Jenny Watson
Australian artist in a bar in New York in the year 2016, 1986
Jenny Watson is known for candid works that document her life and dreams. Her paintings place particular emphasis on women’s experience by depicting female figures on materials selected for their cultural significance, geographic origins and individual histories.
As a young artist, Watson travelled extensively, visiting New York for the first time in 1976. This and subsequent travels to Europe, America and India, inspired a number of works by Watson during the 1970s and 1980s which reflect upon the artist’s sense of place and self. Watson’s works are frequently autobiographical and draw upon her emotional experiences, sometimes incorporating text as an additional means of expression.
In Australian artist in a bar in New York in the year 2016 1986, Watson draws upon her sense of isolation as a foreigner in an unfamiliar city. Painted after the artist’s return from India in 1985, it vibrates with the colour and intensity of the country, while also making more general reference to Watson’s experiences overseas. The dislocated position of the lone Australian artist in New York – the epicentre of post war international art – is also alluded to in the work, and further emphasised via fragments of text on the work from the traditional Australian ballad Wild Colonial Boy. There is of course a degree of irony in the inclusion of the ballad in the work, for the colonial subject is, in this instance female.
Anna Davis, Curator, MCA, suggests that while many of Watson’s works present New York as a place of dreams and aspirations for artists, Australian Artist in a Bar in New York in the Year 2016 1986 ‘offers the inevitable flipside to this fantasy, depicting the city as a site of disappointment, as it is for many young hopefuls, with the artist shown slumped, semi-comatose on a bar in her imagined future.’
- Artist / Maker
- Jenny Watson (1951)
- Creation Date
- 1986
- Subjects
- Art and Design - mixed media
- Materials used
- synthetic polymer paint, colour pigments, gouache and collage on unprimed cotton canvas
- Dimensions
(H x W x D) - stretcher 161.6 x 256.4 cm
- Credit line
- The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Purchased with funds from the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council, 1987
- Accession number
- 1987.0024.000.000
- Copyright
- © Jenny Watson Request Access