Latest news with #TheField
Irish Independent
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Seán McGinley: ‘It was inevitable... but we were dancing around each other for a long time before we actually got together'
Actor Seán McGinley (69) lives in Dublin with his wife, actress Marie Mullen, with whom he has two daughters. McGinley has appeared in numerous theatre, film and TV productions, including 'The Field', 'Michael Collins', 'Braveheart', 'Family' and 'The Butcher Boy'.
Hypebeast
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Is Daniel Caesar Teasing a New Album?
Summary Daniel Caesarseems to be cooking something up. After recently contributing toBlood Orange's 'The Field' comeback track, Caesar appears to be plotting a grand return of his own; aside from a two-pack withRex Orange Countythat dropped this past Valentine's Day, Caesar has been quiet in terms of solo music since his most recent album,NEVER ENOUGH,in April of 2023. But that's about to change … Caesar's new project is presumably titledSon of Spergy,the name used throughout Caesar's recent social media trailer and the URL of the album'sofficial website, which currently houses an embedded video of the trailer below as well as pre-save links to the project. In the trailer, he also tagsBon Iver,Clairo,Dev Hynes,Sampha, Rex Orange County, and 646yf4t. He first shared a 'trailer' of sorts on his Instagram feed (after clearing everything else from his grid), which also comes overlain with a lengthy message. 'I'm trying to write a letter announcing the album, but I want it to be profound and clever. I have this secret desire to think and express a thought that's never been thought before. But alas,' it begins. 'When I was little, any time my dad was disappointed in me or felt as though I needed motivation (or he wanted me to understand him, which I didn't at the time), he would tell me his carefully curated but true origin story. He would tell me of the glory days of the Jamaica tourism industry and how he would sing dinner music at Doctor's Cave Beach to foreigners from all over the world. He told me how a friendly couple from Canada heard him sing and brought him to Canada to sing on 3ABN (an Adventist TV station). This would spark his love for the country, and later, he would go on to move there and meet my mother. He would tell me these stories and I would listen uninterestedly due to having heard them 1000 times. He would warn me of the dangers this world had to offer, seemingly pleasant but in fact fleeting, and would encourage me to center God in my life.' It closes out with: 'Everything is vanity. Family is everything. Be truthful and forthright in your dealings. Never forget that god is the only eternal measuring stick for morality. I am nothing, but in my flesh I am Spergy's Son, and in my spirit I am God's.' Stay tuned as more information on the new album arises.
Irish Examiner
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Denis Lehane: Richard Harris exhibition recharged my batteries
Farming for me, was learned, not from fancy books or from the wise words of a Teagasc adviser. No. I learned my farming the hard way. I learned it from TV, the movies and idle chat after Mass on a Sunday morning. A lot more farming was learned while holding a pool cue down in Bealnamorrive pub on a Friday night, than was ever picked up in Moorepark. Call me old-fashioned, call me blind to the modern world, call me deaf to modern trends, but I think far too much emphasis is placed on classrooms. The most important lessons in life are usually learned in the quarest of places. Back in the 1970s, when farmers ruled the world, and when RTÉ had the good sense to broadcast classic rural soaps like 'The Riordans', I learned many things about the land. I learned that wise old farmers, like Tom Riordan, usually wore grey hats and spoke very slowly. And later on, from Glenroe, I learned that you didn't have to be a genius to be a farmer, or to get married to a fine woman like Biddy. In fact, all you really needed to do was say words like "Well holy God!" I also learned that Joe Lynch, who hailed from the heart of Cork City could pass for a farmer, if given a convincing limp, a few dirty eggs, and the right cap. Glenroe gave me a great grounding in farming and in life. But it was from Richard Harris and his portrayal of The Bull McCabe in the movie The Field that I learned the most of all. Jamie, Damian, and Jared Harris viewing an exhibit at the launch of 'From Dickie to Richard — Richard Harris: The Role of a Lifetime', at the Hunt Museum in Limerick. Picture: Alan Place Richard Harris should have received an Oscar for his efforts — or at the very least an all-star award. But alas, he received very little. And this was shabby treatment for a man in his finest hour. Harris was brilliant, we will never see his likes again. Anyhow, when a current exhibition opened recently in Limerick, dedicated to the great Harris, it was no surprise to find me biting at the bit to go. I was like a hungry suckler calf bawling for the pap long before the doors opened. And when they finally opened, I rushed in like a bullock galloping into a meadow of freshly-grown grass. I was in my element. To say