Contemporary Australia: Women

149 Jenny Watson Australia b.1951 White horse with telescope (from ‘A telescopic vision’ series) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on cotton 200 x 130cm Jenny Watson has always looked at her own life. Rather than making monuments to it, she paints moments from it — fragments, partial glimpses, skewed views — acutely aware of the fragility and ephemerality of the whole. In 2007 she wrote: The moment of transcendence when we witness perfection — a beautifully balanced horse rider, a satin‑clad rock guitarist in the spotlight or a perfect tiny ballerina — it’s an illusion that lasts for a particle of time. How long will it last? 1 Time and its transcendence is Watson’s subject, then, viewed from her particular perspective as an Australian woman. Through decades and personal vicissitudes she has painted what matters most to her — friends, lovers, family; her horses and her cats; the tribulations and joys of being an artist — all the wonderful minutiae of daily life. And it does appear to be wonderful. Even when her personae register despair, Watson consistently sees joy in life, sometimes filtered through organza scrims, sometimes embellished with sequins or ribbons, especially through her use of fabrics, both gorgeous and mundane, that are sourced with great care to act as the psychic as well as the physical locations for her paintings. Watson is a storyteller. Each group of works tells a tale of sorts, a vignette about a special time in her life, a particular domestic situation, a group of friendships or, perhaps, a current pre-occupation. In early 2011, for instance, she made a suite entitled, ‘Five works about a mobile phone’; three featured Watson with mobile phone in hand and trademark long red hair. Most importantly, Watson privileges the life she lives, whether here and now in Brisbane, or with friends, or travelling to work and exhibiting abroad, or her youth as a fervent post-punk rock sympathiser. She lives in the moment, celebrating this life, this culture, these emotions. A committed diarist, over four decades Jenny Watson’s art has chronicled one woman’s view of life. This storytelling sometimes casts back to the past: a current literary phenomenon invites prominent people to write letters to their younger selves. In the ‘A telescopic vision’ series 2012, however, Jenny Watson gives no advice to teenage Jenny. She sits calmly on her horse, reviewing through the telescope of memory the ineradicable images of her youth in Melbourne’s Box Hill: her dad walking his dog; her dressing gown‑clad mother confined to suburbia, as so many women were in the 1960s; her brother Bruce kicking a footy down the street and dreaming of playing for Carlton as his father had done, in B-grade; herself in a short ice-blue satin dance dress made on Saturday afternoon for the Kew Club Dance that night. 2 Each portrait sits on a light cotton fabric, mimicking the summery colours she wore as a teenager, and located emotionally as well as geographically or meteorologically: here her father’s day is a gloriously sunny yellow, but Bruce’s is grey and misty — he never did play serious football. Each image is set into a gradient, with her father’s portrait the shortest and her own the tallest in the family group, their sizes recapitulating the shape of the telescope but suggesting, most precisely, how selectively memory works and how, through time, some images will loom larger than others. On a cerulean blue day, presiding over the entire ensemble, is pink-frocked Jenny on Silver — an old white horse who lived in a vacant lot opposite her first suburban home in the 1950s. Completely contented, she is able to gallop away at a whim, the mistress of her own destination. This poignant set of images is carefully considered, reduced in means, yet redolent with the emotional freight one carries from one’s childhood to the end of life. Yet, if Jenny Watson’s horse literally offered her escape allowing her to ride around the streets and paddocks, so did going to art school and becoming an artist, just a few years later than the scenes shown here. What did she do with this freedom to roam in the imagination? She stayed metaphorically close to home, exploring life around her and references from popular culture, fiercely committed to painting what she knew. (I recall Virginia Woolf’s oft-quoted advice to writers: ‘Arrange what comes your way.’ The next line reads: ‘Never be unseated by that undependable brute, life . . .) 3 Jenny Watson Jenny Watson A telescopic vision