they had this shield, he asked Wallace Anderson if he could teach me to make a sculpture that could be cast into bronze, I went there on Saturday mornings.

Ceri Richards was Welsh too…

Yes, there’s something about the strange visionary quality somewhere in there that’s really very attractive …

Were there things going on while you were in the UK that you were interested in?

Yes, I saw a lot, more when I was about to go, all the great shows like the New American Painting were when I was just about to leave, and I was more free to see them and understand them. They were knockouts, Jackson Pollock at the Whitechapel Gallery had natural light and a few lights, Blue Poles was there, it just shimmered, you could walk right through it, marvellous … I liked Gottlieb, I used Gottlieb … I liked Rothko, but found his works static, I just wanted to give them a kick, to move them …

And Stanley Spencer, I love his paintings, before I got to the Slade, it was late Summer, not long after we had just arrived, Marian and I took the train up to Cookham to see a town exhibition of his paintings, honouring him, in the village hall and then there were houses that you were directed to, all through the village, beautiful village, flowers and greenery everywhere. In one house we encountered this small quiet man with grey hair and a very intense look and it was Stanley Spencer. It was the most beautiful afternoon, it was actually Stanley Spencer light, I love that clarity in his work, so when I found out in Betty Churcher’s book Australian Notebooks that he had been mistreated, I was so distressed.

Were there other artists?

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I loved the traditional landscape painting, the pastoral paintings, seriously visual ones, I loved Constable. I liked the great Matisse backs at the Tate, and the big David Hockney, very interesting, the imagery was so strong and strange, very male and sexual of course, very affectionate, quite lovely. I love people who paint figures and really do it well. I really did like Francis Bacon, to me it’s not particularly surreal, it’s the essence of somebody. I looked for a long time at works by Lucian Freud, I thought they were wonderfully inventive, but there’s a chillness, not a living sort of quality, an inhumane quality. I wasn’t all that interested in Henry Moore. I liked Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Ivon Hitchens, not William Scott. I found a lot of British art to be carefully artistic in a way that was irritating. I wasn’t all that drawn to the British artists. I immediately loved the Americans and I loved a lot of the Europeans, Miro’s sense of the living world, the ecstatic business of being alive.

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Appendix B : Letters

In late 2019, Janet Dawson rang me to say that she had found some letters she had written home to her parents while she was overseas. They comprised a folder containing typed copies of letters (and some original letters), made by Dawson’s father covering the period from when she left Australia in May 1957 to the end of 1958 when Dawson visited the Brussels Exposition, and a smaller number of original letters from Italy and Paris in late-1959 and 1960. There were, however, no letters relating to her time at the Slade School during 1959. I have reproduced below excerpts from some of the letters that related to her art practice.

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13th July (1957), 10:00 pm, PARIS

… Yes, in Paris. In a little room on the second floor of the dark brown, clean, shabby Hotel Le Tour, in Rue Jacob. Just down from the École de Beaux Arts in the heart of the student quarter … Across the narrow street a guitar is playing very sophisticated rhythms … Soft rain is falling, and gay night life noises in the street below. Across the street from us (pebble throw, the street is very narrow) lives an artist and his beautiful bare mistress. She hangs her undies from one of the windows. Below them, in the same old building (all the buildings are old, long-windowed, and high and huddled together), is a well- furnished apartment with many books and modern chairs. A youngish man who wears suede jackets leans from these windows in the evenings. He also has a beautiful mistress. She wears clothes. Smart ones. I haven’t seen the people who live behind the next group of windows below them. The next floor is the ground floor – an antique shop, with gilded cherubs and old tapestries. Art shops, small hotels, tiny clever galleries showing clever abstracts all along the street.

This is our second day in Paris ... It’s heaven to be alone in a room … Marian is asleep and I have been writing and drawing in perfect peace for hours … I love Paris and I’m very happy … Yesterday we were shown round some

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parts of Paris by an old, ill, hunch-back man who we met on the train. He knows everything about art and everything about Paris … He hunched along ahead of us yesterday, telling us things over his shoulder about Louis Quinze and the history of the Louvre. I expected him to vanish any minute, or turn into a Notre Dame gargoyle …

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22nd July (1957), 8:30 pm

Dear People,

Tomorrow morning we leave Paris – and tonight Paris is wide and silver grey and dreamy. Men are fishing on the Embankment – catching one or two, sometimes. We sat swinging our legs over the Seine and watching them, earlier. The sun is pink and the clouds are frothy, and the colour of fairy floss. The clouds over Paris are always wonderful. They seem to know when they come near, and they begin to dance after dinner, a fine one too (the Paris self-service places are wonderful – very cleverly and gaily furnished – and one can get a superlative meal – quivering with French flavouring – for the equivalent of about 5/-. Fantastically clean, too).

Marian trotted off to the station to see about trains (I let her do this, as she enjoys coping – and I can wander and dream) and I loped along the Embankment, feeling pleasantly mournful and alone. One can be gloriously alone in this city. There are many people so, and nobody cares. One can also be lonely and sad – But it’s a good loneliness. Being lonely here seems to stretch out into a wide, vague world sorrow, that is all part of the river and the space and the beautiful, silver city. It is a lovely city. So wide, so vast.

Beautiful streets and huge squares and it’s all just as one imagines, only one can’t imagine the atmosphere. One has to wander along the Embankment, or become a dwarf in front of Nôtre Dame, or puddle through the twisting back streets, or sit at an open-air café and sniff the crowd to do that – the atmosphere bubbles in the air and attacks every sense.

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You see, I’m becoming all poetic. It’s the dreaming hour in Paris – the streets are silver grey and misty and I’m sitting on the tiny balcony of our room. The tired young man with the suede jacket is writing away industriously in the apartment opposite. I’ve since discovered he is a writer. He begins to write at twilight (it becomes dark about 9:30 pm) when the guitar in the nightclub begins to play down the way – and often he goes till about 3 am. Sometimes I keep him company across the street, because Paris has stimulated my desire to scribble. I sit huddled in my duffel coat in our room and he sits at his book loaded desk and we chew pens and think and glare at each other. Often, he falls asleep and I go to bed victorious – the artist has a new mistress. She’s not as beautiful as the last and she wears clothes. The guitar is starting to play now and cats are creeping about on the rooftops. I shall miss this hour in London – I’m sure you can’t find this magic there.

I must tell you all the things we’ve done. The strange old hump-backed man we met on the train – (I talked to him for hours and he knows everything about art. He collects paintings and uncut stones). The hump-backed man, called M. René Vittoz – took us around Paris for three days and showed us things we would never find in years. He was ill and lonely and full of knowledge. He walked us for miles through the streets taking us to churches, and to galleries and museums, and explaining history, architecture and the lives of painters and saints. I’ve had an immense amount of knowledge poured into my ears by this man – for no other reason, it seems, than that he is lonely and likes to give knowledge where it is appreciated. He has gone back to Switzerland now, taking some marvellous Japanese paintings and Mexican opals with him – and I shall always be grateful to him. Because I learnt things I would never know otherwise. I have a funny feeling that he is famous, but I’ll never know (he was an author). 200

We’ve been to museums, to galleries, to churches – Rodin museum, huge, and devoted almost entirely to Rodin sculptures. The Louvre of course, I finally gathered the coinage to go there – and it needed strength – Cluny museum, with some magnificent medieval tapestries – the Orangerie, to see the fabulous Lehman collection from New York – sumptuously displayed on

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brocade walls – the Museum of Modern Art – full of Picasso and Matisse and many others – oh masses! Yesterday we took a train to Chartres. To pay homage to the magnificent cathedral. Truly it’s magnificent! Pure French Gothic, awe inspiring in its size and the purity of its design – and the stained glass – oh the stained glass! It is so rich, and so incredibly beautiful – that even the bottom-most vandal couldn’t fail to weep inside – I can’t write about it – it’s not necessary. But I know now why the Boss (Janet’s brother, Cameron) went there time and time again. The town of Chartres is very old – it dates I think from the beginning of the cathedral – which is twelfth century – and the houses are jumbled and tumbling and the streets are narrow and twisting and cobbled. It was very cold there yesterday, and raining – and we moped and gaped in the cathedral for hours, but unfortunately the township we just belted through in the teeming rain. Unfortunately, we missed a service in the cathedral – I should dearly love to have been to one – but some kind and very talented person played the magnificent organ for a while – and that was something to hear.

I think last week was a bit meagre in the mail line for you, and I’m sorry. But your telegram – (Thank you again, you’ve no idea what it meant to us) – your telegram brought on a rather bad attack of wanting to see you – and when it strikes hard it’s a real physical pain. I started a couple of scribbles to you all – but the old system couldn’t stand it. Please don’t imagine I’m unhappy. I’m not. Paris likes lonely people and loneliness is, I think, almost necessary here at first. But sometimes, when the guitar plays and people in the streets are happy and chattering – then one misses the warmth of people one can be happy with, too. Italy was different. Italian people are much warmer than the French. They have a sunny craziness there in Italy, that is quite enchanting to me. And the warmth of the people is infectious and happy-making. Of course, on lower levels, the warmth becomes rather too animal for comfort – but on the whole Italy is generous. But there is subtlety and spice about this city that is quite fascinating. One couldn’t ever be bored here. Just to sit here and watch the people passing in the street below is an absorbing occupation. In this area all the men have beards and the girls have stovepipe trousers. I find it very irritating to see so many girls who look like me, only better. To be different in this area, one would have to wear a Woolworths raincoat and carry a string bag. Long loaves of

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bread are worn here like walking sticks. People walk home in the evenings with two yards of curly bread tucked under their arms. The night club where the guitar plays is a Russian type place – and there is another night club, very select, almost immediately opposite which is a medieval type place. The various attendants and doorkeepers wear the appropriate costumes and I am often enchanted by the vision of a flamboyant Cossack chatting casually to a man who looks like Robin Hood. Sometimes the Cossack and Robin Hood may be joined by a girl in black slacks with a long cigarette holder – and I wiggle my toes in joy. There must be a million Americans in Paris. They are everywhere and the twang of their voices echoes the length of the city. There are also a lot of English people. They are easily discernible by the way they carry their umbrellas and the hats they wear. And there are fifty thousand art students. The schools are closed at the moment, but cafés and bars are full of beards and stovepipes and attempts to be different …

Our train tomorrow leaves at 11:30 am, so Marian has just told me – bouncing in the door. She is very sweet. She makes me eat all the right things. Not that I need much urging. We are both ravenous all the time and I have put on weight. She forages happily for food when we eat in our room. She is always faithful and tries to let me be alone when she thinks I want to be. We’ve developed a good working partnership when we’re out. I cope with the language (nobody in Paris bothers to speak English except when they’re paid to, e.g. information bureaus etc) and she works out the budget. I am the navigator (I’ve found my bump of direction invaluable. We haven’t got lost yet.) and she supplies and collects maps and tourist guides etc. Of course, our duties overlap a great deal, but that basically is the way we work it.

We’ve wandered the streets, fashionable and otherwise. We’ve paid homage to French fashions per medium shop windows. We’ve seen as much art as possible and we’ve felt it all around us we’ve walked by the Seine under the bridges and over the bridges. We have not been to the Eiffel Tower, we’ve seen it from the distance. We’ve not been in the Champs-Élysées or the Bois de Boulogne. But we’ve been in the Place de la Concorde and the Luxembourg Gardens. We’ve been inside the courtyard of the Sorbonne and we’ve been in

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the Louvre. It doesn’t matter where we’ve been and not been. We’ve seen a little and felt a little and I’m sorry to go. But I’ll come back. And we’re both a bit tired and we want a hot bath. And we want to wash our hair. It’s filthy. And we’re lonely for the English language. And I want to start painting. In fact, I’m knotted with frustration for a big brush and a great big board. Our train leaves in the morning and I love you all. Next you’ll hear from London.

Good night my family, Janie

********

69 Eton Ave, Swiss Cottage, August 4th, 9.30 pm

Dear People,

Sitting at the little bridge table in our pink attic room, Sundayish and alone. I’ve put the reading light from beside my bed on the table (we each have a little bedside table with a reading light, such luxury) and beyond the pool of light on my pad and papers, the big room is dim and homey. Trees, big and black-green and rustly outside, and the sky is deepening into blue night. I love these long, light evenings. I can work and write by daylight until 8.30 and the sky is blue until ten. I’ve been writing up my diary – rather behind, I’m afraid, and the heat and vitality of Milano (very behind!) is foreign to this cool, soft- rustling evening. I’m very grubby at the moment, and the bathroom is calling me. Honest grubbiness, though, as I’ve spent a happy, busy day cleaning out the studio. Yes, that’s right, the studio! I think I recall in my last epic, that I mentioned that I would begin the search for a studio. Well, the search was not necessary. The studio has been waiting for me, like a lovely puppy, down two flights of stairs. A dream of a studio, not a pretending one, but a studio, built as a studio, and intended for painting. And for years it’s been full of furniture and very lovely, and when I opened the door it smiled and told me that it had been waiting for me. It’s large, deliciously proportioned, and the ceiling is all glass panes, and being in it is like being in a great floating bubble. Heavenly light, and nothing but good paintings could come from it.

Well, I’ve kept you in suspense long enough, I’ll start from the beginning. First, Miss Dorothy Lawrance (D.L.), who likes us, which is nice,

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because we like her. She is plump, tolerant, and humorous, in a tweedy, English way, and we make each other laugh. She began this huge, wonderful old house, as a home, from home, for music students. She said that during the war there was no music and, I think, earlier in her life she never had a piano to practice on. And she determined that, when she was given the opportunity to lease this house, she would have pianos everywhere, and there are. I’m continually finding new ones tucked away in unexpected little rooms, and there are even clavicords, and, I suppose, if one must bruise one’s hips, it’s a distinction to be continually bruising them on grand pianos. And now for the house itself. It was built by a painter, one John Collier R.A., who was addicted to epics on a very grand scale, and whose paintings were, if his attempts at architecture are any guide, romantically chaotic. For he designed this edifice himself, and people who pass by think it is a church. It is bristling with quaintly unexpected bits of Moorish, Gothic, Baroque and Victorian decoration, and inside one is continually falling down quaintly unexpected little steps and bumping into quaintly unexpected pillars in the dead of night. It’s a house that one can love deeply. Miss Lawrance does and we are beginning to, even though we are very rude about it. Dug into the basement as is the custom everywhere, nice when one washes up, because the garden is just above one’s head, out the window, a real kitchen, huge, tiled floor and massive dressers, also sculleries and area steps and a Polly Perkins atmosphere. Next floor is the dining room, with big windows looking out onto the large lawn (walls round these gardens, lovely warm brick ones) and the great rustly trees down the end of it. We have well behaved suppers (dinner in Australia) there with Miss Lawrance on weekdays, and well behaved midday dinners in the weekends. She sits at the head of the long table surveying her motley young brood (French, Turkish, Portuguese, Australian and Swiss at present) like a plump, witty mother hen. And there is a marvellous service lift for the food, which pops up from the kitchen below like a devil in a matinee performance. The other meals we have alone and are not so well behaved and everyone forgets the toaster in the morning, so breakfast is always eaten amid the fumes of burning toast and cries of “Who’s burnt their toast?” in all languages.