I was excited about the exhibition would be an understatement. The Harris exhibition was better than any farm walk for me. Harris and the Bull McCabe are to farming what Pelé is to soccer, or Pavarotti is to fine dining. Granted, The Bull was a little rough around the edges, but sure, even in the finest paintings you will find a chip or two, if you look closely enough. The Bull could also be abrupt at the table, and of course, not forgetting the murder. Yerra The Bull was far from perfect. I won't deny that. But sure, who in farming is without his or her share of faults? Let him who is without sin cast the first stone into the transport box. What makes The Bull so special in farming is his passion for the land. It's as simple as that. It was a passion that overshadowed everything else. And Harris in The Field gave us this passion in spades. Farming without passion is like a tractor without diesel. You are going nowhere without it. You are a spluttering failure. And, while you need a lot of things to farm successfully, if you don't have a passion for the job, you are wasting your time. The Harris exhibition in the Hunt Museum in Limerick had me spellbound from the moment I entered the building. And when I returned here to my farm in Kilmichael, I tackled my pike and hitched up to my wheelbarrow with renewed vigour. I was ready once again for whatever the land could throw at me. Like a flat battery after getting a recharge, I was energised for farming and was more than ready to take on the field. 'From Dickie to Richard — Richard Harris: The Role of a Lifetime' continues at the Hunt Museum until November 16, 2025.
Sydney Morning Herald
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Janet Dawson was told to ‘stick to one' thing. Instead, she broke all the rules
The first thing that strikes you about Janet Dawson is her voice, deep and resonant, a voice from another era. But the artist, aged 90, is not at all stuffy. 'I'm a lucky old bat,' she says by way of introduction when we meet at her home on a sprawling bush property in Ocean Grove on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula. Dawson lives in a low-slung, 1970s modernist home with exposed brick walls and long rows of large windows that look onto eucalypts, shrubs and lawn. Her studio, or 'pod' as she likes to call it, is in a sheltered corner of the garden. Clad in corrugated iron, the studio is crammed with paintings and drawings, some finished, some not, Dawson's art books, and remnants of her former life in rural New South Wales. Above the creative clutter rises an incongruously giant white sculpture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse that Dawson bought from a nearby furniture warehouse. 'We've got to find a home for Mickey and Minnie because I love them so much,' Dawson says, her intensely brown eyes flashing with a hint of mischief, just like the photos of her as a younger artist. I can tell this will be fun. But the interview almost didn't happen. Dawson was in hospital recently after a fall. She's recovered remarkably well and sits comfortably in her armchair, ready to chat about her six-decade-plus career as an artist, print-maker and organic farmer ahead of her times. I visit her on a sunny winter's morning ahead of the first major retrospective of her work, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on July 19, a recognition long overdue. Dawson made her name in the 1960s as a superstar of abstraction, one of only three women included in the National Gallery of Victoria's landmark 1968 exhibition The Field. One of the key works in that exhibition, Rollascape 2, will be shown in the AGNSW retrospective. It's big, bold and yellow, a series of exuberant curves that unfurl for three luscious metres. 'That's one of my favourite paintings,' Dawson says as I show her an image of it on my laptop. 'I think it works very well, and the fact that it means absolutely nothing is terrific.' Dawson doesn't play by the rules, never has. As a younger artist, she'd often be pressed by critics to explain the 'meaning' of her abstract works. She'd patiently respond, in her cultivated tones, that 'meaning' didn't reside in the story a painting told, but in a painting's shapes and colours, and the emotions and sensations it provoked. When Rollascape 2 was exhibited again at the NGV in The Field Revisited in 2018, Dawson described it as 'an expression of a painting trying to escape from the prison of the square'. That splendidly vigorous image could equally apply to the artist herself. Dawson has escaped categorisation, followed her own artistic instinct, regardless of fashion. When American critic Clement Greenberg visited Australia in the 1960s, he told her to 'stick to one' thing. She ignored the advice. 'One of the great strengths of her work is that she didn't conform,' says exhibition curator Denise Mimmocchi, the AGNSW's acting head of Australian art. That it has taken so long for a state gallery to stage a retrospective of her work may have something to do with Dawson's resistance to neat definition. Her gender, and eventual retreat from the centres of art in Sydney and Melbourne may also have played a part, Mimmocchi says. After coming to prominence as a pioneer of abstraction, Dawson faded from the limelight as she moved towards realism in works inspired by the natural world. The shift coincided with her move to Binalong in regional New South Wales in the 1970s with her late husband Michael Boddy, a Yorkshire-born actor and playwright. Out bush, Dawson didn't for a moment miss the art cliques of Melbourne and Sydney. 