Megan Dixon Dawes
Megan spent much of her Sydney childhood drawing, including illustrating magazines that she and her sisters wrote for their own entertainment.
Memories of primary school art are of grey pastel paper pads, sets of pastels and set topics to draw. She loved all of this. At high school she was lucky enough to have a wonderful Scottish teacher and her Leaving Certificate class was the first year that art was an examined subject. She thought seriously about studying art East Sydney Tech but there was really no room at home to be an artist.
Instead, Megan went to Bathurst Teachers College and majored in Art becoming a Primary School teacher with a very useful speciality. The Art lecturers were fabulous artists and the teaching exciting. Years later she was awarded a Bachelor of Education.
Wherever she lived, in country towns and then in Canberra, she took art classes at night especially at the ANU. When living in Fiji she embraced silk screening and printmaking inspired by the Bloomsbury group of artists’ work – doing all this in her spare bedroom studio!
After 20 years teaching and 20 years in the Australian Public Service, Megan retired and grabbed the opportunity to study further (now in the daytime!): pastel painting classes and also oils and acrylics with Michael Winters through the ANU.
When Megan moved to the coast she was lucky to have a studio built. It is the most wonderful asset for a painter. Here she has created her numerous pastel works of outback scenes based on her camping travels with her husband to very remote locations. She filled many sketchbooks on these trips.
Megan has exhibited in Canberra, surrounding towns and the South Coast. She has won numerous awards and is especially pleased with being a finalist the M16 Drawing Prize (Canberra), the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize, River of Art Prize and winner of the Peg Minty Landscape Award Spring Exhibition Artists Society of Canberra.
Her latest work takes her in a different direction. Inspired by the work of mid-century UK artist, Patrick Caulfield, she is fascinated to create images of houses in broad, flat planes of acrylic colour with black lines highlighting the structure of the building. She was planning to focus on apparently extremely lavish beach houses but is easily distracted by other interesting but more modest dwellings.
There is no doubt that Megan will continue to paint until she can’t.