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Various odd practice rooms, abounding in pianos, and the main entrance hall and some good furniture. Next floor are Miss Lawrance’s rooms, and the huge exhibitions studio, a massive place where Mr Collier R.A. showed his epics to an admiring crowd of be-whiskered, be-bustled socialites. It is now a dormitory (very superior one) with five beds, some lovely furniture, many screens, and three pianos and a clavicord, and some other instruments, whose name I know not. It is vast, dark panelled, and impressive, a delightfully dignified place for small Turkish girls to chatter and curl hair and wear frilly nighties and sleep in. But no good for painting. But in its opposite wall is a large arched door (heavily disguised as a wardrobe and a baby grand. We have to ease gently around them to get in and out). And through the arched door, tucked away and removed from the rest of the house, is my beautiful soap bubble studio. From this floor the house spirals up two floors of bedrooms and bathrooms and practice rooms, and pants up the last flight, to end, gasping, in our pink attic room. We are very high up, as you can imagine, being on an extension of the fifth floor, almost as high as the huge old trees at the bottom of the neat green lawn, but not quite.

And now, back to the studio, and how it was acquired. (Stop here for a cup of Nescafe and a bath). And a night’s sleep and a day writing my report. It’s 10.30 and dark. I’ve been battling all day amid a welter of notebooks and catalogues … I’ve been writing solidly, thoughts, impressions, attempts at stories, all manner of things. I’ve found that it helps me to think, too, because I can no longer paint just for the fun of painting. It’s not enough. I have to think about it now, about what I’ve seen, what I feel, and how I should progress. I also feel a great need for more study and research. I was being continually frustrated on the Continent by my lack of knowledge. I’ve started the ball rolling with a little book of elementary Latin, I hope to teach myself a little if it’s not too difficult, as I want to delve into the medieval world. Also have decided to attempt classes in French and Italian. Great plans, but I think I can do it …

Well, Miss Lawrance must have had some ideas in the back of her mind, when I told her we were looking for a studio, she told me about the house and its history, and took us into the Exhibition Studio, which I admired, but felt nothing for. Then she said casually (we liked each other at this stage, and I

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know she’d decided that we’d be pleasant and undemanding guests) “Of course, there’s the other little studio. It’s full of furniture, such a pity.” And she opened the door, and I gasped, and she said “Yes, I knew you’d find it interesting”. So, we’ve come to an arrangement whereby we clean it out, paint and decorate to our own taste materials at her expense, and then we rent it cheaply. There is a large sink, and the plumber has been, and fixed the pipe. And electric lights, and apart from dustiness, the walls (wood-panelled) are in very good order. Only one leak in the glass roof, which will be easily repaired, so she benefits by having another rentable room when we leave, and we benefit by having an eminently paintable studio …. So here I am, in my dirty old slacks, and in my familiar happy state of ladder climbing, fossicking, and junk clearing. Bliss! The gods are good to me …

Masses more to tell. I have seen a little of London, and what I’ve seen I’m beginning to love, especially the great, country like parks. I never imagined such space and quiet in the heart of a huge city … My main thoughts at the moment are of the studio … I hardly dare think of the future, it seems so bright. But even if it all fails, if the studio vanishes, if I can’t paint, and if I find my heart has disappeared, I’ve had my present, and the present is nothing but Joy!

Janie and the Studio.

********

Monday morning

30th September (1957)

Dearest Folks,

Dammit, pen’s run out. Sorry I missed my Sunday night news hour. We were claimed by a Mozart programme at the Festival Hall. What a fantastic place! I’d never have believed that a place could be so vast, and so brilliantly designed. Foyers, buffets, lounges, restaurants everywhere. Great glass windows reflecting the Thames and the bridges and barges and buildings, and myriads of lights twinkling and shimmering and making fairy-tale reflections everywhere. Waterloo Bridge strung with lights and the night sky of London getting all mixed up with people drinking cocktails. I could have watched

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through those huge windows (walls of glass, really) for hours. And the Mozart was lovely. These two concerts were presents from Mrs Kirsner, Friday night Myra Hess as soloist and Joseph Kripps conductor, Sunday night Friedrich Gulda soloist, and I’ve never heard Mozart played like it.

This week has been fun, I’ve washed and ironed and tidied, and am beginning to feel female again. French and Italian lessons on Monday and Tuesday nights, on Monday night after my lesson I wandered down Regent Street all shiny wet in a light drizzle with the fashionable dress shops glowing rich and violinists with their caps in front of them playing to people who are never interested. From Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus, glittery and colourful and just like the poster, with every nationality of person pushing and gaping and going to the cinema and looking at Eros. Then down the Haymarket and through to Trafalgar Square, with the National Gallery all lit up and the fountains glittering and the square shimmering and reflecting all the lights and the shadows of people on its wet pavements. I stood and watched the splashing water coming from the dolphins’ mouths and the mermaids’ fingers (or something, I forget how the mermaids manage). And I felt all pleasantly lonely and lost while I looked at the fountains, until the inevitable man came and asked me the time. So, I had to go away. I love my lonely night wanders. It’s a very particular feeling, wandering slowly and alone through the big glittery city and watching people clattering here and there. There are many, many lonely people in London. They haunt the coffee shops and the parks and the big squares, and it’s good, every now and then to forget who you are, and why, and just be somebody alone … As long as you can go home afterwards, of course.

I’ve discovered a marvellous little theatre up in Hampstead, called the ‘Everyman’, it devotes itself to really good films (being in an arty-crafty area it can afford to do so, apparently). Wandered up there one night to see an Italian film which was as sensitive and well produced as St Joan should have been. There are a series of them showing and I hope to see them all. Nice and cheap too, and the walk up the hill is long, but pleasant. Also, have been purchasing myself all sorts of exciting bits of colour and rolls of paper at little art supply shops near Covent Garden, and tomorrow is the big day. Yesterday came the

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male model (not the dancer boy, our heating system gave the poor pet a cold, so his friend came instead). I drew with venom and energy all the afternoon, and a little comes back. I feel more confident now. Probably, tomorrow no work will be done and arranging hours etc. But it’s as well to be prepared.

Another attack on the studio must soon be made, too. The rest has been pleasant, but winter is drawing on and we must have curtains, and we can’t have curtains till the windows are painted, and we must have the kitchen finished etc … and now that we’ve had a model in here, and have done some drawing in here, all I want to do is paint and paint. For the light is beautiful as I knew it would be, and bellows of creativity. So much to do, never mind, it’s all fun.

Dearest folks, I’m all tossed with nerves at the moment, I won’t write more. I’ll send you an airletter later in the week giving the lowdown on the Slade. Wish me luck, even though the moment will have passed when you receive this.

Your rather homesick small offspring, Janie

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Sunday morning (6th October 1957)

Dearest Folks

The air letter I didn’t send, it didn’t seem warranted. I went back to the Slade on Friday, and it was dreary. Segregated life rooms! Women in one studio, men in another. What rubbish! The model is dreary, the studio just like any other art school studio. The other females in the life room dress abominably and I couldn’t see one drawing or painting that looked remotely inspiring, certainly in this studio anyway, somewhat less than Gallery standard. I’m disappointed. The atmosphere is dull and the instruction niggling. The main way to draw a figure it seems, is to draw the background objects and fit the figure into a series of squares. Accuracy, that’s all very well, I suppose, but it usually ends up with the most uninspiring scratchy looking set of smears. One

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doesn’t need to feel the construction of the forms, or the rhythm of the body. Oh no, I draw all day, trying desperately for accuracy in this method, and ended up thoroughly bad-tempered. None of the instructors came near me, and none of the students spoke to me. On Monday I shall take a book. I suppose that soon I’ll discover the place is full of genius and creation. I hope so, and I’m allowing myself time to change my opinion. But at the moment it appears just a fuddy duddy cobineddy hole, left over from the Pre-Raphaelites.

The first day, Tuesday, was of course very strange. I kept getting lost and my registration forms had disappeared. So, I was shunted from the Slade office to the College Registrar and back again. Finally, I was fixed up, and I bought myself a locker, and found the art materials shop and procured a drawing board etc. And found my way to the women’s life room (!) and began to draw. No sign of Sir William or interviews or anything like that. I began to draw the dreary model, trying to turn out an “art-school” type drawing. Of course, being in a state of nerves, it went badly. But I looked around, and all the other drawings were infinitely worse. This only made me more depressed. Eventually, came an instructor and he looked at my drawings and criticised them (actually, very well) and he asked me how I was organised for tutors etc. I explained that I’d seen nobody, and he took me to the office again. The staff were very kind, they told me I could come any time I chose, no set hours (I’m booked for three days a week. This means I can come any day, which is very pleasant) and that I can attend lectures (this is, I think, a privilege not granted for most part time students) and that if I care to paint there (which I don’t) I can come for a fortnight, full-time, every now and again. This was all very nice, and I appreciated it. Fees £12 a term. So anyway, I can have three days a week solid drawing, and that doesn’t hurt anybody.

The other students are all set about with beards, pipes, stove-pipe trousers, floppy sweaters, grubby necks, too much eye shadow and they read esoteric books and talk rubbish. The fashion parade is really an eye opener. I’m used to a bit of dirt, and comfortable old clothes, but some of the dressing there could hardly be called comfortable. And the female hairstyles are varied and eccentric. Mainly based on the horse tail theme, but with elaborate variations

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etc. This is all very funny, of course, but I’ve been through it all and it’s a bit wearisome to have to run the gannet again. I’m probably sour. But I get more sour when everyone talks excitedly about the marvellously stimulating atmosphere of the polytechnic schools and I’m mouldering at the Slade. Pray it springs to life, or I’ll go to Chelsea and do lithography, instead of including it at the Slade. Never mind, peoples. I’ve got a wonderful studio, and I’ll paint here and go to lots of exhibitions, and work out my own salvation. Enough of the Slade for a time.

Wednesday night was another concert at the Festival Hall, Wednesday afternoon I was shown around the college by two nice young engineering students ... We wandered round the grounds and the Union buildings, paid a short visit to the immense library (where I enrolled and found the art library). Very fine and ended up with a cup of tea at a café nearby, talking car races and college rags. Very pleasant. Yehudi Menuhin played at the Festival Hall, and it

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was a packed house and a magnificent performance. Thursday, I went to the Monet exhibition at the Tate Gallery, a huge show and very exciting. In the afternoon I came home and tried to paint and couldn’t and tore up a number of gouaches in a fury of frustration. And Friday I braved the Slade again, as stated … So much for culture ... Thank you so much for your news, keep telling me of studio progress … The studio this end has lapsed a little with school organising to do. But will start again soon ...

I go. My love to you all, Ciao, Chirp.

********

Monday 14th (October 1957)

Bon soir ma chere famille,

J’ecrire dans l’atelier. Je suis heureuse et tres content. Ce soir j’avait ma leçon francais, e domani sera studio Italian. Il maestro Italian e molto gentilo. Poi, io sona stupida. Com’e va?

After that brilliant beginning, I fear I must return in weariness to my native tongue. The Slade improves a little on further acquaintance. On Friday I had the life drawing model almost to myself all day, and he being a painter, and knowing how to take good poses, we had a whole day of quick poses. It was tremendous fun, and very unorthodox, apparently, as various tutors came in and tut-tutted, and then said they’d allow me to continue, as there were no other students around. So I drew furiously all day and used masses of paper and did some good drawings and felt happier all round. Also, I delicately asked one of the tutors if it were possible for me to do a little lithography and he said “I think so” and wandered off, and came back and said yes. So I’m to be introduced to the lithographer tomorrow. But still the teaching is all foreign to me. So I draw how I wish, and I try to use the instruction I find helpful, but I refuse to alter my ideas. I refuse to believe that drawing is merely a matter of measuring and diagramming. It isn’t. Yesterday was a busy window painting day, and so was Saturday. We had many people milling about on Saturday afternoon – all being funny and helpful – Phil came for lunch, and we waffled Art, and then Kenneth

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with his laundry bag and stories of the Rhine valley. He wafted off a couple of weeks ago and spent some time in Germany and Holland and Paris. He painted the gas pipes in the kitchen for us, and talked philosophy – then came Mano and Edgar, and they planed window frames which stuck before, but don’t now – and they all stayed for tea and played darts, and went off to various parties and do’s and I was left alone and happy. I love being alone here. I brew myself coffees and potter and mend things and life becomes all ordered and mellow.

This morning I flew off early to Soho, chasing an easel. I didn’t find one, but I found many other wonderful things – markets, and fascinating restaurants, where I didn’t enter – and bookshops and people spouting the Bible and Doomsday. I purchased myself a little second-hand tray mobile – for a paint tray – and ended up at Foyles in Charing Cross Road. This is the most fabulous bookshop ever. I browsed for a long time, and bought a couple of much-desired books, and a mass of Christmas cards. Incidentally, the Christmas sea-mail to Australia closes very soon. I have various things eyed off at Portobello Road, but I shan’t get a chance to go there until after the closing date. Do you think it’s possible, now

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that I’m settled, for somebody sometime to bundle up a few of my art books and throw them off sea-mail to me? Not all. Just a couple.

I must send him away to you – a meagre sheet this week, peoples. I’ll begin another tonight with a little more news. Suffice to say life is full, good, and I am well, and I miss you all rather much. I love your letters, especially the chook on Sunday one … Adios, keep well. I’m bursting with health except for a couple of spots on my chin. Overeating, that’s what.

Love, Janie

********

Saturday morning, 19th October

Under the apple trees in Kent,

Dearest folks,

Such delightful people, the Passmores, young and happy with two baby boys and this lovely cottage in Kent. Great beeches and chestnuts all around, and this lovely apple orchard at the end of the back garden. The sun is out and it’s eleven o’clock. I’m rested and breakfasted, have been piggy-backing Nicholas (age 2) around the garden, and am now settled luxuriously with a table and deck chair in the peace under the sky and the apple branches.