'Oh, they were awful,' Dawson tells me, pulling a face. 'It's nothing to do with artists, it's all to do with …' She completes the sentence with a series of comical gestures that indicate the tedious snobbishness of it all, sending me into fits of laughter. We're sitting in a small back room of the rambling house that she shares with her extended family – niece Penny, Penny's partner Lee, and Dawson's sister-in-law Jill, wife of Dawson's late brother Cameron. He'd be pleased to see them all here listening in as Dawson tells stories about her adventure-filled life. It was Cameron's vision to build a house with enough rooms for several generations to live comfortably together. Dawson's works are scattered throughout. In the room where we sit, there's a buoyant still life of a leafy, broken-off branch of a loquat tree brimming with velvety-yellow fruit that spill across a bustling domestic table. At the bottom right of the composition, we glimpse the artist's hand capturing the moment. The pastel work was created at Binalong, at Dawson and Boddy's rural property, Scribble Rock, where the couple lived for almost 40 years. In style, the loquat painting couldn't be more different to Rollascape 2, and yet both works share a sense of energy, motion and light. Mimmocchi tells me that even when Dawson was 'meant to be doing colour field painting, which was all about the flat surface, she instilled elements of light and painterliness into her aesthetic'. Featuring more than 80 works, the AGNSW retrospective reveals an artist of versatility, skill, and moods, unafraid to range across artistic styles, from the cascading abstraction of Rollascape 2, to the meditative realism of Moon at dawn through a telescope (2000), to glorious still lifes such as Scribble Rock pomegranates (1999). What first inspired Dawson to take up art? 'Very simply, my mother,' Dawson tells me. 'She was gifted. When she was a young girl she thought that she would be an artist, but then of course she met my father and became a wife instead.' Dawson was born in Sydney in 1935, to parents Olga and Kingsley. Before she had children, Olga had attended Julian Ashton's esteemed Sydney Art School, whose alumni include William Dobell and Joshua Smith. With her knowledge of art, Olga recognised her daughter's unusual talent and encouraged it. She even sought the advice of state gallery directors, including then AGNSW head Will Ashton who recommended supplying the child with paper and pencils – 'no rulers, no rubbers, no copying' – and leaving her be. 'I loved drawing,' Dawson says. 'I drew and drew and drew. She used to give me big papers and charcoals. It was normal in our house that I always lay on the floor and drew, and this, I think, was intended to give me confidence right at the beginning. All my gift comes from my mother.' They just thought I was a silly little tweet, you know, dear little thing. When the family moved to Melbourne in 1940, Dawson began Saturday morning art classes with the realist painter Harold Septimus Power, at his studio on the corner of Elizabeth and Little Collins Street. Dawson was the only child in the class, aged 11. 'He was a lovely, funny old fella,' Dawson says. 'He was a very good artist, wonderful training. To me, his studio was the beginning of my art work. There was this little easel – it was really funny – the other big artists all around me. I just remember it being very comical. They just thought I was a silly little tweet, you know, dear little thing. No, I shouldn't be rude. They respected that a child was to be taught early.' Dawson went on to study at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. A tonalist self-portrait created in the early 1950s while she was a student there, depicts a poised, beautiful young woman, silk scarf knotted around her neck, confidently meeting the viewer's gaze. (Dawson would later model for Italian-born fashion photographer Bruno Benini in a series of studio portraits and shoots in Melbourne.) In 1956, Dawson won the NGV Travelling Scholarship, another significant step in her career. She studied at London's Slade School of Fine Art, where, frustrated with her attempts at painting, she began to explore lithography and printmaking. Her passion for painting was reignited when she saw The New American Painting exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1959, on tour from New York's Museum of Modern Art, and featuring the work of abstractionists including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb. At Slade, Dawson won another scholarship, which funded further travel through Europe, including a six-month stay in the small village of Anticoli Corrado, north of Rome. The area's picturesque valleys, hills and rolling clouds spurred Dawson's first significant series of abstract landscapes. 