MARGARET PRESTON ART AND LIFE
EXHIBITION
ARTIST
EVENTS
GARDEN TOURS
EDUCATION
ORDER CATALOGUE
Art Gallery of New South Wales 29 July to 23 October 2005
ARTIST
biography
‘in her own words’
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
‘in her own words’

1930

*…’ it is high time we began to make our homes more Australian in atmosphere … Oh those wretched kookaburras, gum leaves and wattle blossoms done on cushions … These … are degrading the art sense of a young nation. The time has come for us to establish an Australian school of design … ‘

(‘Away with poker-worked kookaburras and gum leaves’, Sunday Pictorial 6 April 1930)

 
Margaret Preston

1935

* ‘I am trying in my work to start at the beginning and not at the finish … I’m trying with my cultivated knowledge to do away with all the imitativeness, the copying of the past great masters of the world … I am trying to find even one form which will express Australia in some way’

(‘Some recent paintings by Margaret Preston’, Art in Australia May 1935)

 


Image: Margaret and William Preston’s bookplate by Adrian Feint
. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
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