We had a delightful day yesterday. I left the studio and London all sloshy and grey and dripping. Caught the Sevenoaks train by a whisker and was borne through the silver dripping countryside. Bev met me at the station with the children gurgling happily in the car. She is Australian, her husband Pip, is English. Bev is thin and fine boned and gay and pretty, and the children are beautiful and sticky fingered and happy. We had lunch in the kitchen amidst baby turmoil of rubber ducks and toy cars and socks and safety pins, and drove (Bev insisted that I drive, such bliss to be behind a wheel again) to a lovely parkland of beeches, an enchanted forest, really once an estate, but now given to the National Trust. Really, such incredible beauty. The beeches are huge and mossy, and the ground is covered in a great drift of golden leaves, piled feet

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deep in the humps and hollows. Nicholas and I had a large explore in the magic forest, Nicholas led me purposefully to all his favourite hidey holes and kept up a continual gurgle of information. He pattered ahead of me through the forest, his red corduroy drawers glowing against the bright leaves, and when he came to a hollow piled with gold, he would fall into it with a shriek of joy. We both fell over, accidentally, and on purpose, and we sat on a huge, mossy twisty-rooted log, and sang the Pooh Outdoor Song for Snowy Weather (Whenever it snows tiddley pom-) and then shuffled through an ankle deep mass of autumn leaves, to have a great forest of leaves to oneself and a small boy is a glorious experience. There were fairies and Pooh and Piglet and all the magic of an enchanted place there. I distinctly saw Piglet with a muffler round his neck collecting beech nuts, and I heard Pooh practising a new Hum to himself behind a tree.

This afternoon the Wilson Steer competition was discussed and judged, all students present, and the analysis of the many paintings was particularly enlightening. One thing about the teaching here is that the painter can go his own way and is not restricted to any particular set of rules. This was particularly obvious in the Steer competition paintings. There were hardly two paintings even remotely similar. This, of course is very good. My complaint about the teaching of drawings was really, I see now, based on the instruction given first year students, and is hardly applicable to the general attitude. Better and better. But I’m still at sea about it all. I seem to have reached a full stop in my progress, and although I’m aware that the next step is away from technique towards a more intellectual approach, I seem rather bogged down. However, I suppose I’m not really balanced out yet. Time will tell.

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********

Tuesday night

Lithography this morning, the lithographer-in chief is Lynton Lamb, rather famous and very pleasant. The lithography room is very well equipped and very crowded. I begin to enjoy. In fact, the Slade does improve on acquaintance. Probably the thing that cheesed me off was the fact that nobody opened their arms to me and welcomed me hysterically as the rising star of the Antipodes. Sheer conceit.

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Tuesday

I think I have a cold … I can’t even turn out a lithograph. I did a design. And I thought it was quite good, which it wasn’t, and then I scummed it up when I was washing off the ink. All the halftones went smeary and when I took proofs the wretched thing was just a lumping black and white mess. I spent hours carefully re-etching it with acid, and the same thing happened. Then I decided that the design that I’d thought a powerful piece of realism was just plain corn. So I scratched it out with fury and turned it into an abstract. And all these nice little girls around me were turning out good little neat pieces of pictures with infuriating efficiency. And I spent three days over one stone and didn’t even get it printed! Damn, Damn. Anyone would think I’d never seen a lithograph before … I realize all this is necessary. I’ve been riding high for years. I swept into London on the crest of the wave, and I can’t complain of the backwash which is hitting me now.

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Sunday morning

I discovered that my cold didn’t amount to anything, so conscience wouldn’t allow another day in bed. I did my washing and spent a lovely afternoon painting two very bad abstracts. Braved the Slade again on Thursday and spent two days battling with my litho stone. I’m having a big struggle, and nothing (even things I know) comes easily to me. But, although it’s maddening to have to fight every inch, I’m beginning to realize that these bad periods are really the most formative. I have no idea what’s around the corner, but I can’t repeat what I’ve done in the past and this seems to be a breaking through period. Despite the growing pains, which are considerable, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that the only blokes who are doing good work, and the only instructor whom I admire (one Ceri Richards, just won a £700 prize in a big Liverpool competition, and a very strong personality), seem to treat me with more respect than my very depressing efforts warrant. Perhaps I look as though I’m trying or something. Friday night Marian and I went to a film of the Bolshoi

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Ballet (made during their London tour last year). Quite magnificent, really, the Great Ulanova, is really great. She’s not human, she’s a bird or a fluttering leaf, or a cloud. The soul of poetry. Such dancing as makes one weep, and quite brilliantly filmed, I thought, although I’ve read criticisms of the treatment.

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November 1957

I’m making a little more progress at the Slade. Last week I began my first colour lithograph. Great mental efforts for little Chirp to work out which colour goes where and on what stone. It’s not the way I want to work on stones, but I know I must learn the proper way first. I’m making a violent attempt to put the old nose down and tail up and just stew in paint without too much of this theorising, and also, this social business. People are very kind to small dirty Colonials, but it’s difficult to work with so many invitations.

Last Wednesday, we had dinner (D.L., Marian, me) with our friend Mr Turner. Quite delightful. He gave us lashings of Roquefort cheese and celery and French rolls and Spanish wine, and showed us his small, but fine collection. He has a magnificent piece of Hepworth sculpture (you wouldn’t like it, it has a hole in the middle) and some other modern gems. All chosen because he loves them. Not because they’re fashionable, consequently the collection is quite individual and bears the mark of real love of art. It was a delicious and funny evening. He has a tiny, well-furnished house, in Hyde Park Gardens Mews (very fashionable, these mews houses, and when decorated with taste, absolutely wonderful). He entertains, so D.L. says, very rarely, and he fussed over the soup and rolls with an old bachelor’s concern that everything should be “just right”. Marian was very sweet. She insisted on helping him in the kitchen, which he loved, praised his coffee, and his cooking, and he was flushed with success and Spanish wine by the time we reached the coffee and dates stage. He’d insisted that I bring some work to show him. I scratched about in a panic and managed to produce some life drawings and three of my least awful lithographs. He was very keen about one print and pleaded for me to give it to him. I was rather, in fact very dubious, as the only reason that this print looked interesting was sheer

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accident. It had printed unevenly and because I’d rolled the stone too dry, it had scummed in a few places. These accidents gave it a lovely texture, but, as I say, they were sheer technical accidents. There is quite enough of this “making use of accidents” business in art today, and, theoretically (although one can’t help lapsing sometimes) I don’t approve. But I left it with him, after pointing out these details, and announcing very firmly that it was a Bad Thing, and that I was Not Happy in my mind. So, Mr Turner is now the proud possessor of a Bad Early Dawson (not signed). His collection is enriched. I hope he hangs it in the diddy. But he’s sure to put it next to a Sutherland (also a lithograph and, of course, a magnificent print) …

Feeling very virtuous at the moment. I’ve just finished hanging curtains. Really crazy ones. They’re patchwork and striped and spotted flowers on a black silk background. Parts are tattered, as they are very ancient, and the silk is rotted in parts, but they’re very much in the atmosphere of the place. Of course, they cover only the two end windows of the north wall. The four middle windows will have to find some sort of hanging. Old Mrs Lawrance is digging again. She produced these patchwork jobs in triumph when we were cleaning out the studio, and we laid them aside. They must be at least fifty years old, and the stitches are as fine around each flower. Rather like my patchwork skirt mum, but much more striking, and a sort of bead curtain and Aubrey Beardsley flavour about them, mad and lovely.

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Sunday night

… Robertsons in Camden Town … I finally went on Friday afternoon. The second-hand easels cost fifteen pounds, the huge old-fashioned ones with pulleys and levers and things, marvellous affairs, but the ordinary type that I’ve been used to at the Gallery only cost a fiver new. So I upped and wrote a cheque and carted my shiny, spicy smelling easel through the streets of London Town, or to be more precise, through the streets of Camden Town, to the bus stop (with a short stop to pay homage to a pub on the corner called Mother Red Cap, which I think Dylan Thomas frequented, I’ll check up). When I got it home

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and put it up I was so tickled that I began painting before I’d removed my coat. An awful abstract. Yesterday afternoon I grabbed old Mrs Lawrance and started a head of her, planning to give it to D.L. for Christmas. And next weekend I’ve booked a magnificent German model to come for a big nude. Back to basics …

Tuesday night

… I’ve been usefully occupying my time reading literary review and art critiques and essays. It’s bitterly cold and foggy outside, and the studio, and the main house, are veiled in mist. Seeps everywhere. Horrid stuff. Aesthetically something when one’s strong enough to see it that way. Glowing suns and delicate bare trees against misty pearl skies. At night, fairy tale. Draping the city with coloured, shifting veils. But when one’s red-nosed and sniffling in bed, the world narrows to a bed, a pool of light, cooking smells and a ticking clock …

When I make an accident and utilize it to help the development of the image, although it alters the original purpose, something of more value may develop from the accident and I console myself that the accident could only have been made by me on the image I’m creating. And only I can select or discard the accidental values, thereby giving them purpose, by selection.

I gave Marian a party last week. For her birthday a checked tablecloth, four yellow candles. French rolls and vegetables and cheeses and sprats piled up artistically like a Dutch still life. About six people. Successful. The studio looks magnificent in candlelight …

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11th December 1957

And tonight the Slade term finished … the past three days have been wonderful. It being end of term, there’s been nobody in the litho room and I’ve been happy and productive. And I have suddenly discovered that I have learnt quite a lot this term, and that during the last three days I’ve begun to put it into practice. I turned out a number of colour prints and variations on a black and white theme, and some are fair to passable. And the instructor today, one Mr Ormrod, complimented me, and became quite excited about how I could print

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this over that etc, and was pleased with the results, which is something more. Still nothing like the work I’d like to do, but I’m beginning …

Saturday I’d booked a model … gave her breakfast and played continental records to her … Began painting with an excess of three months frustration. Paint everywhere, studio all upside down … eventually collapsed about five o’clock in the midst of paint and turmoil. I slept for an hour and when I woke it was terrible. So, I had an attack of the Black Dramatics, which lasted till Monday. It’s hidden by a huge dust-cloth, and I’ve not looked at it again. Tomorrow I’ll brave it and do something Drastic to it …

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5th January 1958

I’ve been wallowing in paint, furiously fermenting, loading on paint, scraping it off again, doing three paintings at once, ditching them, doing another, then going back to the old ones. Paint everywhere, masses of temperament, fits of fury and depression …

… The studio is tidy and twilight is beginning to creep, blue and dreamy, down from the ceiling. It’s Sundayish and peace is upon us … Paint has been upon me, and the world crept away. There are five paintings of varying size ranged against the wall, and one more to come. All incomplete, all rather bad, I think, but there’s a germ of idea coming through. Space. Form in space.

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11th January 1958

… It was a good birthday – I worked fairly solidly all day, and Marian had cheese and rolls and cider and candlelight for me at night. Joe and Phil and a couple of other bodies dropped in. We had music, and the studio glowed. Joe bought me daffodils, so lovely in mid-winter (there are waxy white hyacinths in the window boxes at the Slade, against the dripping sky and bare branches they really do seem new and precious things. Daffodils with a candle behind them (in a milk bottle on my palette with velvety black shadow behind them)

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seem to flicker and dance – living beings in dead grey-winter … I’ve started etching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts – one of these very fine County Council Schools – all day Tuesday and till 8.30 at night. Terribly exciting, such a lyrical medium, infinite possibilities and the instructors are very good. I’m getting all esoteric about deep etches and sugar etches and aquatints. My dream is to have, one day, a studio with a litho press, and an etching press. Painting easel, too, of course. Trees outside, and sky. What a dream! Just been to a lecture on Italian architecture – a series of six, including the 4th to 14th centuries – from Early Christian, through Romanesque to Gothic – very good lecturer, one Clifton-Taylor, and the first city he surveyed was Milan. Coloured slides of the wedding cake Duomo, and lovely San Ambrogio. One feels a sense of ownership when one’s sat in the cloisters of San Ambrogio in the hot summer, and watched the birds twittering round the (built c.800) Monks Tower, and there it is, being talked about, and there’s the broken capital where one sat, when one’s leant against that pillar in the Duomo, and it was cool, and smooth, with a knobbly broken bit where one rubbed one’s toe. From Milan to Verona, then Venice – coloured slides and good ones – it will be a very interesting series, Marian and I are going together … back to night school, and my first print was pulled – bad, of course, but not discouraging. I’d tried deep etching some areas, and they turned out beautifuly black, with a raised, crusty line – nice quality – oh, there’s so much to learn.

Slade today, very energetic, had the pressure on my press so hard that the only way to turn the handle was to give a mighty heave till it reached the top of the arc – then jump on the handle with legs swinging in the air, and literally ride on it, to bring it down. Very Marx Brothers, but necessary. It’s too annoying to have wishy washy prints. Am going to have the muscles of a wharfie when I’ve done a few years of lithography – carting great hunks of stone about and heaving presses – etching is nothing like the grind.

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Tuesday, 28st January (1958)

Work is progressing steadily, thank God! My prints are becoming more professional, and even slightly artistic, and today my first successful etching, technically. I’d been very pleased with myself at laying a beautiful aquatint ground … Have just been reading Kafka’s The Castle. It’s a very powerful thing, one of the most physically exhausting things I’ve read. One feels completely enervated and demoralised after about two pages. Had Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus given to me for my birthday. It’s waiting for some free time to begin …

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Westminster Library.

Friday, 21st February (1958)

I have before me the hugest tome on etching possible to imagine. A monumental study by Koehler. I disagree with the man on many points. He dismisses Dürer as a very inferior etcher and artist, but it’s a fascinating book, and the reproductions are genuine prints … And today, I produced, after great tensions and anxieties, my first multi-coloured lithograph. God knows how many printings. But I have one pearler of a print and Ceri Richards is very pleased. It was a monumental effort of brain power, one has to become very analytical about colour, very good for me, my colour’s always been on the weak side. Anyhow, there it is sitting on the wall in the litho room, and it’s a damned good print. You know, I’m fascinated by all this. Really happy now, both at Slade and Central. The old temperament has its ups and downs, but by Gum, I’m learning!

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Thursday 6th (March 1958)

… work progressing, I was asked yesterday to give three of my latest lithographs to the school “So that we remember Dawson” Mr Ormrod, the Wednesday instructor said to me in dulcet tones. Quite something, that, seeing that everything I’ve done till recently has been an unpardonable mess. I’m beginning to be extremely happy in the litho room – I can print away for hours and nobody interferes except to come up every now and again to view progress. Etching comng on, I don’t think I’ve done anything of artistic interest in either field, but I’m all out for technical know-how. I’m hoping to go to Central on Mondays as well. Also seriously considering buying a bath and a few odd bits of equipment so that I can work on plates at home. It’s such a long business that one must have a number of plates at different stages, otherwise there’s so much tension waiting for different processes to process.