'A painter can live here without anyone thinking him queer or bohemian – I'm a farmer – I'm a painter – same thing,' she wrote home to her family while living in Anticoli Corrado. In her catalogue essay, Mimmocchi notes that these thoughts 'had a prescient correspondence' to the life that Dawson later found at Binalong. In 1961, Dawson returned to Melbourne and had her first solo exhibition at the innovative Gallery A, in Flinders Street, founded by designer Max Hutchinson and sculptor Clement Meadmore to promote modern art and design. When Gallery A moved to a larger space in South Yarra, Dawson established a print workshop there and became the manager and master printer. In the following years Dawson also worked on props and sets for the experimental Emerald Hill Theatre company in South Melbourne, and in 1965 met her future husband, Michael Boddy, there. 'He wasn't fat then. He had a lovely face, really. I thought he was beautiful, actually beautiful, that's all,' Dawson says. 'I certainly rejoiced in his presence, and looked forward to his presence, and made sure that when I knew he was coming to the gallery, I'd be there, all that sort of thing.' In a living room in another part of the house hangs Dawson's 1973 Archibald Prize-winning portrait of Boddy. It was her first Archibald entry, and she became the third woman to win the prize in its 52-year history. She depicts Boddy as a gentle giant in a lilac t-shirt and worn hat, fingers clasped on his generous belly as he reads. Behind him fans, a rake and a spade, symbols of their rural existence. The painting won't be in the retrospective, nor will another blazingly good portrait, Summer 1986, in which the older Boddy – tall, fleshy, bespectacled, grumpy – lies naked, bar slippers and socks, in a pose reminiscent of Monet's Olympia. Boddy said he much preferred it the Archibald-winning portrait. What I'd like to do is a really honkedy-donk-donk last set of works. The 1973 portrait has just been returned to Dawson after being on tour for several years in the Archie 100 exhibition. Mimmocchi had originally included Summer 1986 in her loan requests (it's in the National Portrait Gallery collection), but after much thought, decided it didn't 'fit' the retrospective, 'both physically within the space but also given its overpowering presence.' In a more subtle tribute to the significant men in Dawson's life, Mimmocchi has included a smaller pencil portrait of Boddy, and one of Cameron. Dawson and Boddy married in 1968, the same year that Dawson's abstract works would be celebrated in The Field. In 1974, the couple moved to Binalong, and three years later ensconced themselves even further in the bush, buying the property they named Scribble Rock. Boddy famously remarked: 'Our marriage is one long conversation. We moved to the bush so we could talk to each other without so many interruptions.' 'That was absolutely true,' Dawson confirms. 'Yes, we just rattled on together for years.' She describes the move to Scribble Rock as the 'absolute coming together' of her work. The natural world was a fount of inspiration, and so too the bounty that she and Boddy grew. Cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, onions, sprouting potatoes and more inhabit Dawson's wondrous still lifes. Dead animals feature too – a kookaburra, a young wedge-tailed eagle, a hare, a tawny frogmouth – all rendered with exquisite care, homages to the transience of life, and evocative of 17th century Dutch still lifes. Dawson tells me that Boddy would often bring the dead creatures in for her to paint. 'He'd say 'there's a dead bird down there, I think you'd like it, go and get it or I'll go and get it for you if you like'. So he would bring it up for me, or I'd go and get it, and then we'd talk about it, and he might even write something about it.' At Scribble Rock, Dawson and Boddy immersed themselves in the local community and produced a newsletter, Kitchen Talk, which Boddy would write, and Dawson illustrate, promoting the principles of organic farming. We look at one of the abstract landscapes Dawson created in Binalong, Balgalal series 5 – Sunday Morning (1975), named for the creek that ran through Scribble Rock, a vast triptych that stretches for almost four metres. 'Well, they're not really abstract,' Dawson corrects me. 'They're trees,' she says. 'They're living things, and you actually see that – that's out here and that's behind it, and that one's there, and that's next to it and coming that way,' she says. 'So when you start looking you see that they're actual solid tree shapes, but they're just simplified.' Loading After Boddy's death in 2014, Dawson moved back to the Binalong township before relocating to Ocean Grove in 2016 to be with family. Her recent fall has kept her from the studio of late, but she's keen to go back. 'When everything settles, I'd love to go and work in the pod,' Dawson says. 'I feel I'm sort of ungracious by not working in it. What I'd like to do is a really honkedy-donk-donk last set of works,' she says, emphasising the sentiment with a theatrical growl. What will the works be about? 'I don't know,' she says, and makes another long, low, growling sound, as though summoning ideas. 'But it's coming.'
