Since her first exhibition at Bonython Gallery in Sydney in 1969, Lesley Dumbrell has defined geometric, hard-edge abstract painting in Australia. She became prominent in the 1970s for her use of colour and line, and also her involvement in the Women’s Art Movement and co-founding the Women’s Art Register. Since 1990 she has lived and worked between Thailand and Victoria, and is now being recognised with a career-defining survey at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with a title that aptly captures the experience of her work: Thrum. Curator and writer Kelly Gellatly talks with Dumbrell about the Women’s Art Movement, slowness in creating and viewing, and how Dumbrell is reflecting on 60 years of painting.

Kelly Gellatly: Despite the importance of structure, repetition and the grid in your practice, you’ve always stated that colour is most important to you. Why so?

Lesley Dumbrell: Because all the colours have their own meaning. I can’t really describe it, but if you listen to music, the different musical instruments—like the oboe against the piano, against the violin—colour is the same kind of thing. It creates the atmosphere around the actual structure— which for me is a whole lot of patterns and things, but for other people, it could be a portrait or a tree or a landscape—and colour, in a way, is the unsung meaning.

KG: It seems extraordinary now, given its championing of the ‘new abstraction’, that you weren’t included in The Field exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1969 (and of course, of the 40 artists represented, it included only three women—Janet Dawson, Wendy Paramor and Normana Wight). How did this affect you at the time?

LD: Well, you see, I haven’t actually said this to anyone, but this is the thing … At that time, I was married, and that marriage broke up, but while I was married, my maiden name, Dumbrell, disappeared and I was ‘Mrs So and So’, and then I came back to my maiden name. So, there was confusion about names and who I actually was. And I was really young and just starting out, and the first exhibition I had—now, these works are in very fine collections—but at the time, I sold nothing. It was in Sydney [at Bonython Gallery in 1969], and no one had ever heard of Lesley Dumbrell, given I was a Melbourne girl. And although I knew John Stringer [curator of The Field] and he could have put me in that show, he wouldn’t have seen those paintings. So, no one in Melbourne really knew what I was doing. It’s a Melbourne-Sydney thing. That’s why it happened. It wasn’t really John Stringer’s fault because he hadn’t seen any of that work.

The other thing that always sticks in my mind, is I remember talking to the head of the art school at RMIT when I was a student. One day I said to him, “How come you’ve got so many willing female students, more females than males?” and I said, “Wouldn’t you prefer to have it a bit more balanced?” The question in my head was really about the fact that women artists didn’t seem to get very far, but the men did. Even in the course that I was doing, the blokes were definitely taken much more seriously than the women [Dumbrell studied at RMIT from 1959-1962]. And my lecturer’s answer was, “Oh no, we’re perfectly happy to have women. They’re very much part of the art world. They’re just as likely to get married, and sometimes they marry well, and they’re very good at buying art—you know, they’ll go out, and because they’ve experienced being in art school, they’ll know what to buy and they’ll be very beneficial to the community.” That’s how they saw us. And I thought, “Well, I wouldn’t assume mate. It’s not going to be like that for me.”

KG: Your involvement in the Women’s Art Movement (WAM) in Melbourne saw you take American feminist art critic Lucy Lippard to galleries and to studios of women artists during her now infamous trip to Australia in the 1970s. This was a watershed moment for many women artists at the time. What did that mean for you and your practice?

LD: Well for a start we decided we had to get women artists together and start talking. So that’s where the Women’s Art Register came in [co-established by Dumbrell in 1975]. Because for the men, when international people came there were plenty of doors that were immediately opened. Everyone knew all about the men—they didn’t know about the women. So, we had to have something to balance that up. But it was also opening up the fact that as women, we should support each other, and should go and visit each other’s studios. You know, it’s a community that we should have, which we really didn’t have until that started to happen. So that was a big change. And it meant a huge amount to all of us. It was very important. It was exciting for us because we felt like we were really getting somewhere, really getting somewhere.

I think there are some other elements in all of that, particularly the fact that there were very good galleries, like in Sydney, Gallery A, and good women in Melbourne too. So, the women who were in the business of selling art in their galleries, they supported women, not because they were women, but because they were good artists. There wasn’t that barrier of “Oh, you’re either male or female.I don’t do men, I just do women”, or whatever. Women came into that mix, and I can always remember—particularly at Gallery A – Ann [Lewis, an influential patron and passionate arts figure] supported women, just as much as she could. If she thought the art was good, she was there, and she had your back. And I think that they made a big difference. Christine Abrahams [arts figure and gallery manager] was a dear, dear, friend of mine and so was Ann Lewis. They were really my rocks, those two, and without them my career would be completely different. So, it is still about good women doing good things and really making a difference.

KG: In Art Gallery of New South Wales’s director Michael Brand’s introduction to the catalogue of your exhibition, he states that your practice “is characterised by intuition and play”. I don’t think this is something that would necessarily occur to most people when they look at your perfectly calibrated and highly finished works. Can you talk about intuition and play in your practice?

