Selected Writings - Margaret Preston. Margaret Preston

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ As much as the blind appropriation of another culture’s imagery (a criticism frequently levelled at Preston), this could be seen as a rejection of the ‘religious’ sentiment that she despised in Victorian art. She was to be uneasy with Surrealist literary references for similar reasons. Her attraction to ‘oriental art’ was also in keeping with modernist tenets, with Preston advocating the principle that art should not ‘imitate nature as it is but in its ideal form.’ She wanted to create ‘a purely Australian product’ and did not believe it could be achieved by the landscape traditions associated with debate about a national art.

      Aspects of articles in this collection are repetitive but have been included to show the gradual evolution of Preston’s ideas about Aboriginal art. Her cavalier attitude of the 1920s, advising the adoption of sacred patterns for cushion covers and golf socks, in time, was replaced by a more measured tone. By 1941, with first hand experience of both Aboriginal art and its creators, she could admit that she was ‘humbly trying to follow them in an attempt to know the truth and paint it and so help to make a national art for Australia.’ Her repeated stress on the Aborigines as the ‘lowest grade of humanity’ paid lip service to a then, widely circulated view that they (along with the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa) were the closest living peoples to the Stone Age. The statement was generally followed by a denial, with Aboriginal pictorial and decorative art cited as evidence to the contrary. ‘The aborigine is an artist,’ she repeated, again and again; ‘a true and sensitive artist whose work should be studied and treated with the respect that is due to true art.’

      As Preston returned to favoured themes (such as the role of American art in posing a warning or an inspiration) she sometimes made contradictory statements but the passage of the years brought new insights and she revised her opinions accordingly. Some views, particularly regarding the making of art, remained unchanged. She disliked facility, a factor that influenced her questing mentality and her ability to change both medium and approach. The craft writings also reveal a hands-on, do-it-yourself mentality, the product of working under difficult conditions and the realization that artistic feeling is invariably stronger with ‘the combination of the hand and the brain.’ Her rehabilitation work during World War 1 involved extensive improvisation, searching the moors for plants that would give dyes. Later she experimented with traditional Aboriginal colours, even bringing back sacks of sand, from her outback wanderings, to her Mosman hotel.

      Her writing reflects this distrust of well-wrought style, jumping from one idea to another, in a lively, conversational manner. The transcript of her lecture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1938 is a particular example of this and a curious insight into Preston’s views on recent European contemporaries. Her advice to readers of The Home on how to decorate a bedroom provides another angle, particularly when contrasted with the electric candelabra and old Chinese ginger jars advised by other writers. As might be expected, Preston stresses an authentic minimalist approach, inclusive of the reader’s own ‘intimate possessions’ and handicrafts.

      Margaret Preston practised what she preached, becoming a nomad who searched for inspiration in unlikely places; an adept at finding her own masters, so she could learn from her own ‘intuition how to understand them. No sitting down in Art Galleries or Art Schools, with Art served ‘a la carte, nor any return to Australia with wonderful canvases of great successes.’ Over her long life, the young girl who aspired to the high stool in the art gallery, in From Eggs to Electrolux, became her own woman, and in the process made a unique and on-going contribution to Australian art.

      Elizabeth Butel

      NOTES:

      1 Hal Missingham, Art and Australia, Vol. 1, No. 2, August 1963, p.90

      2 Andrew Sayers, Australian Art, Oxford University Press 2001

      3 Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life, Collins 1941 p.22

      4 John Tregenza, Australian Little Magazines 1923-1954, Libraries Board of South Australia 1964, p. 44

      5 ibid

      Spelling of place names in the travel articles has been left unaltered but a small number of other corrections to spelling and punctuation have been made in line with current usage.

A CONVERT TO MODERN ART

      FROM EGGS TO ELECTROLUX

      The woman whose work illustrates this book is alive. As a small girl of twelve years of age she was very much so, especially the day her mother took her to the National Gallery of Sydney to see the pictures there. She remembers quite well her excitement on going through the turnstile to be let at large in a big, quiet, nice-smelling place with a lot of pictures hanging on the walls and here and there students sitting on high stools copying at easels. Her first impression was not of the beauty or wonder of the pictures, but how nice it must be to sit on a high stool with admiring people giving you ‘looks’ as they went by, also she liked the smell of the place. She thinks now it must have been the kind of floor polish used on the linoleum.

      This visit led her to decide to be an artist. Her mother being persuaded that she wasn’t fit for anything else, asked advice from the schoolteacher, who recommended a needy friend. This friend gave tuition in an art that could be described as ‘painting without tears’, the process was so simple. A piece of frosted glass was placed over a copy of water lilies or swans, etc., and then pencilled through and afterwards coloured to copy.

      One thing, however, the needy lady taught her, and that was to paint on china and bake the colours herself. There was a funny little gas oven in the backyard where the embryo artist experimented, so successfully, after a while, that at the mature age of thirteen she won a prize for china painting at a local show. This was a great feat, and was duly acknowledged by all her friends, but it wasn’t sitting on a stool at the Art Gallery, so she started making enquiries as to the means of acquiring this honour. She found that the National Gallery authorities did not care for painting on frosted glass very much, that if she wanted to hang a work of hers on the walls and sit on a high stool it would be necessary to paint direct from Nature.

      Then an inspiration came. As her mother knew no one who knew artists, why not go back to the Art Gallery and ask the man at the turnstile? He ought surely to know something, being with those pictures all day long. The idea was soon put into practice, and mother and daughter were presently interviewing the man of buttons. After some hesitation he wrote down the name of what he described as a ‘nice promising young feller’ who might teach. The artist’s work, he said, was there in the Gallery and they could go and see it. At first sight it looked dreadful to them, but the artist-to-be explained to her mother that she had heard of the ‘Broad’ school, so it must be that kind, but they took the addresses of two other artists whose work met all their requirements in detail and subject. These two artists declined teaching young buds to sprout, so her mother took her to the ‘promising young feller’, who was very nice and helpful and promised that everything she did was to be from life. Her first still life was begun in a studio in Angel Place. History has no memory of it, but a picture of a striped tablecloth with a studio pot hung for many years in the attic room of our young friend.

      After some months of careful teaching, the promising young man, W. Lister Lister, who was really a very thoughtful person, suggested that it would be wiser if she were sent to Melbourne to learn, in a big school with other students, how to draw from the antique, to begin from the beginning. As it made no difference to her family where they lived - her father being on the sea - they went to Melbourne.

      Some little time before this, the Victorian National Gallery had acquired a new master, and his fame was immense. It was to this great man she was sent.

      She began her drawing lessons at this school with one of the kindest, cleverest artists Australia has produced, Fred McCubbin. He has gone now, but the memory СКАЧАТЬ