The Prints of Margaret Preston

Margaret Rose Macpherson decided early in life to become an artist. In 1888 she trained for several months under Sydney landscape painter W. Lister Lister, and in 1893 enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where she studied for just over four years. In 1898 she registered as a student at the South Australian School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts in Adelaide.

Both the Gallery School and the South Australian School of Arts were influenced to a significant degree by the German aesthetic tradition, which emphasized the importance of rendering a subject with rigorous fidelity to nature. Margaret Macpherson's first visit to Europe in 1904, and her studies in Munich and Paris, had little impact on the naturalism that dominated her work from this early period.

Only after returning to Paris some eight years later did Macpherson recognize the decorative possibilities of art. Japanese prints, and the work of the French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin, were a revelation to the young Australian, who realized that ‘a picture that is meant to fill a certain space should decorate that space’.

With the outbreak of war Macpherson travelled to England, where she exhibited at the Royal Academy, the New English Art Club and the Society of Women Artists. Two years later, in 1916, she enrolled at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts as a student of pottery, at the same time developing her interest in fabric printing and dyeing, basket weaving and the various techniques of printmaking.

The artist's earliest prints were etchings — many of them depicting picturesque thatched cottages in Bonmahon, a small town in Southern Ireland, and in Bibury, a quaint village in the Cotswolds. Macpherson visited both villages on several occasions, sometimes accompanied by her own students. She soon realized, however, that she was not comfortable working as an etcher, and later remarked that the process required too much equipment.

It was in the 'friendly little craft' of woodblock printing that she was to excel. Working with readily available materials, she began to use the knowledge she had gained from her study of Japanese prints to cut bold, decorative prints of still-life subjects. One of her earliest woodcuts, Still life and flowers, c.1916-19, an impression of which is in the Australian National Gallery Collection, reveals the extent to which she had absorbed the Japanese ideas. Even her monogram, 'MRM' (the initials of her maiden name), has been drawn in the manner of a Japanese seal.

In 1919, on the last day of the year, Margaret Macpherson married wealthy businessman William Preston, and settled in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. Views of boats floating on expanses of rippling blue water, and of houses clustered on foreshore hills — as in Shell Cove, Sydney, c.1920 — are the most characteristic prints from the early years in Sydney.

In 1925, with her friend Thea Proctor, Preston showed her work in exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. The exhibitions had an extraordinary impact. Preston included a total of sixty-five prints, many of them hand-coloured in rich scarlets, blues and greens, and all of them framed in Chinese red lacquer frames. Harbour views were again prominent, but Preston's vision of the waterfront had by now become compact and busy. Less tranquil than the earlier images of the harbour, works such as Circular Quay, 1925, gain their effect not from the artist's skilful use of colour, but from striking contrasts of black and white combined with elaborate patterns and repetitions.

Other prints from this period featured native flora and fauna. In some instances Preston made use of readily recognizable and popular themes, but it was with still-life subjects such as Platylobium, 1925, that she convinced her public that Australian native flowers were equal in beauty to any imported species. The artist's next major exhibition, held in 1929 at Sydney's Grosvenor Galleries, further explored these ideas, and included Wheelflower, c.1929, a work that has become one of her best known prints.

From 1932 to 1939 Preston lived with her husband at Berowra, on the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River. The area was one of rugged natural beauty, and the artist's house was surrounded by scrubland. For the first time Preston found herself living in the bush. Prior to this the native flowers that featured in her paintings and prints had been purchased from local florists; they now grew in abundance around her home.

Preston's prints became simpler, larger, and less reliant on the use of bright colours. Flowers were no longer depicted arranged in vases, but, in prints such as Banksia cobs, c.1933, were presented to the viewer in their natural state.

While living at Berowra, and undoubtedly prompted by the Aboriginal rock engravings found near the property, Preston also developed what was to be a lifelong interest in Aboriginal art. On returning to Sydney in 1939 she became a member of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales, and later visited many important Aboriginal sites.

Preston believed that Aboriginal art provided the key to establishing a national art that reflected the soul of the vast and ancient continent of Australia. During the 1940s, Aboriginal motifs and symbols, together with dried, burnt colours derived from bark paintings, became increasingly prominent in her prints. The artist’s titles from this period frequently acknowledge her sources, and reveal the extent to which she was able to combine traditional Aboriginal designs with the themes she herself had been exploring for over twenty years.

In many works from the 1940s Preston employed a new and original technique. Rather than engrave a huon pine block as had for so long been her practice, she began to work with the rough side of masonite – a brand of hardboard recently introduced to Australia. Masonite enabled her to produce prints with a looser, less definite quality that she identified with Aboriginal art.

Preston had little patience for cutting the different blocks required for colour printing, and in most instances chose to colour her black and white images by hand. In her masonite cuts, however, she began to paint colour directly onto the block before printing. The natural outcome of this experiment was that she dispensed altogether with engraved lines, and turned her attention to the production of monotypes.

In 1946, after caring for her husband during a six-month illness, Preston experienced a sudden burst of creative energy and produced about one hundred monotypes — works that were remarkably varied in both subject and style. While some of these prints featured realistic landscape and still-life subjects, others clearly revealed the artist's debt to Aboriginal art. Landscapes such as Ferntree gully, 1946, were well received by the critics, who saw in them a return to a more traditional method of working. But Preston would prove them wrong.

Perhaps in response to Aboriginal hand paintings, she now began to experiment with stencilling. In 1953, at the age of seventy-eight, she held an exhibition of twenty-nine prints made using this ancient technique. Many of the works exhibited incorporated Aboriginal motifs, although a significant number also reflected the influence on the artist of Chinese thought.

Preston had admired Chinese art since 1915, when she purchased her first books on the subject, and she had visited China on two occasions. Chinese elements may be found in several of her paintings of the 1940s, and are particularly evident in works such as Flying over the Shoalhaven River, 1942. In her prints of the 1950s, however, Preston combined Chinese ideas with the concept of the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

Shoalhaven Gorge, N.S.W., 1953, represents one of her most successful attempts to synthesize these two traditions. Using the stencil process long associated with both Chinese and Aboriginal art, Preston brought to her subject the thick, opaque browns, whites and ochres of Aboriginal bark painting. Human habitation has no place in this timeless landscape. The geological features of the gorge are ambiguously depicted, and it is possible to read the massed shapes as a flat plain, a gigantic cliff, or a river valley. The never-ending geological changes — earthquakes, upheavals and slow erosion — are all part of Preston's vision.

The flat black cardboard onto which the stencil is printed may alternately be seen as defining the structure of the landscape or as representing the blackness of eternity, the Dreamtime, the void into which all eventually returns before being reborn.

Preston did not let age change her working habits. In her later years she continued to paint and to make prints, and she travelled frequently. At her death in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight, she had produced over four hundred prints. In a career spanning almost six decades, she created a body of work that demonstrates not only her extraordinary originality and the intensity of her commitment to a national art, but also the constant grappling of one artist with the problems of her times.

Roger Butler
Department of Australian Art

Brisbane City Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Brisbane QLD
1 Dec 1989 – 2 Jan 1990

S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney NSW
15 Feb – 15 Mar 1990

Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart TAS
22 Mar – 22 Apr 1990

Perc Tucker Regoinal Gallery, Townsville Queensland
4 May – 27 May 1990

Musuem and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin NT
7 Jun – 24 Jun 1990

Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, NT
6 Jul – 5 Aug 1990

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA
21 Sep – 28 Oct 1990