The Age
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Janet Dawson was told to ‘stick to one' thing. Instead, she broke all the rules
The first thing that strikes you about Janet Dawson is her voice, deep and resonant, a voice from another era. But the artist, aged 90, is not at all stuffy. 'I'm a lucky old bat,' she says by way of introduction when we meet at her home on a sprawling bush property in Ocean Grove on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula. Dawson lives in a low-slung, 1970s modernist home with exposed brick walls and long rows of large windows that look onto eucalypts, shrubs and lawn. Her studio, or 'pod' as she likes to call it, is in a sheltered corner of the garden. Clad in corrugated iron, the studio is crammed with paintings and drawings, some finished, some not, Dawson's art books, and remnants of her former life in rural New South Wales. Above the creative clutter rises an incongruously giant white sculpture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse that Dawson bought from a nearby furniture warehouse. 'We've got to find a home for Mickey and Minnie because I love them so much,' Dawson says, her intensely brown eyes flashing with a hint of mischief, just like the photos of her as a younger artist. I can tell this will be fun. But the interview almost didn't happen. Dawson was in hospital recently after a fall. She's recovered remarkably well and sits comfortably in her armchair, ready to chat about her six-decade-plus career as an artist, print-maker and organic farmer ahead of her times. I visit her on a sunny winter's morning ahead of the first major retrospective of her work, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on July 19, a recognition long overdue. Dawson made her name in the 1960s as a superstar of abstraction, one of only three women included in the National Gallery of Victoria's landmark 1968 exhibition The Field. One of the key works in that exhibition, Rollascape 2, will be shown in the AGNSW retrospective. It's big, bold and yellow, a series of exuberant curves that unfurl for three luscious metres. 'That's one of my favourite paintings,' Dawson says as I show her an image of it on my laptop. 'I think it works very well, and the fact that it means absolutely nothing is terrific.' Dawson doesn't play by the rules, never has. As a younger artist, she'd often be pressed by critics to explain the 'meaning' of her abstract works. She'd patiently respond, in her cultivated tones, that 'meaning' didn't reside in the story a painting told, but in a painting's shapes and colours, and the emotions and sensations it provoked. When Rollascape 2 was exhibited again at the NGV in The Field Revisited in 2018, Dawson described it as 'an expression of a painting trying to escape from the prison of the square'. That splendidly vigorous image could equally apply to the artist herself. Dawson has escaped categorisation, followed her own artistic instinct, regardless of fashion. When American critic Clement Greenberg visited Australia in the 1960s, he told her to 'stick to one' thing. She ignored the advice. 'One of the great strengths of her work is that she didn't conform,' says exhibition curator Denise Mimmocchi, the AGNSW's acting head of Australian art. That it has taken so long for a state gallery to stage a retrospective of her work may have something to do with Dawson's resistance to neat definition. Her gender, and eventual retreat from the centres of art in Sydney and Melbourne may also have played a part, Mimmocchi says. After coming to prominence as a pioneer of abstraction, Dawson faded from the limelight as she moved towards realism in works inspired by the natural world. The shift coincided with her move to Binalong in regional New South Wales in the 1970s with her late husband Michael Boddy, a Yorkshire-born actor and playwright. Out bush, Dawson didn't for a moment miss the art cliques of Melbourne and Sydney. 'Oh, they were awful,' Dawson tells me, pulling a face. 