LD: After the first 10 years of doing all those pattern-y things, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the fact that there’s something in our brains that is about pattern. If you think about it, the Scots are famous for their tartans, and there’s a hundred different combinations of lines and colours. And being here in Thailand there are a whole lot of symbolic repetitive shapes—which I don’t know the meaning of because I’m not religious, and it’s not my religion—but they’re there, and they run and flow through a lot of clothing the Thai people wear, and on the walls, and in

Lesley Dumbrell, Tramontana, 1984, Liquitex on canvas, 182.8 x 365.4 cm. national gallery of victoria, purchased through the art foundation of victoria with the assistance of the marjorie webster memorial, governor, 1984 © lesley dumbrell, image © national gallery of victoria, melbourne.45

the decorations… Every nation has got colours that they feel they own, and they’ve also got patterns that have great meaning. So, it’s not that unusual that I was interested in patterns and kept following it. It was something that came more naturally to me than wanting to paint portraits or something.

The other thing is that my father was an architect. And so, from an early age, I was dealing with rolled up papers and rulers and things. I think I got it because I was my father’s daughter. He had that kind of brain too, but he was building houses. They’re patterns also, in a way, but they’re structures that have another meaning. So, for me, it’s just how I think. I learnt to respect that I shouldn’t have to worry about it, that it’s fine. If you think that way, keep going.

“But it was also opening up the fact that as women, we should support each other…”

KG: Your career has been characterised by pauses in your work—when you had your son as a young artist, for example, or when you moved to Bangkok in 1990. For some artists, this may have been the beginning of the end, leading to a crisis of confidence after which they stopped making work. What do you think got you through these challenging periods?

LD: I think I’m always up for an adventure. Certainly, moving to Bangkok, I thought, well, I don’t know anything about Asia, but it’s got to have something that I’ll find interesting or that I don’t know about—I just have an open mind to things. You have a whole lot of challenges—you’ve just got to make things work. Every artist goes through a time where it’s not coming together properly—we have our moments, definitely. But life’s like that, that’s just normal. Nothing’s perfect—you have to make the best of whatever you have.

KG: Can you tell us about the process of finding titles for your paintings? It seems to me that you use your titles to expand upon the allusive quality of your work—a feeling or sensation that a painting might convey—and to provide a hint for the viewer. Is that your intention?

LD: I found this book years ago, which was like a dictionary of colour. It had the colour—say, yellow, and what that was in Mexican, for example. And some of these colours—like blue or green, had these wonderful names that were almost musical, but obviously you wouldn’t know that it was actually the name for green in Mexican. So, I deliberately chose the Mexican name because it would be a kind of mystery name that would also sound quite beautiful. I felt, “Well, people will just have to do their research on these things.” But I never wanted to name paintings telling people what they should have to think about. I know what I think the meaning of [my work] is, but everyone who looks at it has got to find their own meaning for it. I like to play with words because really, the meaning of the work is in itself. I like the ambiguity and a bit of mystery in the name.

KG: Your works are a long-time in the making and they deliberately slow the viewer down so that they can work on us. What do you hope audiences take away from them?

LD: I think whatever they find in it, is for them. I’m not trying to preach anything. I’m just delighted that people get something out of it. It’s lovely to feel you’ve got an audience.

People often ask me, “Well, how did you know what you wanted to do?” I sort of always knew what I wanted to be. But I didn’t know what that would mean. And having finished art school, I thought, “Well, I don’t know where to start here.” And it took a while, but, in a way, you’ve got to invent your own language, and no one can really help you. You’ve got to find it. You can obviously look at artists you admire and think “I’d like to think like that”, but it’s another whole world of not being able to explain in words because it’s visual. I was always this kind of funny visual person, I guess.

I’m not musical—I’ve never played piano or anything—so I don’t have knowledge of that, but I think people don’t put the same demands on music. Somehow instinctively they’ll respond to some [type of] music better than others, and that’ll become their favourite. They don’t ask for an explanation of it. They either get it, and enjoy it, or they don’t like it. And I think visual art is the same thing. It’s not preaching to people, “Oh, you’re stupid and you don’t understand this.” It’s just like music. If you don’t like that or you don’t feel anything about it, then move onto something else. It shouldn’t be this snobby, “Oh”, kind of thing. I don’t think art is like that—it shouldn’t be.

KG: What does it mean to you now, in your eighties, to have an exhibition and publication of this magnitude?

LD: Quite honestly, I find it scary. But I’m enormously touched that this is what’s happened. The thing that I’m really, really looking forward to, and that astounds me, is that they’ve managed to collect together a whole lot of works that are going to sit in the same space. It’s like herding a group of people together, you know, to have some fun. I’m going to be fascinated to see how the thread of thinking goes through it because this is something that I could never have afforded to do, or even think of doing. It’s also the kind of thing that if someone did think of doing it, you’d probably be dead when they did it. So, fortunately, I’m still alive and kicking, and get to see it, and I’m going to be fascinated to see what I learn from it. It’s very exciting. It’s a great gift.

Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum
Art Gallery of New South Wales
20 July—13 October

This article was originally published in the July/August 2024 print edition of Art Guide Australia.