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Canberra Today 18°/24° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Warrior of the brush

WWII veteran and artist Garth Dixon.

PAINTER, educator and environmentalist, 87-year-old Garth Dixon of Ainslie has been living in Canberra for nearly 20 years after retiring from the university in Goulburn.

Now, he’s holding a retrospective exhibition at Canberra Grammar School Gallery that shows you can’t keep an old fighter down.

Dixon belongs to that mighty generation in which war veterans became artists.

A Lancaster bomber pilot in World War II in England and Europe, he shakes his head in disbelief at the casualty figures coming in from Afghanistan, recalling that some 4,000 of his  8,000 fellows died in action.

An interest in art was kindled when he saw Gauguins and Matisses during a trip to Ireland, so after running a couple of shops on his return to Australia,  he headed for the National Art School in East Sydney, armed  with a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme scholarship.

He later taught art in Lithgow, at Bathurst Teachers College which turned into Mitchell College of Advanced Eucation, and finally heading up the art diploma studies at Goulburn CAE.

Dixon won 10 major painting prizes between 1961 and 1969 and was included in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Australian Art, but  the sheer hard work of a long teaching career took its toll, though he did find time to become an ardent anti-Vietnam protester.

Once retired, he was able to pursue his private interests in conservation, for which he received an OAM, spending much of his time on the wildlife reserves near Collector, Bredbo and Michelago.

Dixon returned to painting and drawing in the last few years and has painted his impression of the devastating bushfire which devoured most of his property, Warriwallah, in 2003.

Now he says that he’s done “more artwork in the past six months than in years” with 30 to 40 works on paper – drawings, pen and charcoal.

Garth Dixon's "Bushfire".

 

He’s also been working on a huge oil painting that he calls the “mothership” of his works on paper. Titled “Inscriptions From Nature,” it consists of markings of nature not unlike Aboriginal tracks and showing a connection to the art of  Fred Williams, with whom he feels an affinity.

At 87, Dixon  is aware of the potential of technology and has developed the technique of photocopying images and reworking them in paint, so that sometimes the completed images, including his bushfire work, are unrecognisable.

“The art is not in the copying, the art is in the re-moulding,” Dixon says, “it’s got to be something more than photography.”

“Garth Dixon: A Retrospective” is at  Canberra Grammar School Gallery, Monaro Crescent Red Hill,  from October 22 to November 12  and represents artworks by Dixon over 50 years from 1961 to 2011.

 

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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