'It's nothing to do with artists, it's all to do with …' She completes the sentence with a series of comical gestures that indicate the tedious snobbishness of it all, sending me into fits of laughter. We're sitting in a small back room of the rambling house that she shares with her extended family – niece Penny, Penny's partner Lee, and Dawson's sister-in-law Jill, wife of Dawson's late brother Cameron. He'd be pleased to see them all here listening in as Dawson tells stories about her adventure-filled life. It was Cameron's vision to build a house with enough rooms for several generations to live comfortably together. Dawson's works are scattered throughout. In the room where we sit, there's a buoyant still life of a leafy, broken-off branch of a loquat tree brimming with velvety-yellow fruit that spill across a bustling domestic table. At the bottom right of the composition, we glimpse the artist's hand capturing the moment. The pastel work was created at Binalong, at Dawson and Boddy's rural property, Scribble Rock, where the couple lived for almost 40 years. In style, the loquat painting couldn't be more different to Rollascape 2, and yet both works share a sense of energy, motion and light. Mimmocchi tells me that even when Dawson was 'meant to be doing colour field painting, which was all about the flat surface, she instilled elements of light and painterliness into her aesthetic'. Featuring more than 80 works, the AGNSW retrospective reveals an artist of versatility, skill, and moods, unafraid to range across artistic styles, from the cascading abstraction of Rollascape 2, to the meditative realism of Moon at dawn through a telescope (2000), to glorious still lifes such as Scribble Rock pomegranates (1999). What first inspired Dawson to take up art? 'Very simply, my mother,' Dawson tells me. 'She was gifted. When she was a young girl she thought that she would be an artist, but then of course she met my father and became a wife instead.' Dawson was born in Sydney in 1935, to parents Olga and Kingsley. Before she had children, Olga had attended Julian Ashton's esteemed Sydney Art School, whose alumni include William Dobell and Joshua Smith. With her knowledge of art, Olga recognised her daughter's unusual talent and encouraged it. She even sought the advice of state gallery directors, including then AGNSW head Will Ashton who recommended supplying the child with paper and pencils – 'no rulers, no rubbers, no copying' – and leaving her be. 'I loved drawing,' Dawson says. 'I drew and drew and drew. She used to give me big papers and charcoals. It was normal in our house that I always lay on the floor and drew, and this, I think, was intended to give me confidence right at the beginning. All my gift comes from my mother.' They just thought I was a silly little tweet, you know, dear little thing. When the family moved to Melbourne in 1940, Dawson began Saturday morning art classes with the realist painter Harold Septimus Power, at his studio on the corner of Elizabeth and Little Collins Street. Dawson was the only child in the class, aged 11. 'He was a lovely, funny old fella,' Dawson says. 'He was a very good artist, wonderful training. To me, his studio was the beginning of my art work. There was this little easel – it was really funny – the other big artists all around me. I just remember it being very comical. They just thought I was a silly little tweet, you know, dear little thing. No, I shouldn't be rude. They respected that a child was to be taught early.' Dawson went on to study at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. A tonalist self-portrait created in the early 1950s while she was a student there, depicts a poised, beautiful young woman, silk scarf knotted around her neck, confidently meeting the viewer's gaze. (Dawson would later model for Italian-born fashion photographer Bruno Benini in a series of studio portraits and shoots in Melbourne.) In 1956, Dawson won the NGV Travelling Scholarship, another significant step in her career. She studied at London's Slade School of Fine Art, where, frustrated with her attempts at painting, she began to explore lithography and printmaking. Her passion for painting was reignited when she saw The New American Painting exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1959, on tour from New York's Museum of Modern Art, and featuring the work of abstractionists including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb. At Slade, Dawson won another scholarship, which funded further travel through Europe, including a six-month stay in the small village of Anticoli Corrado, north of Rome. The area's picturesque valleys, hills and rolling clouds spurred Dawson's first significant series of abstract landscapes. 'A painter can live here without anyone thinking him queer or bohemian – I'm a farmer – I'm a painter – same thing,' she wrote home to her family while living in Anticoli Corrado. In her catalogue essay, Mimmocchi notes that these thoughts 'had a prescient correspondence' to the life that Dawson later found at Binalong. In 1961, Dawson returned to Melbourne and had her first solo exhibition at the innovative Gallery A, in Flinders Street, founded by designer Max Hutchinson and sculptor Clement Meadmore to promote modern art and design. When Gallery A moved to a larger space in South Yarra, Dawson established a print workshop there and became the manager and master printer. In the following years Dawson also worked on props and sets for the experimental Emerald Hill Theatre company in South Melbourne, and in 1965 met her future husband, Michael Boddy, there. 