Funny how one suddenly sees things. In the opening paragraph of The Horse’s Mouth, Gulley Jimson is walking by Thames Embankment and he says “… Sun in a mist, like an orange in a fried-fish shop …”. I was walking to

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school the other morning, and suddenly I saw it, over rows of misty-grey chimney-bristling terraces, the original orange in a fried fish shop. Quite often the moon is flushed hot, and the night sky is a deep red purple. But when the moon walks on the glass roof it’s glittering silver crystal and the sky is silver black. It’s quite the most luxurious feeling in the world, to lie in bed, bathing in moonlight, with the studio like a silver bubble – just watching the moon. Doesn’t happen very often as the sky is rarely clear … “The moon, night’s concubine, comes gliding by”. She’s walking on the roof again. I must go to bed and talk to her.

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Tuesday (March 1958)

Dearest, most generous and able-knitting family,

The cardigan arrived this morning, quite superb, a triumph of craftmanship … anyway it’s lovely, and thank you so very much. Phew! What a week it’s been … First, in order of importance, Ceri Richards wandered up to me last week and said “How many prints have you that you feel are successful?” “Not many, I’m very slow” said I. We looked through them, there are only about five (each one consecutively better than the last, which is good) and only a few of each, four at the most. “Not enough yet” he said. I asked why and he said that he thinks when I have more I should take them to a gallery, he named a couple which deal mainly in prints, well known places, because he thinks they’re worth showing, and possibly I’d be asked for an edition. I said No. Not yet. Not for a long time yet, and I explained why (this is a thing of mine, far too many people exhibit too soon, before their work has resolved itself, and they develop an eye for the public which does a hell of a lot of harm to the sincerity of their work – if I were to be quite honest I’d admit that I’d done so myself, and that it was bad for me). I didn’t say that to him of course, but I said that I didn’t feel my work was resolved enough and that I’d rather learn with concentration than be distracted by the thought of selling (and – big and – I don’t really know enough technically about printing to make an edition). But I am pleased, I am triumphant, I am utterly swollen with pride, because in one term my work has

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leapt ahead to that level. It seems the nightmare first term wasn’t wasted after all. I’ve clicked, I’ve jelled, and now the path is clear and I’m bouncing along it, gathering daisies. Incidentally, Ceri Richards is a fine artist and one hell of a nice person and the best and most sympathetic instructor here. So, Chirp’s broken the crust. Only just, mind you. But the break came. Sound the trumpets, I’ll blow my own. Which all means, of course, doubled effort next term. And there’s etching to be got at too. I’m sure there’s a complaint known as etcher’s itch … I’m going to buy a mangle. Preferably the big old-fashioned sort with big rollers. Because one can print with mangles. Not stones, of course, but plates. I can print etchings, or at least proof them, and I might even descend to using zinc plates to do some lithographs at home. As soon as we break up (Slade tomorrow, Central next week) I’ll go on a mangle hunt. So, these holidays should be busy. I’m going to attack painting with concentration. I’m going to fit up etching equipment, I’ve still got some more work on the studio – plans, plans – so much to do. It’s alive, everything’s alive, buds are bursting, trees are just beginning to hint at a shimmer of green. The crocuses have been and gone. It’s cold, bloody cold, with biting x-ray wind. But it’s coming. I look to the day when we can lie on our beds and the sun beats in on us. I’ve been dreaming – sun and ships and blue sky – and now it’s very late … and now sleep.

Wednesday

Slade has finished and I’m sorry because I wanted to keep going. But no matter, there are still masses of things to do. But I had to leave a print half done this afternoon … Madly social last week. Ballet, first night at Covent Garden and it’s just how it ought to be, of course. Dimly plush and smoky – The Sleeping Princess – superbly done, all tinsel and spangles … eventually I dragged myself out of bed and was hit by a violent attack of depression. Probably reaction, but it’s lasted all day, during which time I cleaned the studio and attacked two paintings and ruined them both – deliberately. Now I’m in bed again, clean, and slightly more cheerful. I might be slightly better at printing, but I still can’t paint …

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Next evening, my old pal Mr Turner (D.L’s collector friend) took me to dinner in the area that was famous some thirty years or so ago – Fitzroy St, Charlotte St – home of the literary and artistic lions of a bygone era, and still dreaming in memories … We talked art and things madly (Charles Laughton was dining there too) and the food was excellent and the service unobtrusive, and Mr Turner with his Edwardian air was out of the past. No, IN the past, and I was in the past with him. He knows a tremendous amount about art, and enjoys imparting to a young person, with no trace of condescension. Friday night I saw the Picasso film. He’s old but he can still do it …And Monday printing again. So, there we are. That brings us to date. For the last three days I’ve been at the Slade – finished two prints, one an interior of the studio, the best print of which was immediately pinched for the school collection. And yesterday I had the address given me of a lass who can probably make available to me a printing press over the holidays. In Hampstead, too. I believe. So, I may still be able to print on stones … Snowed again today. The snow seems to penetrate where rain doesn’t, especially powder snow. I lay in bed and watched the flakes drift gently down from the ceiling to land on the floor. But the weather seems to be trying to improve. Anyhow, one thing I’ve proved – draughts and cold do no harm to one, really. We’ve had quite enough of both and we’re quite fit …

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Tuesday, 8th April 1958

Well, now I know what is meant by a sense of fulfilment – me and my basement – fulfilment, joy, peace and solitude – it’s really marvellous … I was left alone with all and more of a small cold heaven, and the key to heaven on my ring. The press is small, but adequate, rollers ditto, enough inks and acids, workbench, sink. I worked all that day … all the next day and had to run away at 6.30 to go and see Lysistrata … Really these bawdy Greeks! One is inclined to regard such a name as Aristophanes with reverence, he being an ancient, and of the great Greek culture, but I’ve never heard such lewdity in my life, but not at all offensive, that’s the interesting part. Probably because it’s all straight out, and so full of gusto. It was a superb and quite fantastic production, very colourful and bizarre, incredibly funny, one leaves the theatre wondering in a

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dazed sort of fashion, just why one wasn’t shocked. I enjoyed it thoroughly. But I was worried about my print, it being at a difficult stage … and went back to the basement. Worked solidly until dawn and birds began to twitter, and came home filthy and black …

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Thursday, (April 1958)

Took my prints in to show Ceri Richards. He was very pleased and pored over them for some time. I asked him if he thought I’d be able to stay at the Slade, and he said he’s certain I can … Marian and I plan to spend a weekend at Stratford soon … Romeo and Juliet on the Friday night, and Twelfth Night on the Saturday … I’ve been reading Robert Graves retelling of the Greek myths, absolutely fascinating. It seems Zeus was a very sexy old man. He lay with any number of women, one quote: “Amorous Zeus lay with numerous nymphs descended from the Titans or the Gods, and, after the ovation of man, with mortal women too; no less than four great Olympian deities were born to him out of wedlock”.

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Friday

Have I told you about the magnolia tree? Just below our kitchen window, all winter it was bare and black … a couple of mornings ago I leant out and there it was, a magic tree. The most beautiful white, pink tinged, velvety fairy tale blossoms on the black tree. Like stars, soft stars … the flowers pointing upwards, rather oriental in shape. Anyhow, it’s an enchanted tree, and I’m waiting for a warm night, so that I can sit on the window sill and smell it … This is such a beautiful hour, it’s light now, light enough to paint, until sevenish, and then slowly it gets greyer and dreamier and stiller. Masses of birds outside in the old trees.

Signed myself on in the Registrar’s office the other day, committed myself to another year at the Slade, full time. I’ll go to the Central for evening classes, as I want to have use of their press at nights. I’ve also been promised a

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job over the holidays … I expect to stay here most of the time and attempt a reconciliation with paint …

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… Twelfth Night at the Memorial Theatre … Naturally a superb, rollicking performance ... Sunday morning we went to Wales … crossed the Wye, and penetrated through darkening, brooding country, sweeping with rain, into the hills, drove to Brecon Beacon, a great surge of dark hillside, bare and magnificent … parked the car and went pelting and panting up the side of the Beacon, chasing a wild grey pony and scattering long haired sheep. Bare, these hills, save for tough grass, and streams of water race down the hillsides, and the earth, broken away by water, is purple red. Marvellous, to stand in the wind and look over great windy spaces and see nothing but these great heaving bare, dark hills …

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Sunday evening, after an eventful week, such a lovely, soft ache-in-the- belly evening. High sky with birds, silver green trees rustling, long sunlight yellow on the windows … On Friday Ceri Richards told me that he’d had a fellow printer (artist printer, not commercial) who prints a lot of his work in to visit him at the Slade, and this man had admired one of my prints which was pinned on the wall.

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Saturday morning

Bliss! Heaven! Peace and nobody in the studio. Heat coming soft and sleepy through the ceiling – sounds of mowers and birds outside, and a blue, blue sky. Me in dirty old slacks and shirt, dirty bare feet, coffee and cigarettes and Schubert on the turntable. Nothing could be more beautiful, idleness in every limb, with the promise of action tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. I’ve been reading avidly.

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Tuesday

Heaven, heat, real heat, sun almost blistering … End of year at the Slade ended in a blaze of activity and socials. Strawberry tea. The prize giving. I was given a Highly commended in Lithography and congratulated roundly by the Professor, Secretary and various instructors. Forgive the boasting, but it did finish off the year rather pleasantly for me. A trying year, but, I think, a valuable one.

Then for two days after the official end of term I was given permission to print in the etching room (Slade) and turned out four prints of my big plates (incidentally I did manage to get two prints into the Central Show, probably I’ve told you that). I’ve sent a print of a landscape to Keith for his birthday so he’ll probably show it to you. I’m quite sure you won’t like it, but I think it’s my best etching.

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Sunday morning (July 1958)

Ah, Sunday morning again, cloistered peace and solitude … Professor Coldstream, bless his heart, has decided to make the Slade facilities available to a few select students over the holidays (fearfully hush-hush, this, for obvious reasons), and I’m one of them … Joy, oh rapture! The school is heaven when it’s empty, as I discovered on my printing spree after break-up and now I can do some printing as well as painting. And you people jolly well rejoice with me, thank you! For it’s not only an honour to be asked but extremely helpful! As for Keith’s etching, yes, it is of Wales more or less. Brecon Beacon, of course, and I think quite successfully conveys what I felt about the place. Yes, the technique is quite advanced. The different surfaces on the paper are obtained by different lengths (and strengths) of biting the plate in acid, called deep-etch ... Poppa the Goth’s remark about the inside of a coal mine wasn’t nearly as derogatory as he thinks. I was quite preoccupied with the idea of earth formation, and rock stratic and such, so that it’s meant to be something like an x-ray, with the bones on top, primeval and all that. It was one of two I had in the Central show. As

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that one wasn’t howled down as much as I expected I’ll take another print of the big head and venture to send it to you. Lithographs are rather a different matter. I usually have only two or three good prints, as I prefer at this stage to experiment rather than churn out dozens all the same, and I have to keep them for either show or reference. I’ve just recently seen the most magnificent exhibition, Japanese art, from pre-history to present, one of the richest and most exciting exhibitions I’ve ever had the fortune to see. Almost half the exhibits are Registered National Treasures (meaning they’re priceless) and it contains some of the most exquisite and exciting images. Mum, a number of the characters from Monkey are there, Taoist immortals, fiery dragons, floating Bodhissatvas, a wealth of fantasy. Monkey really comes to life at the Victoria and Albert Museum (the fact that Monkey is a Chinese story matters not a jot, the influence of Chinese art on Japanese has always been considerable).

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Wednesday night

The past three days at the Slade have been very frustrating. Every attempt has met with failure, and I’ve torn up about twenty drawings, and wrecked about five stones (no, the same stone five times, which means grinding the wretched thing down again after every try, no joke). So off to Brussels and be damned to it! I hope to come back fresh and bursting with ideas …

Actually, the Slade is marvellous at the moment. If I were working well, I’d be as happy as a lark. There are only about four people there besides the staff, and we’re all working in separate rooms. I can’t use the etching press for another week or so yet, so I’m back in the litho room. Trouble is that I’m trying to use brain power in a concentrated manner, sort of consolidating the past year’s experiments, and I find myself rather lacking in that respect. Hence the frustration, so I hope Brussels will give me a big mental kick …

Plan of action is to drive to Dover … and cross by boat to Ostend then drive to Brussels. They are going to drop me at the exhibition on Friday morning and I can spend the whole day there on my own. D.L. has just come back from

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it, she spent about two hours telling me about it in great detail, and the catalogue she brought back is magnificent. She insisted that I go, and that was probably one of the things that decided me. The Arnotts go off to the Rhine valley on Saturday and I catch the boat back … If it’s so easy to go, I’ll go again, for I have plans of a visit to Holland sometime. Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Amsterdam and the museum at Arnhem, and it’s all a hop, step and jump away.

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Westminster Library, Saturday 5.30 p.m.

… I’ve been mounting prints … I asked Ceri Richards to look through my prints (about fifteen, the result of a term and a half, all the preceding efforts I threw away), and he looked at them, and said that I should show a print of each, that they were all good, and that I’ve shown a very steady development, and many other nice things. Unfortunately, only three prints are required to be submitted for the show, but still, he picked out seven and said “you should definitely show all these”, so I’ve mounted them and bunged them in. They’ll all probably be thrown out again, or most of them, but I can always say that I did what I was told. The other day Professor Coldstream came in to the litho room. I was working there alone (after hours … I’ve forgotten why) and chatted to me for some time. The first time he’s really spoken to me individually, and asked me my plans and when I said I wanted to come back next year, he said “We’re always pleased to have people who work”. Not implying that they’d be pleased to have me if I worked, but because I worked. Nice. Also asked me to put some of my prints in the show, “some of your good stuff”, so I was pleased for I didn’t think anyone in authority knew I existed, and that’s good, because one isn’t interfered with. But it’s pleasant to be praised. Actually, the cause of all the worry and early risings are the two etchings. Flaming things are giving me hell. Merlyn Evans has been demanding prints from me, and I’ve been delaying, because the things won’t work, and have been getting rather peeved. Because the Central show is already hung, and I’ve put nothing in. But I’d rather have two good etchings than two bad ones in the show …

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Peak Cottage, Martley, Worcestershire

Sunday night

Well, here I be in the wilds of Worcestershire, beautiful rich up and down country, in a delightful old Tudor cottage at Tessie’s parents’ home. Owls carrying on outside, and bats and moths, tumble down barns ... I’m bedded in Dr Jaray’s study, a small funny angled room brimming with the best of European culture and smells of pipe smoke … Marvellous place to work, no interruptions, no outings, just air and country and paint.

