Contemporary Australia: Women

150 Father walking dog (from ‘A telescopic vision’ series) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on cotton 108 x 80cm Mum in dressing-gown (from ‘A telescopic vision’ series) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on cotton 128 x 80cm Opposite Bruce kicking football (from ‘A telescopic vision’ series) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on cotton 210 x 80cm Me in short dress (from ‘A telescopic vision’ series) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on cotton 220 x 80cm in the same field with observations of life around her. (In a way, this is still a collage technique.) Apparently simple, Watson’s paintings are supremely sophisticated, leading some critics who privilege conventional manual skill over imagination, to decry them. I suspect, though, that they are really more offended by Watson’s deliberately informal girly fields of dreaming, and are hampered by a hierarchy of subject‑matter that cannot relinquish gendered affiliations. 5 As curator Jan Hoet noted in 2006: . . . the familiar response of ‘I could have done that myself’ certainly does not apply here. This work has far too many layers for that; an inner tension that takes psychological hold of the viewer and disarmingly questions him. 6 That is exactly the point. In ‘A telescopic vision’ Jenny Watson holds past and present, observation and emotion, self and family, in delicate balance. She is poised, she is mounted on the steed of her imagination, she is as free as any of us can ever be. Looking back with affection, Jenny Watson shows us how to think about the past, reminding us that it always travels with us, whatever our mount. Julie Ewington Importantly, Watson started life as an artist employing a formidable realistic technique to paint impeccable large-scale works, as large as in the academic tradition, but stylistically aligned with Pop in their cool detachment: Chestnut with yellow/green headband from ‘Horse series no 3’ 1973 (Collection: Griffith University, Brisbane), for instance, shows a much-loved horse with the green fourth-place winner’s ribbon, won in a weekend pony club competition. Watson’s oeuvre from the mid 1970s to early 1980s included ambitious portraits of friends, collages considering beauty products, and meticulous drawings of street scenes from travels abroad. This is still Watson’s territory: the content of the mature works is not different, just the manner of making them, and the ways they reveal Watson’s emotional investments. (Significantly, the first found material Watson used for her paintings, in 1982, was hessian horse‑feed bags.) 4 Within a decade, she had adopted a more summary expressive idiom, drawing from European figuration and recalling the painful honesty seen in art by children; she has explored this way of working ever since. This deliberately cultivated appearance of spontaneity allows Watson to gesture directly towards personal feelings and permits disparate images, ideas, materials, fragments of conversations, random ruminations — all the simultaneous chatter of one’s internal life — to sit