Margaret Preston is best known for the striking paintings and woodcut prints that she produced from the 1920s until the 1950s. Bridge from North Shore is a bold and decorative work and a fine example of the artist’s style during this period. Like the floral still-lifes the artist produced at this time, many details of…
Margaret Preston returned to Australia from Europe in 1919 determined to develop a modern and distinctly national art. Indigenous art was integral to her campaign and, after 1932, when she moved to Berowra in the Hawkesbury Basin near Sydney and encountered local rock art, she embraced its restricted palette and geometric forms. Her appreciation of…
NSW and West Australian banksia 1929 is one of a number of paintings by Margaret Preston in which she used the floral still life to bring attention to the natural world and landscape as a way of expressing place and the notion of ‘home’. The distinctive organic forms of the banksia and restrained use of…
Recognised and admired for her vibrant and distinctive art, Margaret Preston (1875–1963) possessed an equally colourful personality, and was described by one associate as ‘the natural enemy of the dull’. After committing to a career as an artist from an early age, Preston completed her academic training in Melbourne and Adelaide before spending two lengthy…
Continue reading » “Vibrant and distinctive: The art of Margaret Preston”
‘O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism’ celebrates the work of three pioneering artists who made distinguished contributions to the development of international modernism. All born in the late nineteenth century, American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and Australian artists Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith came of age during the 1910s and ’20s, decades of great social…
Continue reading » “O’Keeffe, Preston, and Cossington Smith in Brisbane”
‘O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism‘ showcases the iconic art of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the most significant American painters of the twentieth century, alongside modernist masterpieces by the celebrated and pioneering Australian artists, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith. United by their love of nature, O’Keeffe, Preston and Cossington Smith developed subjects from their…