I’m working very badly at the moment, very painful transition from emotional and intuitive to considered, intellectual approach (probably I’ll never be as scientific a painter as I’d like to be, but one just can’t get away with blood and guts any longer). Also, the Brussels exhibition unnerved me considerably. I’m writing it to you in another letter …

I decided to have an efficiency campaign, and rise every morning at six thirty, with the aid of the kitchen clock. I don’t know if it improves my work or not, but I feel very virtuous, and wandering round the property so early is beautiful. I go up to the top of the hill, where there is an apple orchard, and having performed my morning duty of giving an apple each to the two horses … I sit on the edge of the water tank, with blackberry bushes prickling my neck … all the curly hills, bouncing around together with the fat, curly clouds … We’ve been on two occasions to a nearby pub, about three miles away, in the evening. Walking along in the black and silver moonlight, huge, full moon … the cats came with us to the end of the lane when we left, and met us there on our return and escorted us home … Only two more days, I’m so sad, but I’m running out of paint, and I want to get to the Slade again. It’s been quite the loveliest holiday ever.

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6th September, 1958

… Brussels … we started off very early … out into a high, fine cloudy day, called in at Canterbury for about a quarter of an hour … through the morning shopping melee in the narrow olde worlde streets of Canterbury, and dashed into the cathedral. I raced off on my own to the windows and found some magnificent designs for tapestries half hidden on the walls, made a lightning tour of the main stained glass panels … on to the Continent.

Past the Belgian border we went … Drove on through flat, grey green, damp country, so flat, with little lumps of haystacks and stocks and miles of grey white sky pressing down on the flat land … stopped at a seaside resort … marvellous promenade there, the sea, the sand, gaudy bathing huts … After coffee, we wandered back and set off again for Bruges, where we intended staying the night. Bruges was my idea, as I knew it was a very beautiful medieval city filled with masses of medieval art, and I was dying to see the Groeninge Museum … Bruges was completely enchanting for everyone, we took rooms in a delightful old pub, my room overlooked masses of crazy tip tilting roofs, with the beautiful medieval bell tower on the left, the cathedral tower in the centre, and the baptistry on the right. Bells, bells, I woke to the sound of them, and went to sleep to the sound of them. The Bruges bell tower is famous for its carillon as well as its architecture. After we’d unpacked we went to look at it, down narrow streets, where each shop hangs out its painted flag, depicting what trade is carried on inside, the streets were massed either side, above our heads, with these gay, heraldic flags, all betasseled and fringed and fluttering in the breeze.

Next morning, we upped and off towards Brussels … Arrived Brussels about midday, flags, balloons, international police, sky writing, signs in every language. As we neared the exhibition grounds, we could see the great silver Atomium and various soaring spires and slabs and spears of the exhibition architecture. Well now, imagine the Olympic Swimming Pool Stadium and the Sydney Opera House, multiplied sixty-five times in effect. Pouf! The modern world! A fabulous world of fine design, pure colour, chrome, steel, aluminium,

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girders, struts, spears, electro-this, hydro-that, nuclear the other. A fantastic world, where people whizzed round above head-height in little bomb-like conveyances. Fountains sprayed up in great glittering sweeps, flags fluttered like birds, the new spirit, the new age … then I was deposited at the Fine Arts Building, where there was the exhibition I’d come to see “50 Years of Modern Art”. I spent all the rest of the time there, about six hours in all, as it is easily one of the most important shows of the century … the exhibition (the paintings I mean) was worth every moment. Dazzling, actually, the effect on me was so powerful I’ve been half paralysed since. Probably take months to get over it … What a journey! But oh, so worth it!

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Florence, 3rd November (1959)

Well, still not in Rome … After the frustration of being stuck in Venice and several minor mishaps, the journey is now taking its proper shape. Weather is continually sunny though cold. Incredible blue Italian skies with unbelievable sunsets. Car going well, oceans of paintings to see. Countryside quivering with colour. Everyone well, and tempers very much better now that things are easier. I’m eating like mad and taking a cold shower every morning. Absolutely blooming – walk an average of seven miles a day without turning a hair and have practically given up smoking – down to four a day. I’ll be ready for the commandos soon. We left Venice rejoicing (don’t misunderstand me – it’s an incredibly lovely, mysterious city full of delights, but we felt chained down by circumstance, and the youth hostel was bloody uncomfortable) and drove to Ferrara. Hostel there was delightfully small and sleazy, run by a delicate lovely little man who took us to his heart – one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. He played his radio loudly all the time – chamber music and Wagner solid for three days. Some lovely buildings in Ferrara. The façade of the cathedral is one of the most beautiful pieces of Romanesque I’ve seen. Pink and white marble. Frescoes, medieval pots, castles. We left for Ravenna feeling much restored, the warden nearly in tears, and drove through superb country, incredibly flat. I think it’s the “immense plain of the Po” according to the books – shimmering with colour – vineyards and fields glowing with golds and reds and violets.

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Great poplars looking as if they’d been made by jewellers from umpteen carat gold. Ravenna is of course famous for its Byzantine mosaics (beloved of the Boss). Very fine things, though the only one that really knocked me out was the apse of Sant Appolinaire – a magical thing of blues and greens with white sheep and a great cross in a superb blue circle.

6th century Byzantine mosaic in the apse of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare, Ravenna

Well, from Ravenna to Florence, a magnificent journey over the Apennines. Trees golden in farmyards. There are some trees with fruit called, I think, cacci. The original golden apples of Eden – they glitter all over the countryside. Bare branches in orchards a red haze. Oh, the colour. Magical country. Olive trees, a silver grey. They look as though they were lit up from inside. Everything floating and shimmering in this incredible light. Florence is a lovely city. Strangely unaffected in atmosphere despite its history and the horde of tourists – perhaps it’s because we come out of season. Thank God, that we can see the city without the tourist varnish.

Today has been wet and cold, the first wet day for some time. We spent nearly all day in the Uffizi Gallery. Huge place stacked with pictures from every period. About as important (not quite) as the Prado and the Louvre. Also spent some time looking at marble busts of the Roman emperors. As the boys had

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pinched both the Claudius books from me and devoured them, we had a great time matching faces to incidents. Nero’s is the most frightening face imaginable. Incredibly degenerate, vicious, perverted. Claudius very thoughtful, rather fine. Couldn’t find Caligula anywhere, though everyone else was there.

We have a new eating practice. Mostly we buy vegetables and bread and cook amazing stews and soups at the hostel. Lunchtime dried fish or pizza by the river or on church steps. Can very rarely afford restaurants and it makes terrific holes in the budget when we do. Today, being cold and wet, and us being very hungry having had no breakfast and no lunch (1/2 litre of milk only – 50 lire) we huddled miserably under a dripping statue and decided a restaurant was the only place. Had minestrone, chock full of spinach, and rolls and 1/2 litre of wine, and for second course I produced a tube of anchovy paste which we surreptitiously squeezed on rolls under the table, when the proprietor wasn’t looking. Very delicious and only cost about 200 lire apiece for a good lunch. One can buy all sorts of things in tubes, and they’re very easy to carry and use – like toothpaste.

Yesterday, and the day before, we went to Fiesole, which is a village just outside Florence high on a hill overlooking the city. The first time we walked – about five miles – second time we took a bus and walked back. The view is tremendous all over Florence to the hills beyond. Fiesole spreads all over the hilltop – narrow walled lanes flanked by orchards and olive groves. So peaceful and airy. Walking home we watched the flaming sunsets, like visions, and the short twilight began to glitter. Florence looked like a white ghost city below with the great dome of the cathedral a floating bubble. The sky grew deeper and deeper blue and the city was a band of glitter below and the cypresses black velvet points. The air is so clean that the moon, a new one, seemed very near. The unlit side was visible by some reflected light, so it really looked like a marble suspended in blue space, very eerie. Wandering home through these lanes in the starlight, chewing the ends of our loaves of bread which should have been kept for supper. Crystal quiet, the moon and an occasional bellow of delight from the boys. This is why I want to live for a while in the country. To be part of this and not get in a car and drive away.

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Fiesole has a small and very beautiful Roman arena. Situated on top of the hill facing away from Florence, it commands a superb view over the Apennines. Cypresses, broken columns, it is very noble. How wonderful, on a starlit hot night, to sit there and watch a performance with the hills behind. I think many poets have been here. Byron and Shelley, I’m almost certain, and probably many others. I’m sure the place was beloved of the Romantics. There is also a small museum with Roman and Etruscan figures, pots and tools excavated from Fiesole. Very funny yesterday – it was Italian Remembrance Day, and a Giorno Festivo (holiday) – we caught the bus to Fiesole. It was packed full of people going to Fiesole for the day. You couldn’t imagine a bus more packed. At each stop more people piled in, and the squash was terrific. A man and a woman had a terrific argument at the back of the bus. Though they were only a foot or so away from each other they shouted abuse at the tops of their voices – very aware of the audience. The whole busload listened eagerly – contributing comments and suggesting epithets with the conductor acting as a sort of M.C. cum referee. Entertained the whole crowd until the bus panted up the last steep lane to the central square of Fiesole.

We’re off to Perugia tomorrow. Shall write again from there.

All love my family, Janie

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Anticoli, Monday

Dearest folks,

It’s all happened – I’ll believe in everything from now on – anything can happen, and frequently does.

First things first – have arrived and left Rome – have received all your wonderful letters. So much to reply to. We all charged into the Post office as soon as it was open on Friday morning panting for mail. All left the counter weepily clutching bundles. Sat in the midst of the roaring post office and devoured our letters – occasional exclamations every now and then.

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Goodness knows what has happened to half the letters I’ve written you. Didn’t you get my cable from Kassel? It cost me the equivalent of £3.10 sterling and eased my mind considerably at the time, as I thought you’d be anxious about the first stages of the journey. But you don’t seem to have received it. I only hope and pray the parcel from Venice reaches you. Mama mia, you are a wonderful lady. Lovely things to look forward to. Poppa you were ill and better again and I didn’t even know. Thank God the brother has recovered. I’ve been carrying frightful visions of malignant glandular bodies hovering over his head. In fact, the night before I got my mail, I was so excited and worried in case I shouldn’t get any, that I had terrible nightmares about you all. Fearful (light’s gone out – something to do with the rain – am writing by firelight and memory – dig that! firelight! I’ll tell you all in due course.) Fearful dreams – which made me jumpy and sick in the stomach (light’s gone on again. I’m amazed at the excellence of my writing in the dark) – until I got your letters. Well you’re all well, and safe, and the flat is finished and a supreme example of flat making – I can expect wonderful things from the Mutual Store – and we’re in contact again. Or almost so. Tomorrow I catch the 6:30 am bus to Rome and pick up my money …

I’ve come to rest at last! And how! It’s all so beautiful and exciting and exactly what I’ve been needing that I’m quite silly with joy. This village, Anticoli Corrado (of which I’ve told you previously), is a dream place. The situation all round is unbelievable. I’d had many doubts about Anticoli. I’d heard it was an arty place full of pseudo-bohemes, perishing cold and not worth considering. But all proved quite untrue. When we had digested our letters, we called at the British School in Rome which proved to be a huge palace of a place in the Borghese gardens. The present Rome scholar Brian Taylor is a friend of ours – he introduced us round and the Secretary invited us to dinner as guests of the school – a glorious meal which we regarded with awe. The people there in the school studios really have it soft – marvellous meals in a room which is like the most exclusive London club. Private studios, the finest I’ve seen. My God, the Rome scholarship really is plum. However, I wouldn’t swap situations now. At dinner we discussed the possibility of going to Anticoli. Brian told us that there were studios to be rented at incredibly low cost – but didn’t seem at all enthusiastic – repeated the dirty-smelly-isolated story and also

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said the countryside was dull. However, we decided to go see for ourselves. Set off, drove out of Rome, through Tivoli (famous for gardens and the Palazzo d’Este) and through glorious country to Anticoli which like all the villages round here, perches on top of a hill. Had an adventurous night sleeping in the car (couldn’t afford a pensione). Four people cramped up in an old car in pouring bucketing rain, squabbling over sleeping bags and where to put legs. Sorry, missed a bit out. When we arrived, we parked the car below the village (it had run out of petrol in the main tank and reserve is dicky on hills) and walked up – the road zig zags up the hill very steeply, and as we walked the great valley, hills, villages (all perched on peaks like that) unfolded around us – magnificent space, wonderful shapes, great rolling clouds.

We’d been told to ask for a Mr Bonnet, a Dutchman who could help us. After chasing all around the village we caught up with him taking an evening stroll. He is a wonderful old man. White haired and saintly … reminded me very much of Wallace Anderson. He was very kind, took us to the local bar (it was dark by then, the main square full of people, kids scuttling everywhere, wives nattering on doorsteps), stood us a drink and told us about all the various studios – arranged to take us round next morning. After our night in the car which was the longest night I’ve ever known – interrupted by frequent visits from the local constabulary who were suspicious at first then highly amused and affable, chatting for a long time to us – we arose, bade good morning to a large pig and a number of long horned cattle and set off on foot back to the village to see Mr Bonnet.

The rain was bucketing down and we arrived soaked on Mr B’s doorstop. He has a lovely studio, whitewashed walls, massive old beams, red tiled floor. There had been a wedding in the village that morning. As we crossed the main square the people crowding out of the church under huge umbrellas (I’ve never seen such umbrellas – locally made, three people can fit underneath very comfortably – like beach umbrellas) scattering sugar coated almonds all over the square – an Italian tradition, I believe. Mr B. gave us coffee and large sweet buns – also a wedding custom – and then took us round. The places are quite wonderful. Some are real studios, some houses which have been used as

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studios. Rents range from 15,000 lire a month to 8,000 a month – as little as a pound a week for a whole house! In London a pound a week won’t even get a filthy, scabby little back room! We decided on one house with six rooms – and a well-equipped kitchen. This will be the main quarters. We are all living here at present. When we get organized and working hard, we’ll separate and take separate studios for living and come here to eat – or even give this place away after a month. At present it’s ideal. It’s on the slope above the main square.

I just made a cup of coffee, today is a working day. Big Mike under the car, small Mike manufacturing an incredible stove from odd pieces of rusty metal.

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The kitchen has a lovely open fireplace, but it burns too much wood. Wood is expensive, one buys it by the mule load. So, a stove is necessary – I’m just about to have a massive wash – Rodney sawing up firewood. We hope to be able to start work – real work – by Saturday. The upper windows look out right over the village to the hills – long French windows with balconies – one can loaf up there in twilight and watch the hills change colour. Mules loaded with firewood, cattle, goats, sheep clopping up the main street driven by boys with long sticks.

