Margaret Preston

Last month our topic to study in the Waverley Art Quilters was Margaret Preston.
Margaret Preston was an Australian Artist who was born in Adelaide in 1875 and died in Sydney in 1963.
She studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School under Frederick McCubbin and lived her married life in Sydney.
She travelled extensively throughout Australia, Asia and Europe which influenced her painting and made her determined to create a modern Australian form of painting influenced by the work of the Australian Aborigines.
Her painting style was quite graphic and she used flat colour surrounded by a black outline.
Margaret Preston wrote many articles for magazines about decoration and design and was known as quite a strong opinionated woman.

Waratah 1925. Margaret Preston

Her work mainly consisted of Australian native flowers, landscapes of Sydney and woodcuts.
Margaret once wrote that 'a lover of art cannot do better than study Japanese woodcuts if he wants to know something about design'.

I used the hand coloured woodcut named Waratah (pictured above) as my inspiration.

I used a white pencil and drew the flowers onto black fabric and then I quilted over these lines in black thread.

I decided to use the Paintstik technique that I had tried last month and rubbed the Paintstiks directly onto the fabric.
I thought that the effect gave a similar look to Margaret's work.
It was hard to get the fine detail I needed on the gum blossoms and so I used Deco Art-So Soft paint to make the little yellow dots.

It was very interesting to study Margaret Preston's work closely because at first glance I thought the paintings were very simple and it wasn't until I started to do my own piece that I realised how much detail was actually in her paintings.


Our next topic is to make a quilt Inspired by Nature.

Bye for now,
Linda