'He wasn't fat then. He had a lovely face, really. I thought he was beautiful, actually beautiful, that's all,' Dawson says. 'I certainly rejoiced in his presence, and looked forward to his presence, and made sure that when I knew he was coming to the gallery, I'd be there, all that sort of thing.' In a living room in another part of the house hangs Dawson's 1973 Archibald Prize-winning portrait of Boddy. It was her first Archibald entry, and she became the third woman to win the prize in its 52-year history. She depicts Boddy as a gentle giant in a lilac t-shirt and worn hat, fingers clasped on his generous belly as he reads. Behind him fans, a rake and a spade, symbols of their rural existence. The painting won't be in the retrospective, nor will another blazingly good portrait, Summer 1986, in which the older Boddy – tall, fleshy, bespectacled, grumpy – lies naked, bar slippers and socks, in a pose reminiscent of Monet's Olympia. Boddy said he much preferred it the Archibald-winning portrait. What I'd like to do is a really honkedy-donk-donk last set of works. The 1973 portrait has just been returned to Dawson after being on tour for several years in the Archie 100 exhibition. Mimmocchi had originally included Summer 1986 in her loan requests (it's in the National Portrait Gallery collection), but after much thought, decided it didn't 'fit' the retrospective, 'both physically within the space but also given its overpowering presence.' In a more subtle tribute to the significant men in Dawson's life, Mimmocchi has included a smaller pencil portrait of Boddy, and one of Cameron. Dawson and Boddy married in 1968, the same year that Dawson's abstract works would be celebrated in The Field. In 1974, the couple moved to Binalong, and three years later ensconced themselves even further in the bush, buying the property they named Scribble Rock. Boddy famously remarked: 'Our marriage is one long conversation. We moved to the bush so we could talk to each other without so many interruptions.' 'That was absolutely true,' Dawson confirms. 'Yes, we just rattled on together for years.' She describes the move to Scribble Rock as the 'absolute coming together' of her work. The natural world was a fount of inspiration, and so too the bounty that she and Boddy grew. Cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, onions, sprouting potatoes and more inhabit Dawson's wondrous still lifes. Dead animals feature too – a kookaburra, a young wedge-tailed eagle, a hare, a tawny frogmouth – all rendered with exquisite care, homages to the transience of life, and evocative of 17th century Dutch still lifes. Dawson tells me that Boddy would often bring the dead creatures in for her to paint. 'He'd say 'there's a dead bird down there, I think you'd like it, go and get it or I'll go and get it for you if you like'. So he would bring it up for me, or I'd go and get it, and then we'd talk about it, and he might even write something about it.' At Scribble Rock, Dawson and Boddy immersed themselves in the local community and produced a newsletter, Kitchen Talk, which Boddy would write, and Dawson illustrate, promoting the principles of organic farming. We look at one of the abstract landscapes Dawson created in Binalong, Balgalal series 5 – Sunday Morning (1975), named for the creek that ran through Scribble Rock, a vast triptych that stretches for almost four metres. 'Well, they're not really abstract,' Dawson corrects me. 'They're trees,' she says. 'They're living things, and you actually see that – that's out here and that's behind it, and that one's there, and that's next to it and coming that way,' she says. 'So when you start looking you see that they're actual solid tree shapes, but they're just simplified.' Loading After Boddy's death in 2014, Dawson moved back to the Binalong township before relocating to Ocean Grove in 2016 to be with family. Her recent fall has kept her from the studio of late, but she's keen to go back. 'When everything settles, I'd love to go and work in the pod,' Dawson says. 'I feel I'm sort of ungracious by not working in it. What I'd like to do is a really honkedy-donk-donk last set of works,' she says, emphasising the sentiment with a theatrical growl. What will the works be about? 'I don't know,' she says, and makes another long, low, growling sound, as though summoning ideas. 'But it's coming.'