Incidentally, between beginning this letter and now a day has passed. I went to Rome – purchased paints very cheap ... I still haven’t told you properly all the things I want to tell you about Anticoli. How wonderfully kind the people are. How there’s been a tradition of painters living here for 150 years. How whole families in Anticoli have been models in Rome art schools – from great grandfather down. How a painter can live here without anyone thinking him queer or bohemian – I’m a farmer – I’m a painter – same thing. How peaceful it is after the clattering up and down of Europe. How I climbed above the village this morning after sun-up (still oodles of sun here – even in November!) and was practically on top of the world. All this will have to wait till the next letter. It needs to be told at leisure and I’m still unwinding and unpacking. Why doesn’t somebody come over here sometime? Mama, you’d adore it here – you’d lap up the peace and beauty ... After I’ve had a reasonable period on my own here, and been to Paris, I’d love to show you this place.

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5th February 1960

Another long silence, owing this time to house moving … Ann came in (lass from the British School who’s taken a studio near me, nice girl and a good painter. She’s sleeping in my rooms at night as she thinks her place is a bit isolated. The likelihood of anything happening to her in Anticoli is very remote. But she’s a nervous girl and has spent six months in Rome which is, of course, a big wicked city).

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Now I must tell you about my lovely rooms. Light, bright and airy, perched high over the valley, with the same stupendous view as the studio I was originally going to take, the top floor of a very old house. Big homey kitchen with a tiny balcony off it which houses my washing trough. This balcony sweeps the hills and valley west, almost to Tivoli. A small passage which opens out onto a huge flat terrace which projects over the steep hillside and sweeps the entire range of valley and hills from west to east for miles. A small room in front which is my studio – this has a balcony in the opposite direction which is immediately over the main street and looks across the street to the tumbling old part of Anticoli. Above that the nearest hills where those photographs were taken. And, next to it, on the same side, a big light bedroom. The sun streams into these rooms all day. I work with all the doors open, the great valley on one side, the gossipy village the other, and it’s incredibly cheap. I can sit on the studio balcony and gossip with the whole street and watch who goes where (very important in any village). My landlord is a nice man who has lost an arm, and is very beaten up about the nose, he is the village mayor.

House moving was hell. Cleaning the last traces of the boys … and moving my gear took days of effort. I kept trotting up and down, from one side of the village to the other with huge bundles of junk. Unfortunately, the only way back and forth led through the piazza, and each trip I made with some eccentric bundle I had to run the gauntlet of all the piazza loungers and gossips. Cries of “Brava Giovanninna!” rang in my ears, they were egging me on as if I was in some mammoth obstacle race. Some wit put forth the suggestion that I was half girl half donkey (mezza-ragazza, mezza-asina). This label stuck for some time. Cheeky! Work is going very well. After house-moving I gathered strength and waded in – the first solid bout since Christmas. Have been working on the terrace on sunny days, with two tables loaded with junk, and great buckets of water, sloshing paint and water and all round trying to master water- colour technique. Damn difficult. But great fun, and marvellous working with my head in the clouds – literally – and great windy spaces all about me …

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15th February 1960

Pouf! Big letter writing night, am so behind with mail … Good for a period to live on one’s senses and sheer physical appetite for weather, food, people’s companionship and a nice healthy attitude to work. But the big bad world won’t stay away from my ivory tower for long. I feel it snarling around me when I go to Rome … I almost must be in London on April 15 or thereabouts, depending on whether I’m asked for an interview for the French grant or not … it’s time I thought about moving again. I’m doing all the work for the French grant here and will ship it to London, or possibly send it by some person’s big car … if a grant fails, I’ll be back to London working part-time and printing with Stanley …

One has to be a stranger in a place to know just how much kindness means. I’ve never felt more warm, welcomed, and happy as I have here. And when I hear stories of the war, of the escaped prisoners hiding in the hills (also all the village men) and the women and children secretly feeding and caring for them under the noses of the Germans … I have a pile of new stretchers in a corner just screaming for canvas and paint. My little white studio is lined with new and exciting drawings … Have had more rain and the valley is all ochre and silver with flood water. Bad season for the farmers. It was a poor olive crop and looks like being an eccentric spring … I read about Augustus, how he liked to travel so slowly that it took him two days to get to Tivoli from Rome. I go from Tivoli to Rome in a bus in an hour, and even allowing for chariots I can’t imagine how anyone could dawdle so much! Also read of Nero’s debauches and see the remains of his villas and grottoes in these very hills, and enjoy Vespasian’s wit when he described with a quotation from the Greek classics a man whose genitals were grotesquely over-developed as “striding along with a lance which casts a preposterous shadow”. The Caesars have become as familiar to me as Winnie the Pooh. Nice to know that Augustus wore “no fewer than four tunics and a heavy woollen gown above his undershirt: and below that a woollen chest protector, also underpants and woollen gaiters” and that Tiberius was “subject to occasional rashes of pimples”.

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In this country, with the remains of their great and bloody lives all about, they come to life with incredible vividness. No dry old history book stuff. I saw a monk in a flapping gown with calloused pink feet trudging up the hill the other day. He met a man with a loaded donkey and a woman with a bundle of sticks on her head and they were all crystalized in time against the stony old hills. Could have been today or a thousand years ago. This immense sense of time is something I’ve felt with peculiar intensity in Italy. Time now for Chirp to sleep.

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26th February 1960

… it’s Carnaval time in southern Italy ... Sudden weird creatures come flitting out of the shadows at night. Grotesque masked figures beating drums. Clowns and devils and witches. As though the world was suddenly caught up in a paper nightmare. It’s a big thing here. Festivals in Rome and Tivoli every night. Fun fairs and masked balls. In the village it’s quite a ritual. Children dress up and go prancing round in groups. Frighten the life out of me at times. I suddenly see a hideous face grinning at me through the butcher’s window or emerging from behind the vegetable stall. Tonight, Ann and I were quietly sitting in the studio and there was a funny scuffling little knock on my outside door. I opened it to see a group of phantoms swaying on the dim stairs below. Took me some minutes to realize that they were some of the village children, who go calling at houses like carol singers. We invited them in – they stood shyly scuffling feet and looking curiously at the studio – and I gave them half an orange each.

I believe there is a law which forbids the wearing of masks in the street. Not enforced here, but very strict in Rome. People used to take the opportunity of assassinating anyone they happened to dislike – under cover of a Carnaval mask. There are still many active vendettas going on in these parts, and Rome would be a dangerous city at such a time.

There have been great goings on here and in Tivoli the last week or so. There’s still so much superstition and folklore here to make Carnaval not just a commercial rake-off but a really potent strange manifestation – beautiful and

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weird and rather frightening (also a good commercial rake-off, of course). I went to a couple of parties earlier on and found myself really caught up in the magic of it all. Such a situation wouldn’t be possible in Australia, where we don’t have this tradition of Popery, wizardry, paganism, symbolism. It would be just comical and rather stupid. But here one can live in the fantastic and grotesque make-believe ...

Have had a fine day today – I had six beautiful new canvases which had taken me some days to prepare (not in terms of a full day’s work but applying coats of preparation and waiting a day for the next coat and so on). Today I took them all out on the terrace and buggered up all the gleaming white surfaces with nasty doodles. Great working in the open air. Two little girls came up with a bunch of violets for me. Violets are growing all over the hillsides now – and occasionally I’d look down at the track that leads to the mill and see a procession of women coming up from the fields with great bundles of daffodils on their heads. Out for an evening walk I met a great brown burly donkey man leading his faggot laden donkey. He had a violet between his teeth! Primavera is really here …

On Sunday afternoon we went to Tivoli to watch the grand Carnaval procession – most of the young folk of the village. Tivoli was seething with people, fun fairs, shooting galleries, music blaring – and on the great famous promenade by the Villa d’Este an immense crowd gathered to watch the floats. Our gang met up with some of our Tivoli friends, we stationed ourselves on the corner by the fountains where we could see up the viale where the floats would appear, watch them come down, see them go round the piazza in three lanes (immensely broad promenade this, like a seaside promenade, but where the balustrade ends is a sheer drop and then miles of great flat plains where one can almost see Rome) and then off down to the old part of town. What terrific things they were! Immense papier mache figures of clowns and butchers, and gargoyles, and animals. Great constructions of gilt and cardboard with whirling fountains, and carrying people dressed in harlequin costumes throwing confetti, pulled on drays. Even a whole Dracula’s castle, peopled with live Draculas in cloaks with hideous teeth (I saw one Dracula take his fiendish fangs out of his

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mouth for a moment, spit meditatively, then replace them and continue his flapping and deviling). These great gaudy things came slowly down the viale, glittering with colour and gilt and spangles. Clowns cavorted, balloons bobbed, confetti went everywhere. It was a heavenly day, soft and warm and brilliantly sunny, with that particular magic that the sun has here. I was almost beside myself with delight. I’ve never seen anything as splendid and vulgar and huge and garish as these Carnaval floats, and what with the confetti and all I really knew I was seeing a great continental festival. So rarely one is able to get completely carried away by something like that … Anyhow, the floats were the start of the festa – the crowd, which had been orderly and Sundayish before that, went wild, everyone throwing confetti, coshing each other with supposedly harmless plastic truncheons which hurt like hell when used in a certain way. We found a shooting gallery where I burst all the balloons and hit every plaster shell (small targets about ¾ inch wide of plaster disks which shatter very satisfactorily when hit) on one side of the booth, to my immense satisfaction. I was given a toy duck as a prize. We did the usual carnival things. After dark the crowd got wilder, the floats came round again all lit up. We all emerged battered and bruised and exhausted (really bruised, the whole thing was a near riot composed of many small real riots) and adjourned to a small roadhouse some miles out and drank rum punch and did some rather enfeebled dancing. But what a day. Glamour and glitter. Great electrical storm raging outside, every few minutes the lights in the village go off. This always happens during a storm or in heavy rain. I patiently light my candle and go on working. There are candle stubs scattered all over every house in Anticoli for this very purpose. Otherwise one just sits in the dark waiting to resume activity and wondering if one is scared of the sound of lightning or not. I decided a long time ago that I am. Great blue blasts of it are ripping about, nearly knocking me off my chair – thunder deafening, and rain nearly breaking the window panes. I shall go to bed soon and cower under the blankets. Saw Ann off to Aix-en-Provence this morning. Poor kid she hated leaving Anticoli. I left her teetering on the steps of the British School … I felt as mean as if I’d put a kitten out in the rain. But she has to go. She has a scholarship waiting for her there ...

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… I’ve applied for an Italian bursary, but can’t expect it to be considered in time to be of much use. A bursary would keep me for a month longer here which would be perfect timing as I shall probably have to be back in London early May, anyway … Work is going very well at present. I’m hardly out of the house these days, and the solitude and peace is very good. I’m much more confident about my paintings now. I hope to have 20 finished to take to London with me. The flat is beginning to look like a high-pressure production belt. But turning out a finished painting is slow work for me. I’m continually having to curb my impatience as I’d like to work very quickly. But if I do my handling becomes far too facile. So, I’m constantly having to check myself up and restrain from making easy gestures that don’t mean anything. But it’s good discipline, and my ideas are gaining in power and intensity because of it … I was going to send some work to the Woodstock Gallery but decided against it … Robert writes that he may call in on his way back from the Olympic skiing … he can probably take some of my paintings back to London with him … Ann is now living in the famous Château Noir at Aix – famous because it contains the studios of famous painters. I’ve forgotten whose studio she’s living in – André Masson, I think. Now I must off and buy paint. I grind all my own colours these days. Saves a fantastic amount of money, and I can get colours and qualities that could never be achieved with commercial paints …

Glad I didn’t post. An entirely new situation has arisen which calls for fast work on my part. Had a letter from Small Mike saying he’s giving up his job with Patris (Atelier Patris, where Stan Jones trained and where I want to be) … as the job’s vacated he very kindly put in a word for me and if I leap to it I can (I hope) dash off to Paris and begin working in Patris Studio as a professional apprentice – and for a wage! Probably not much, but enough to live on … It may not come off – Patris may have dozens of eager beavers wanting to jump in. But the chances are good enough. Oh Lord, if it comes off it will be marvellous – exactly what I’d planned to do. Print with a French master. Go back to London with the prestige of Paris (only a ghost now – much better work being done in London, but it still counts a lot) – and make prints in both London and Paris before I leave. If it doesn’t come off, well, things are as they were, revert to Schedule A, which is to stay in Anticoli and finish work for Scholarship

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(which I’ll finish anyway, but possibly not as highly developed) and then go to London ...

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29th March 1960

It’s on, it’s on – Paris in Spring and a job with Patris! They’re holding it for me and I’m dashing off as soon as I can pack up here. Probably leaving on Saturday. The thought of leaving this primitive Paradise for terrifying glorious decadent Paris is hell, but it’s all too good to miss ... Robert is very kindly going to wait and drive me to Paris and then go off skiing. This saves innumerable train fares and luggage problems. Shall probably arrive in Paris from 6th to 8th April. Shall have a large gathering of my Anticoli friends here before I leave, a big sing and many tears ... Oh hell, I hate leaving. However, I’ll be O.K. in Paris. I know people there …

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Wednesday 13th April 1960

Today was my first day with Atelier Patris, and, oh boy, is it tough work! I’ve been printing solidly for seven hours flat, and after six months lay-off it’s very exhausting. I didn’t expect to be printing immediately (in fact, yesterday I didn’t expect to be able to work for them at all) but Ben the Dutchman (you have a new gallery of names to learn now) who runs the Atelier – Ben gave me a black and white print to do for an American – (lousy thing, too – it’s going to be frustrating printing junk) – I got seven prints from an edition of 25 done by lunchtime – absolutely trembling with nerves – printing is such a tricky business that one minor mistake could ruin a whole edition. I fully expected to pick up the wrong bottle by mistake and flood the stone with acid or something. I certainly didn’t expect the terrific responsibility of an edition on my first day. Anyhow I managed, by taking it slowly, to do seven very good prints, and perfectly clean, too. So, after lunch (in a café next door to the atelier which is in a nice honky-tonk sort of area) Ben gave me all the proofing of Corneille’s

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colour prints. Corneille came in (nice quiet Dutchman – very well-known artist in Paris) and stood over me as I printed. I had to do five different prints – changing stones, changing colours (Ben and Corneille mixed colours, of course – that’s master’s work) – and about five prints from each stone. Naturally, I made some mistakes. I’m not used to their type of presses, and I don’t know where things are kept. But I must have managed reasonably, otherwise I don’t suppose I’d have been told to continue. But, oh my what a day! Can you imagine – from the peace and contemplation of Anticoli erupting into Paris and having to work from 8:30 am to seven at night? Never mind, I’m where I want to be and learning fast – so far so good.

