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’

1941

* ‘Knowing the New South Wales ranges well, I have tried to paint them with stark truth, copying the natives in eliminating the Western idea of ‘time and place’. I know that art is of the mind and a picture a replica of the mind’s vision. A camera-mind produces a camera picture, and this type of mentality has never belonged to the Aboriginal’

(‘New development in Australian Art’. Australia National Journal, May 1941)

 
Margaret Preston

early 1940s

*‘Australian artists must feel inherently the difference between their land and that of others … the tremendous difference in our flowers … so our treatment of our flora must be different. If it isn’t then it is merely copy and repetition’.

(‘An inherent Australian art’ early 1940s)

Image: Margaret Preston 1940s (detail). Photograph by Max Dupain. Courtesy of Jill White
Margaret Preston

1942

*‘The change in the world situation of Australia, made by the war, will compel her artists to readjust their relationship to the art of the European continent and Great Britain . . .Australia will find herself at a corner of a triangle – the East . . .will be at one point and the other . . .representing the West. It will be in the choice of one of these corners that the future of Australian art will lie … Which end of the triangle will Australian post-war artists take?

(‘The orientation of art in the post-war Pacific’, Society of Artists Book 1942)

Image: Installation photograph of Art of Australia exhibition 1788–1941, at Yale University Art Gallery, USA, 1941. Photographer unknown. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Margaret Preston

1945

*‘When I’m painting flowers I‘ll pull one of its kind to pieces. I will know exactly how it’s formed. When I’ve done this I draw from another one – I do this with all my flowers. I make studies of them. I then put the studies entirely away from me and make my compositions’

(Australian Artists speak’ Radio 2FC 1945)

 

Image: Margaret Preston with gum blossom, Oenpelli, Northern Territory 1947. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
back