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This richly illustrated monograph is the first publication to look in detail at the life and art of Margaret Preston, an artist who practised in her native Australia from the mid-1890s right up to her death in 1963.
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Margaret Preston, Australia's foremost woman painter between the wars, sent a series of shock-waves through Sydney's art circles with her vital art, her spirited journalism and her belligerent enthusiasm for living, during a career that spanned over seventy years. 'A red-headed little firebrand of a woman', she was an artist who never stood still, moving from realism to Post-Impressionism, to an Aboriginal-inspired style of art with unceasing verve and freshness.
Over a 60-year working life Margaret Preston (1875-1963) established herself as one of Australia's best-known artists. Her bright decorative prints of distinctively Australian subjects have delighted the public since the early 1920s. The National Gallery's 1987 publication The prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisonne was a historic event, being the first monograph the Gallery published on an individual artist, and also the first catalogue raisonne it produced. Following its publication, many more Preston works were discovered, and this new expanded edition reproduces a number of these prints for the first time while also filling some gaps in previous biographies, particularly on the period up Preston's marriage in 1919. The emphasis throughout is on Preston as printmaker--her techniques and the influences on her work.
This is the first time that Australian artist Margaret Preston's printed oeuvre--from her early etchings to her last woodblock prints, including over 400 works in all--has been catalogued in its entirety. Uncovering a wealth of information about this inventive, prolific artist, who continually strived to create a national art relevant to her time, Butler's study is absorbing and authoritative.
Celebrated for her vibrant and distinctive pictures of indigenous flowers, artist Margaret Preston was an equally colourful and outspoken personality. Less well known is her legacy as a generous and insightful teacher and keen cook, and her deep sense of civic duty. She was passionate about the need for a modern national culture that reflected everyday life. For Preston, the building blocks of such a culture were not to be found in the Australian pastoral landscape tradition, but in the home and garden. Maintaining that art should be within everyone’s reach, she published widely on the methods and techniques of a host of creative pursuits—from pottery, printmaking and basket weaving, to the gentle art of flower arranging. She devoted much of her career to the genre of still life, depicting humble domestic objects and flowers from her garden, and often painting in the kitchen while keeping 'one eye on the stew'. Drawing on recipes from handwritten books found in the National Gallery of Australia and richly illustrated with Preston’s paintings, prints and photographs this book sheds new light on the fascinating private life of a much-loved Australian artist.