The last couple of days have been a nightmarish chase around Paris trying to get myself a meal ticket. This is very important here. If one is a student at a recognised academy one can get a student restaurant card which enables one to eat at student eating houses – this means a solid meal – not very posh, mind you – for 100 francs, instead of a minimum of 500 francs at a cheap restaurant. So, a student card means one’s meal money lasts about five times as long. Not being a student at an academy, this was difficult for me – also not having a university degree presents difficulties. So, after two days of tramping from office to office, institution to institution, and meeting always with the bloody unhelpfulness that any student meets with (except the British Consul and Australian Embassy who were both charming) I eventually found that the only thing to do was to have a letter from the Cultural Attaché to the Director of the Beaux Arts presenting me as a gift from God to his academy. The Cultural Attaché very kindly sent me this in the mail tonight. So I shall probably become a student of the Beaux Arts in name only – purely so I can eat cheaply. I wouldn’t go near the place to learn anything. Not my cup of tea at all. So that’s done – or almost. Small Mike very helpful here, dragging me round, almost by the scruff of my neck, and bullying people very competently for me. I’d probably have tried charm if left to my own resources, but charm doesn’t go far in Paris – nobody has time for it much – tough joint!

As for the rest, I have a tiny room in 36 George Mandel, about the size of a large wardrobe. This is the most incredible rabbit warren of a place – the front

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wing is immense and old and very solidly rich and respectable (16th arrondissement very respectable area, you’ll be pleased to know – all this avenue is posh and quiet and lined with heavenly chestnut trees – at present in brilliant leaf). The people living in the front wing have bevies of servants who live in this wing, which is 8 stories high and my room is on the 8th storey – 8 flights of stairs to climb up and down. Then narrow tortuous corridors with multitudes of rooms off them.

But the room is very nice – white walls, attic ceiling – skylight window, red-tiled floor, and very clean – even has bright green cushions and an orange shaded reading lamp – and being so incredibly hidden it’s wonderfully peaceful – so the stairs are rather a blessing really. The landlady a very charming wealthy Swedish woman, lives in the posh part. I cook immense stews on my electric ring. But it’s more expensive, eating at home, I can’t afford it much. I’ve only been here two, no three days – all of them until now absolutely feverish and chaotic – trying to get everything finished before beginning work – and yet I feel wonderfully securely settled already. Paris is going to be tough, and tiring, but it’s going to be good, and I’m very happy about it all …

As you can imagine, leaving Anticoli was hell – I wept and wept, and poor old Rinaldi wept, and the family Augusto wept – oh, me. I went out in a flood of tears. Poor old Robert bore this all very patiently. He was staying with Harry and, being a stranger to the circle, couldn’t, and very tactfully didn’t try, to join in on the last two days emoting. But I could tell it was a bit wearing for him and was pleased to get away because of it. We had a magnificent drive up – the Volks (he brought a Volks saloon with him) crammed with my paintings (only one suitcase of clothes and the rest materials). Drove across Italy to Rimini on the Adriatic coast, then up and across again, through Bologna and Faenza to the Mediterranean. Up around the Italian Riviera, the French Riviera (Monaco, Cannes, Nice, Antibes, all the luxury spots). Heavenly sparkling sunshine, heavenly sparkling sea. Marvellous, brilliant places oozing with warmth and glitter and wealth. The only detour we made was to visit the Picasso museum at Antibes. Then on through Fréjus where the terrible floods were not so long ago. Dams broke and killed thousands of people. Still very desolate and ruined

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looking on the plains where the flood broke. Ruined houses, uplifted trees. Tractors and labour gangs still clearing it out – heart breaking place – on to Aix- en-Provence to visit Ann. The first real stop, I was delighted to see her again, and we had a very happy reunion. She has a lovely studio in the famous Château Noir (I’m sure I told you) – three rooms and kitchen and the classical view of Mt St Victoire (as painted by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir etc) on one side and her courtyard, grassy and blowing with wild iris was Cézanne’s old courtyard – his studio is diagonally opposite hers across this courtyard, with the tree in the middle that he painted – (We sat under the tree having a picnic lunch of salad and olives and cheese and chestnut cream in warm Provençal sunlight) – His old studio has a plaque over the door and a bronze bust of him outside – Very historic and rather romantic – (Usually I get up in arms about the oohs and ahs of the “Elizabeth slept here” school) – But this gave me a helluva kick. The whole place was so familiar through the paintings one has seen so often. Like the Giotto part of Italy that is so familiar because one has seen Giotto’s paintings of it. That was a long time ago, but it’s basically still there – the light, the shape of the trees. The Provençal connection is much closer in time of course, only a few decades ago, or half a century at most. Then on, heading up through the Loire valley at a terrific pace – no, not really, cruising at sixty when possible – but driving long hours – to Paris. The last evening, we stayed at Fontainebleau and sat in the twilight drinking coffee and gazing at the superbly beautiful palace through the dusk. Then Paris and Robert dropped me off ... Then he went off to Austria to ski and I began my Parisian whirl ... childhood images (have) suddenly become a reality. But the funny thing is that they are of secondary importance when they happen. How often I used to say to you – one day I’ll be in a garret in Paris. Well, here I am – the childhood dream itself. But the dream is only in passing now. These things have happened naturally, and one hardly considers one’s situation as being romantic, or extraordinary or even wish fulfilling. I happen to be here, because I’m doing something here. But still, it’s funny … Bed, and rest the aching muscles.

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Saturday morning – ah heaven – lying in bed like any other honest weekly worker who has to get up early other days. Mind you it won’t be for long – I have to go to the American Express by midday and then over to the atelier – as Patris says I can do work for myself during the weekends. This is very nice. I can possibly get an edition ready for printing and send proofs to people who might be interested instead of just trying to rake up finance for an edition on the strength of my position with Patris.

Ben has been away since Easter in Toulon … and Patris has been there every day. He’s a terrific person – only about 28 and already a big name. Tremendous energy and wit. A real bright boy. I like him very much and he seems to like me and think I’m working well. He’s been teaching me personally all week. We’ve been proofing a Manessier the last few days – Manessier is very fussy – his proofs are covered in explanations and alterations. I had to draw up two new stones for slight touches of colour here and there – And we had to alter the colour keys. We spent yesterday morning mixing colour for the edition. As it’s for 200 prints you can imagine what a terrific amount one has to mix – seven colours. Patris gets me going and then buzzes next door to his film studio and I keep on. I’m still working fairly slowly as I’m not as confident as I hope to be later, but Patris seems to be happy with me. “Très, très bien” when he’s pleased – when he’s not so pleased “Ah chérie”!

The times I like best are lunchtimes. We either go to the bistro round the corner which is called Madame Irma’s and is full of eccentric people – workmen, mainly, rather Anticoli-like in their sense of fun, as somebody’s always cavorting or making people laugh. Or we go to the market and buy things and have a picnic lunch in the courtyard of the atelier – cream cheese and pâté and curried eggs with beer. Heaven sitting in the sun with two chickens in a cage for company – Patris has promised when we finish the Manessiers he’ll take us all for a picnic in the country. The other night Small Mike called over to see about an edition he’s doing for Erskine – after work we went to St Michel – Mike, Saffo and I – and bought pigs trotters and wine and the long Parisian loaves of bread and cheese – and took our food down to the banks of the Seine – wonderful long rosy twilight and we sat under the budding trees with Nôtre Dame on our left and the sun setting behind the Invalides dome

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and the big slow river at our feet (a real river, the Seine – not like the mucky yellow Tiber) and ate and drank. I’ve never been so content in my life – Paris is such a beautiful city, all silver-grey, and the spaces and squares are so elegant. One can be freer and happier here if one is poor than in London.

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2nd May

At present engaged in writing con-man letters, to various people who might buy editions if pressed … now about to go to bed, as I have to be at the atelier at 8:30. You’d never know your lazy daughter! Start work at 8 am or then abouts – ½ hour lunch – finish atelier work about 6:30 pm then work on my own prints till 8 pm sometimes later. Which makes a roughly 11½ hour day. – Eh bien! But I’m thriving on it, feeling great, full of bounce. I’m settling in well – beginning to work more consistently, and more relaxed.

The first few days when I tried to register the paper on the stone my hands were trembling so much (not only nerves, but rolling and printing is fast, energetic work, and to stop and try minute precision placing is very difficult when one’s out of condition) – Patris shook his head mournfully and said “Ah, chérie, plus tranquillement!” – But I was anything but tranquil – mostly, I think, the change in tempo from Anticoli to Paris – from calm and unhurry to high- pressure and the anxiety of working for somebody else in new surroundings.

Corneille had the opening of his show at a posh gallery on Friday night ... he’s a nice chap and has been very kind to me. He seems to think I’ve worked well for him (which is kindness – I tried damn hard but the standard wasn’t really up to scratch) and tells people I do good work which helps me a lot. Saffo and I went to the vernissage (traditionally, the “varnishing” of pictures – now merely the opening of a show, though the old term is kept up – rather nice) and it was full of chi-chi people and chi-chi dogs and – dammit – nothing to drink. There’s usually a free grog or two and I was most put out to find none.

Saffo knew a lot of people and introduced me to a lot – but I didn’t like anyone much and walked out as soon as I could, leaving Saffo expecting the world to turn rosy any minute, which is a great failing of his – only because it so rarely does. However, Corneille was very charming and didn’t forget to chat to

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his printers, which he could easily have done on such an occasion. So much for openings. They’re all the same.

10th May

Thought I’d posted this. Feeling rather weary at present, we’ve had two very bad days in the atelier. Everything gone wrong – ending with a stone breaking in half at the beginning of a final printing of a Manessier edition of 200 prints – and the big electric press breaking down – or at least the press breaking down which cracked the stone. Our best printer is ill and all his work is held up – the press will take two days to repair – the big stone costs about 15,000 francs. Ben came back from Toulon … we’ve had a run of exasperating clients who don’t know one end of a lithograph from another and give us a lot of extra work. Patris is extraordinarily patient for such a mercurial person as he is – but yesterday morning he could hardly contain himself for rage and exasperation. I went with him to the repair shop for the electric press, and when we arrived we found the whole place had been burnt down – just black timbers, a huge hole and the miserable little owner in the middle of it with a couple of pieces of new machinery. It seemed to sum up the past two days – it was so awful that we began to laugh and felt much better – still very sympathetic for the little man.

Atelier buzzing now – family problems almost over and things running better (it’s just like a big family here) – Patris is happy now that Ben is back and running the atelier. He can go and do his films. His film studio is next door in the same building and we have streams of odd camera men wandering in and out and pinching the printing equipment for their own extraordinary ends. They are making very interesting experiments with light – moving light patterns and organic forms made by chemicals reacting against each other and being filmed as they develop. Also found a new little world in crystal growths (Not new at all really – but the way they work it is new) – some potash crystals had formed in the bottom of an etching jar that had dried up. Most marvellous structures like trees growing from a very slender stem and branching out in flower shapes.

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16th May

Dearest People,

Miserable, pallid and very weary tonight. My mousehole is rather airless on hot nights – last night, for some reason it was worse than usual – probably a very still night – and I slept very little – also began thinking too much which is always a mistake – I , then got myself wound up and spent a miserable night with mind racing and hot sweaty body. Takes it out of one next day – usually I sleep very well. Had a very boring man to print for this afternoon – pedantic, conceited and lecherous – and a lousy painter. He has kept the atelier waiting for months as he had an edition printed, then asked for more alterations, then didn’t come back – the stones were badly needed for other work and everyone’s been cursing him. Ooh, what a wretched man! He kept fussing and saying corny things – the colour “more mysterious, more pulsating” – in other words more blue – Silly arse! Red is red and blue is blue – green-blue, violet-blue, light blue. I’ve never heard a real painter talk such rubbish. Kept interfering, telling me this wouldn’t work, that wasn’t right – till in the end I could hardly do anything I was so rattled. Then I had to work till 9 tonight finishing the prints I would have done this afternoon – now I’m buggered. Blast the wretch! But this morning was good – I prepared and treated a very difficult stone for Corneille which had been very troublesome in the drawing stage. Managed to make it stable and kept all the range of delicate washes and textures which everyone had predicted wouldn’t print. Took some phenomenally good trial proofs and Corneille is delighted. He thinks I’m a better printer than Patris, which is hardly true. But Patris isn’t very interested these days and he is usually in too much of a hurry – “Vite, vite – Paf, paf, paf – Tac-tac-tac” is his way of demonstrating things to people. Everything goes Tac-tac-tac.

And yesterday I had a wonderful afternoon working with Sugaï. He is very well known in Paris, and as I’ve probably said before, a real artist, not a picture merchant. He is Japanese, looks like the old idiot tramp, but is one of the most gentle sympathetic people I’ve met. We have great fun together. He is doing a series of tiny lithographs about 10 inches square – just single sample images with two colours. Lovely things – and we worked like heavens

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yesterday, painting dozens of these babies. Each image on a separate stone – each one a separate colour – and you can imagine the work in processing, swapping them round and changing colours for each print. But with Sugaï it’s an exciting adventure – mixing colour is like hunting it, you have to pounce on just the right shade before it vanishes – and the images are incredibly delicate. Sugaï doesn’t tit-arse. He is very decisive and when a thing is right it’s right – which is a great help. We finished about eight o’clock last night. He took me out for a much-needed coffee, and had the whole of Madame Irma’s in a dither with his needle trick – (I told you about Madame Irma’s – the bistro next door which is just like the Anticoli bar?) – Pushing a needle through his forehead and bringing it out the back of his head – very clever sleight-of-hand.

I think I have the plum job in the atelier, really. I am usually given the essais (trial proofing) to do – sometimes with the artist, sometimes not – and small editions. So, I’m saved the deadly monotony of doing huge editions and my experience is constantly varied. In the trial proofing, colour is decided on, alterations are made to the stone if necessary, all sorts of odd processing has to go on to make it stable for the edition printing, and five examples are printed. One of which is the “Bon à tirer” – which is the key print for the edition. So, I get all the interest and none of the killing 400-a-day grind. This situation may not last. I shall probably have to do some slogging sometime soon. The essai proofing is good in another way, too. It improves my French, as I have to talk and discuss things with the artists. Also, I meet everybody and get to know them over their work (which can be boring when you get silly asses!).

