MARGARET PRESTON

A gift from the artist to Myra Payne (née Wardell), 1934
Gift from Mrs Payne to Mick Joffe, Sydney, in the 1970s

Berowa Visions: Margaret Preston & Beyond, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney, 5 September - 31 October 2005

Rhonda Davis, et al., Berowa Visions: Margaret Preston & Beyond, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney, 2005, pp. 31-2, illus.

Margaret Preston had a life-long interest in craft and design, inspired first by that remarkable teacher Harry Pelling Gill, whose role as educator and gallery curator played such a vital part in the early development of the arts in Adelaide. The achievements of Preston and Hans Heysen alone are sufficient testimony to his extraordinary abilities. More particularly, Gill's students at the South Australian School of Design worked designs on ceramics for an Adelaide pottery studio while their lucrative needlework studio sold designs locally and internationally. Preston's early interest in the applied arts was nurtured by further studies in London, Munich and Paris, followed by her own earthenware ceramics of 1917 and collaborations with Gladys Reynell. Her interest continued in numerous still life subjects in which exotic or native flowers were set in decorated ceramic vases and bowls ranging in style from the feminine to the marvellously modern. Fabrics are another leitmotif – tablecloths, tea towels, tablemats and curtains, striped or checker board – the everyday transformed into art. These two rugs are further examples of Preston's remarkably broad and highly creative interests. They are also reminders that the greatest in Western art were among the designers of tapestries from Renaissance times to the present.

Preston is known to have made three rugs. The subject of the first was the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The two on offer were made for her home in Berowa, their private use allowing the artist to cast aside any inhibitions a public display may have imposed. When Myra Wardell, Preston's long-time housekeeper at 'The Springs', Berowa, left in 1934 to marry Walter Payne, the pair was a parting gift. Wardell is remembered today as the model for the painting, The Flapper, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.  

During the 1920s, Preston's art was much influenced by designs from Aboriginal sources in her search for a distinctly national style, writing in 1930 that 'colour does not matter, only form…'. ¹ It was also a time of experimentation resulting in some of her finest modernist paintings. Native flora played a greater role in her art, and the late twenties saw the creation of a brilliant series of paintings inspired by banksia and eucalyptus. Stylistically, Eucalyptus and Hakea are related to those works in their arresting simplifications and emphasis on the geometry of form. Colours adopt the ochres of the land, the rhythmic dynamism of the compositions giving the rugs a vitality characteristic of Preston's best work.

1. Preston M., 'The application of Aboriginal designs', Art in Australia, third series, no. 31, March 1930, unpaginated.