Following a fire in my studio in nineteen eighty four and after completion of a teachers training degree at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education coupled with some extensive travel in the United States, I felt better prepared to return to my career as a professional practicing artist after having a short sabbatical.
This incident of the fire, which had deeply impacted both my personal and professional life, had enabled me to mature overall as a person. Artistically, I acquired the ability to face truths about my work, making radical, necessary changes.
Sandra Murray, the then director of the Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the University Of Western Australia, recognized this in an essay on my work in nineteen ninety-one.
“The successful artistic expression of an abstruse concept such as universality is difficult to achieve, but ultimately rewards both artist and viewer.
It is what lies beyond the boundaries of abstraction and figuration that intrigues John Dahlsen, and he has developed a unique visual language to articulate this. Dahlsen has only arrived at this crucial stage in his work after a course of exploration, both in a personal and artistic sense”.
The culmination of this maturation and the epiphanies around my work in the form of dramatic re-assessments in my aesthetic vision sent me later looking for driftwood on a shoreline in Victoria, which then directed me to this exciting new medium of found objects. It’s not necessary for all artists to have to experience such a dramatic incident as having a fire in a studio to bring about a major change in their outlook on life. Some artists instinctively do this in the process of their work in the studio. This is how it happened for me and it left an indelible imprint, which has continued to this day.
The intensity of such an experience for me woke me up to my priorities. I had only up until that point given scant regard to my inner self. Any depth in my work was largely accidental because in those early days I was like any young person fresh out of school or university, hell-bent on experimenting with the latest drugs and partying, and I was largely being unaware and careless. The time had come for me to take stock. I’ve never stopped taking stock, I’m constantly to this day working on myself, to the point of having done many personal growth workshops and trainings over the years, which has helped me to keep checking in with myself to see how I have developed as a human being.