My own work is coming on slowly – I work in the early mornings and sometimes at night – and weekends – spend all weekend at the atelier – last Sunday was a crazy day. Saffo was working on a huge painting – Mike came over to print some proofs – Ben was pulling one of the electric presses apart – I was working on gouaches, and Patris was in his film studio (only cut off by partitions and black curtains) playing the soundtrack over and over again, backwards, forwards, fast, slow – grunts, screeches, jazz, voices. The composer was there as well and the studio was utter bedlam. Sounded as if Martians were let loose. We all gather for meals in the tiny courtyard. There is a very good

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cheap market close by and we buy masses of cheap vegetables and things and cook quite wonderful meals over a tiny gas ring. One thing I admire about the Parisians is that they have the art of stopping to enjoy themselves. They are damned hard-working people, but they can stop and have fun. The English are very weak on this point. I’ve never had this feeling of being alive every moment in England.

Big moves about to go on here. Patris wants to get out of the atelier altogether now. Having built it up, made its name, and got it running, he has apparently decided that it holds nothing further for him and wants to concentrate on films ...

Sunday (22nd May 1960)

Life is one big rush from morn to night – oh the peace and eternity of Anticoli! But it’s great fun and good to be in the thick of it again – I just get desperate sometimes for my old Italian hills and the clouds and rocks and still nights. But that’s a world that’s finished – it’s outside this century – and it will soon be submerged in a great flood tide of plastic and petrol pumps and hygiene – God help us!

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Appendix C : Gallery A catalogue

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Schipper, Kristofer M. The Taoist Body. [Le corps taoïste]. Translated by Karen C. Duval. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1993 (1982). Scolari, Massimo. Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective. [Disegno Obliquo]. Translated by Jenny Condie Palandri. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2012. Scully, Vincent. The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. Trinity University Press, 2013. Semper, Gottfried. Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Settis, Salvatore. Giorgione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Smith, Bernard. Australian Painting, 1788-1970. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971. Stewart, Susan. "On the Threshold of the Visible." In The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, 159-66. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. "What Thought Is Like: The Sea and the Sky." In The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, 99-110. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Stoichita, Victor I. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Tallman, Susan. The Contemporary Print: From Pre-Pop to Postmodern. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. 3 vols. Vol. 1, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978 (1872-83). Vischer, Robert. "On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics." Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, 89-124. Santa Monica, California: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994 (1872). Vittoz, René. L'ivresse De Noé: Drame En Trois Actes Et Un Prologue. Payot, 1932. Weil, Simone. "The Iliad, Poem of Might." In The Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas, 153-83. Wakefield, Rhode Island & London: Moyer Bell, 1977 (1941).

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Wells, K. L. H. Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Wölfflin, Heinrich. "Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture." Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, 149-90. Santa Monica, California: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994 (1886). Yashiro, Yukio. 2000 Years of Japanese Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1958. Yohe, James, Sam Hunter, and Hans Hofmann. Hans Hofmann. New York: Rizzoli, 2002.

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Notes

1 Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, 1788-1970 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971), 396 & 425. Andrew Sayers, Australian Art, Oxford History of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 183. Drawing in Australia: Drawings, Water-Colours, Pastels and Collages from the 1770's to the 1980's (Oxford University Press, USA, 1989), 255. 2 Sasha Grishin, Contemporary Australian Printmaking: An Interpretative History (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1994), 80. 3 Deborah Clark, The Drawings of Janet Dawson (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1996). 4 Christine France, Janet Dawson Survey (Bathurst, NSW: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 2006). 5 Margaret Plant, "Janet Dawson," Art and Australia 17, no. 4 (winter 1980). Mary Eagle, "Sightings," in Radical Revisionism: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art, ed. Rex Butler (Brisbane: IMA Publishing, 2005). Deborah Edwards, "Janet Dawson: On Curiosity, Ambiguity and Attachment," in Janet Dawson Survey, ed. Christine France (Bathurst, NSW: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 2006). 6 Hazel de Berg, Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965 (Canberra: Oral History Section, National Library of Australia, 1965). 7 In March 2020 I contacted the NGV to see if they held any additional information about this drawing, but I have not received an answer to my query as the curatorial staff have been working off-site during the Covid-19 pandemic. 8 The lithograph made in Paris is less useful than the other works, as it appears to have been a preliminary experimental print, rather than a finished work. 9 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 82. 10 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 83. 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Working Notes," in The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968 (1964)), 257. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins [Mémoires d'aveugle: L'autoportrait et autres ruines], trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (1990)), 45. 12 Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 32. 13 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [La poetique de l'espace], trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014 (1958)), 1. 14 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective [L'Origine de la perspective], trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 1994 (1987)), 80.

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15 E H Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1988 (1959)), 174-75. 16 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting [Théorie du /nuage/], trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002 (1972)), 202-03. 17 Susan Stewart, "On the Threshold of the Visible," in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 162-64. 18 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 69. 19 George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959 (1947)), 64. 20 Appendix B, 143. 21 Yukio Yashiro, 2000 Years of Japanese Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958), 192-93. 22 Dore Ashton, Yes...But: A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 94. 23 Appendix C, 172. 24 James Yohe, Sam Hunter, and Hans Hofmann, Hans Hofmann (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), 43. 25 France, Janet Dawson Survey, 11. 26 Kirsty Grant and Cathy Leahy, On Paper: Australian Prints and Drawings in the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003), 74. 27 Clark, The Drawings of Janet Dawson, unpaginated. Edwards, "Janet Dawson: On Curiosity, Ambiguity and Attachment," 30. 28 Appendix B, 118 & 145. 29 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 82. 30 de Berg, Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965. 31 Mel Gooding, Ceri Richards (Moffat, Scotland: Cameron & Hollis, 2002), 133. 32 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 80. 33 Gooding, Ceri Richards, 135. 34 Plant, "Janet Dawson," 337-38. 35 Christine France, "Extracts from an Essay on Janet Dawson," in Janet Dawson Survey, ed. Christine France (Bathurst, NSW: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 2006), 13. John McDonald, "Destination Unknown," The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 2007. 36 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 80 & Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 110. 37 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 110.

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38 Clark, The Drawings of Janet Dawson, unpaginated. Edwards, "Janet Dawson: On Curiosity, Ambiguity and Attachment," 35. Grant and Leahy, On Paper: Australian Prints and Drawings in the National Gallery of Victoria, 74. 39 de Berg, Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965. 40 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 176-77. 41 Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 12. Melanie Klein, "Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse (1929)," in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 92. 42 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 82-83. 43 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 87. 44 Appendix B, 139. 45 Appendix A, Interview 1, 1 February 2020, 68. 46 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [Die Traumdeutung], trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991 (1899)), 307 & 471. 47 Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1989), 158-62. 48 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 25-57. 49 Robert Vischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics," in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, California: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994 (1872)), 92. 50 Heinrich Wölfflin, "Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture," ibid. (1994 (1886)), 151. 51 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception], trans. Donald A. Landes (London & New York: Routledge, 2012 (1945)), 261. 52 de Berg, Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965. 53 K. L. H. Wells, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 70-73 & 92. 54 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 76. 55 Eagle, "Sightings," 248. 56 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 75. 57 Gottfried Semper, Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103-06. Alina A Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 41.

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58 Wells, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York, 13-15. 59 Yve-Alain Bois, "Piet Mondrian," New York City"," Critical Inquiry 14, no. 2 (1988): 270-71. 60 Merleau-Ponty, "Working Notes," 133. 61 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 80. 62 François Chapon, Rouault: Oeuvre Gravé (Monte Carlo: Éditions André Sauret, 1978), 197. 63 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 81. 64 Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, trans. Shirley Jennings (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), 24. 65 Appendix B, 142. Dawson made (and exhibited) a number of etchings at both the Slade and the Central School. In response to my inquiries, the curator of the art collection at Central Saint Martins advised me however that they have no works by Janet Dawson. 66 Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 3 vols., vol. 1 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978 (1872-83)), 469. 67 Jenny Bell, "Look Again: The Work of Janet Dawson in the Collection of the National Gallery of Australia," Art Monthly Australia, no. 259 (May 2013): 39. 68 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993 (1945)), 74. 69 Appendix B, 148. 70 Meyer Schapiro, "The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still Life," in Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978 (1968)), 6. Appendix B, 140. 71 Appendix B, 157. 72 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 88. 73 Victor I Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 18. 74 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age [La couleur éloquente: rhétorique et peinture à l'âge classique], trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1993 (1989)), 120. 75 John Hay, "Boundaries and Surfaces of Self and Desire in Yuan Painting," in Boundaries in China, ed. John Hay (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 143. 76 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1990), 151. Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 21-30.

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77 Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting, 64. James Cahill, The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1996), 189-90. 78 The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 75. 79 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 70. 80 Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective [Disegno Obliquo], trans. Jenny Condie Palandri (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2012), 354. 81 Ibid., 348. 82 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 87-88. 83 Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," 67. 84 Vischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics," 101. 85 Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin, 18-20. 86 Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting, 61-62. 87 The New American Painting, (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959). 88 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 109. 89 Anna C Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1989), 7. 90 de Berg, Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965. She reiterated this in her 1996 interview with Gary Catalano and in my third interview. 91 Gary Catalano, "A Natural History," Art and Australia 34, no. 3: 341. 92 Clark, The Drawings of Janet Dawson, unpaginated. 93 France, "Extracts from an Essay on Janet Dawson," 13. 94 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, 54. 95 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 11. 96 The World of Perception [Causeries], trans. Oliver Davis (London & New York: Routledge Classics, 2008 (1948)), 54. 97 Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 154. 98 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 193. 99 Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, 31-35. 100 Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 155-58.

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101 John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China Institute in America, 1985). 102 NGA accession number 93.1268.14. 103 Telephone conversation with Janet Dawson 25 May 2020. 104 John Hay, "The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?," in Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 44. 105 Kristofer M Schipper, The Taoist Body [Le corps taoïste], trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1993 (1982)). 106 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 41. 107 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 44. 108 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 92-93. 109 Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining - the Chiasm," 146. 110 Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art, 55-56. 111 Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining - the Chiasm," 134. 112 Hay, "Boundaries and Surfaces of Self and Desire in Yuan Painting," 156. 113 Mary Jacobus, "Flaying the Mind: Milner and the Myth of Marsyas," in The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 130. 114 Vischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics," 95. 115 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 78. 116 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 110. 117 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 106. 118 It is likely that Dawson viewed both of these works when she was in London and Paris. A large reproduction of a Rubens painting hangs in Dawson’s studio today. 119 Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 30-32. 120 Appendix B, 156. Simone Weil, "The Iliad, Poem of Might," in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (Wakefield, Rhode Island & London: Moyer Bell, 1977 (1941)). 121 Appendix B, 140 & 149. 122 Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," in The Kristeva Reader: Julia Kristeva, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 (1979)), 191-92. 123 Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (Trinity University Press, 2013), 26. Schipper, The Taoist Body, 122 & 29.

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124 Mary Jacobus, "Incorruptable Milk: Breast-Feeding and the French Revolution," in First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 216-17. 125 Linda Nochlin, "Some Women Realists," in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 91-93. 126 Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art, 75. 127 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (1786-88) [Italienische Reise], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1968 (1817)), 13. 128 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 271. 129 de Berg, Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965. 130 Appendix B, 158-59. 131 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 107. 132 Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, 71. 133 Appendix B, 164. 134 Pat Gilmour, Artists at Curwen: A Celebration of the Gift of Artists' Prints from the Curwen Studio (London: Tate Gallery, 1977), 97-110. 135 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art [La vie des formes], trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992 (1934)), 34. 136 NGA accession number 2003.439. 137 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 278. 138 Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), 59. 139 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 91. 140 Quote by a Ch’ing master in Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting, 72. 141 The New American Painting, 36-39. 142 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 109. Appendix C. 143 Interview 2, 29 February 2020, Appendix A, 82. 144 France, "Extracts from an Essay on Janet Dawson," 13. 145 Alan McCulloch, "Light, Color and Symbols," The Herald, 16 May 1961. 146 France, "Extracts from an Essay on Janet Dawson," 13. 147 Grant and Leahy, On Paper: Australian Prints and Drawings in the National Gallery of Victoria, 74. 148 Edwards, "Janet Dawson: On Curiosity, Ambiguity and Attachment," 34. 149 Hay, "Boundaries and Surfaces of Self and Desire in Yuan Painting," 145. 150 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 95. 151 Smith, Australian Painting, 1788-1970, 425. 187

152 Appendix B, 148. 153 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 92. 154 Susan Tallman, The Contemporary Print: From Pre-Pop to Postmodern (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), 29. 155 Franck T. Gribling, Corneille (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1972), 13. 156 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 165. 157 Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 66. 158 Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement [L’air et les songes, essai sur l'imagination du mouvement], trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas, Texas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988 (1943)), 201. 159 Julia Kristeva, "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 243-44. 160 Oskar Bätschmann, Giovanni Bellini (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 212. 161 Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," 62. 162 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Chatto & Windus, 1973 (1930)), 46-47. 163 Julia Kristeva, "Giotto's Joy," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 225. 164 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours [Die Farbenlehre], trans. Charles L Eastlake (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1967 (1810)), 311. 165 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), 61. Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 45. 166 Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle [La flamme d'une chandelle], trans. Joni Caldwell (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988 (1961)), 1. 167 Edwards, "Janet Dawson: On Curiosity, Ambiguity and Attachment," 31. 168 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter [L'Eau et les rêves, essai sur l'imagination de la matiére], trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, Texas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1983 (1942)), 45-70. 169 Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 74. 170 Ibid., 168. 171 Stewart, "What Thought Is Like: The Sea and the Sky," 100. 172 Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 108. 173 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 97. 174 Appendix B, 148. 175 John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 70.

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176 Goethe, Theory of Colours, 20-25. 177 Vischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics," 96. 178 Carl Gustav Jung, Jung: Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Storr (London: Fontana, 1983), 87. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 139. 179 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 75 & 91. 180 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 92. 181 Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 54- 55. 182 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 91. 183 Interview 3, 1 March 2020, Appendix A, 109. 184 Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 110. 185 Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 168. 186 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 47. 187 Interview 1, 1 February 2020, Appendix A, 72-73. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust [Faust: eine tragödie], trans. Sir Theodore Martin, Everyman's Library (London: Dent, 1954 (1826)), 14. 188 Appendix B, 137. 189 Salvatore Settis, Giorgione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 136-38. 190 Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, 65. 191 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 51. 192 Plant, "Janet Dawson," 344. 193 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999 (1984)), 12. 194 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 13. 195 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 360. 196 France, "Extracts from an Essay on Janet Dawson," 13. 197 Plant, "Janet Dawson," 344. 198 Clark, The Drawings of Janet Dawson, unpaginated. Edwards, "Janet Dawson: On Curiosity, Ambiguity and Attachment," 38. 199 Goethe, Faust, 14. 200 René Vittoz, L'ivresse De Noé: Drame En Trois Actes Et Un Prologue (Payot, 1932).

189