Selected Writings - Margaret Preston. Margaret Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ unwanted work, she was quite free to pursue her own destiny. Back in Adelaide once more, how she craved for just one glimpse of that pink dragon. She felt that her knowledge was so small, but she knew that no one could help her but herself, so there was nothing to do but plod on, work out on canvas that which bothered her mind. For two years she experimented in colour, searching always to get an aesthetic feeling in her work, and all the time penny-piling to be able to make a dash back to Paris to see if she had moved a little. The collection for the trip this time went quicker, as being older and more experienced she received more students, so that by the end of two years she was able to return to Paris to refresh herself. Her work from this time onwards is based on colour principles. She developed a scale of colour to suit herself, and with the combination of realism produced such work as ‘Anemones’. A year in Paris and she then left that city to live in London. Her first exhibit was at the Academy, where she was reported as a colourist. This let her definitely know the move had been made. Solitary realism lay at the back with her adolescence. From now on she allowed herself full license in colour - only letting her subjects appear as realistic as her aesthetic feelings allowed

      Exhibiting and teaching, she found her days full, when crash, down came the war. She decided to try and help mend soldiers, as she had no capacities to heal, and so went to a pottery school and learnt simple rules of that trade. She had as a teacher one who did throwing of shapes on the wheel for Doulton’s, so her good fortune in teachers still stood to her. After a time she was able to teach shell-shocked men simple pottery. Down on the Devon Moors she worked with them until the armistice came and she was free to come home. There are two nice pots in the London War Museum made under her tuition by shell-shocked soldiers.

      Returning again to Australia, she took on domestic duties, finding time to continue with her art. Still painting in colour with a set principle in her mind, she produced ‘Apples’, ‘Thea Proctor’s Tea Party’, and ‘Hibiscus. Yet again the old restless feeling is bothering her. She feels that her art does not suit the times, that her mentality has changed and that her work is not following her mind. She feels that this is a mechanical age - a scientific one - highly civilized and unaesthetic. She knows that the time has come to express her surroundings in her work. All around her in the simple domestic life is machinery - patent ice-chests that need no ice, machinery does it; irons heated by invisible heat; washing-up machines; electric sweepers, and so on. They all surround her and influence her mind and, as her mind is expressed in her work, she has produced ‘Still Life, 1927’, and ‘Banksias’.

      Yet again come her friends and critics. Queer people. Only a short time since they were complaining that her colour knocked everything out, and now that she is trying to produce form in its simplest manner, making all other qualities subservient to this, they regret her throwing away of her ‘beautiful colour’. Fortunately she is free to paint what she pleases and how she thinks. She does not imagine she has advanced in her art - only moved. The ladder of art lies flat, not vertical. This only she claims for the works in this book. They are the mind of a woman who is still alive.

      Art in Australia - Margaret Preston Number, 3rd Series, No. 22 December 1927

      

Nude, woodcut 1927

      WHY I BECAME A CONVERT TO MODERN ART

       The Character of an Individual is not a fixed property. - T. S. ELIOT

      Once upon a time when I was twelve years of age I borrowed my mother’s best dinner plates and brunswick blacked them all over. On to the blacking I painted flannel flowers. The result so impressed my mother that after the shock of the loss of the plates was over she determined to have me properly trained. Her justification was that as the flowers were the image of the natural ones I must have talent.

      From this on my imitativeness was well nurtured.

      Excellent tuition was found for me, and I was well taught to draw the outward show of dancing fauns, Donatello heads, etc. I was well surrounded by tradition and taught only through tradition. Would that I could have had the advantages offered by the Slade school in London, where the sculpture of the Greeks & Co. flourish in museums and not in a live school, and where all imitativeness is discouraged. I must have learnt to draw, for I won so many prizes. After some years of this excellent training I was allowed to start on colour. Oranges, turnips, bald heads, hairy heads, bananas, etc., all were imaged by me, and more prizes followed.

      At last I felt competent to face the future, let it be eggs, onions or portraits.

      I had been magnificently grounded, and all I had to do was to go on doing more, as I had nature always before me and how could anyone improve on Nature? What is a plate but a dish and an onion but a vegetable?

      Then full steam ahead in art.

      As long as the onions were of a recognised species, and plates as they are generally known, all was well. Trees and portraits with a little gentle selection were equally safe so long as you were careful to arrange the lights according to nature. This was the text-book of my early realism. Imitating the world, I decided to go abroad, and fixed on Munich.

      There were two very strong elements in Munich at that time, the dead realists and the lively moderns. These two sets of painters had their shows at the same time. Naturally, I condemned as mad and vicious the moderns and went willingly with the deads. 1 was well soaked in ‘nature above all’ and ‘sanity first’ and the boat fare afterwards. My first visit to the Secession Exhibition, as the modern show called itself, left me undefiled.

      To the pure all is pure, to the blank all is blank.

      My letters about this time written back to my native country could be compressed into a few sentences such as: Half German art is mad and vicious and a good deal of it is dull; I am glad to say my work stands with the best of them.

      Six months after another tabloid letter could have been received: You were astonished when you read that I am starting to think that perhaps the mad and vicious show has something in it.

      And again: I have found out one thing from them - that eggs don’t need to be peculiarly Wyandotte, etc., and they can still be eggs.

      This discovery gave me bad growing pains.

      I suffered all the discomforts of doubt and indecision and, much worried, determined to leave Germany and go to Paris. When I arrived in Paris the Old Salon (francaise) was open.

      Here I found realism triumphant!

      Myriads of canvases!

      It seemed as if all the artists in the world must be showing there.

      But again, its very multitudinousness made me think that if painting is as easy as this, why is it regarded as an art? So again I paid my door money to a modern show and this time tried to think.

      I found at last that the eggs and onions as part or whole of a picture could appear different and suggest something more than being merely edible. I could not paint the smell so I needn’t paint the species. Realism had its first rebuff.

      I went to the Galleries and studied Ingres and Renoir, etc., and so, muddled and worried, I moved on to Spain to worship at the shrine of Velasquez, that demi-god of realism. Velasquez occupied a large room, but, alas, so did Goya. Like the Wandering Jew 1 fled from country to country hunting an ideal, and finally decided to come back to Australia. I had learned to think - so the passage money was not wasted. Australia is a fine place in which to think.

      The galleries are so well fenced in.

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