Initially the composition of this painting unsettled me; too much fence not enough dog. I spent a good deal of time contemplating before I realised that the placement of the dog is a key to understanding the work. Cyclone Fence with Great Dane is an ambitious early work by Australian  artist Jenny Watson completed in 1972 when she was a student at the National Gallery School in Melbourne.

Detail of Cyclone Fence with Great Dane. The tension and intrigue of this work would disappear if the dog, not the fence dominated.

In the seventies in Melbourne, Australia guard dogs still protected commercial properties. They were a feared physical presence, a deterrent to any would-be thief prepared to break a lock or scale a fence.  Yet this painting has a different narrative. How can you feel scared of a dog with a big lolling tongue? Rather than fear, the painting evokes empathy for a creature enclosed by a massive fence.

A canine looking out to the edge of the canvas, hints at the greater possibilities outside the frame. In an interview, Watson recalled that at the time of painting Cyclone Fence with Great Dane the she felt trapped by Melbourne suburbia and hemmed in, longing to escape.¹

As she noted, Cyclone Fence with Great Dane is a figurative work, out of step with the hard-edged abstraction that dominated in Australian art schools in the seventies.² This painting speaks of an artist who from the outset forged her own unique creative journey unfettered by the art orthodoxy of the day.

She simply won’t be fenced in.

¹Anna Davies Jenny Watson: the Fabric of Fantasy, exh. cat., Museum of Contempory Art Australia, Sydney, 2017, p.31

² ibid. p.32