I AM ALIVE - from eggs to electrolux An adaption of Margaret's Preston's autobiographical essays- Why I became a Convert to Modern Art, The Home, Vol.4, June 1923 From Eggs to Electrolux, Art in Australia, 3rd series, No 22, December 1927 Margaret Preston in the gallery amongst her paintings- a monologue for two performers MARGARET PRESTON - A vociferous firebrand of twenty and a quiet watchful little girl devised, designed and directed by SUZANNE SPUNNER Performers - JULIA HARARI as Margaret Preston and ZOE STOCK as the little red haired girl commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for the Public Programs, presented at MARGARET PRESTON ART and LIFE, NGVA, January 15-18, 2006 dedicated to our dear friend, BRIDGET WHITELAW (1950-2004) Curator Prints & Drawings, Australian Art at the NGV ________________________________________________ PROPS- one tall wooden artists stool, a dinner plate, a glass bowl of fresh eggs COSTUMES- MP the little girl- striped ticking pinafore, dark dress, green hair ribbon MP the young woman - long striped ticking skirt, white blouse, green tie ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ MP - The woman whose paintings you see all around you - is alive, and so is the girl who was that woman, before she knew who she was, even what her name was…. Once upon a time when I was a little girl - just twelve years old - like that little girl - I borrowed my mother's best dinner plates and covered them all over with stove black. And onto the blacking I painted flannel flowers. The result so impressed my mother that 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. Then, when the little girl - that little girl - was taken to the gallery - the National Gallery of Sydney - to see the pictures there, she remembers quite well her excitement at 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 beauty or wonder at 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 a kind of floor polish they used on the linoleum. This visit led her to decide to be an artist. Was it the paintings, the high stools, the admiring looks or the smell? Her mother knew no artists, so she asked a schoolteacher who reccomended a needy friend. This friend belonged to the school of art that could be best described as painting without tears, the process was so simple and the results so convincing. A piece of frosted glass was placed over a copy of water lilies or swans, and then traced with pencil and afterwards the colours filled in. The needy lady did, however, teach her to paint on china and bake the colours herself, and at thirteen she won a prize for china painting but it still wasn't sitting on a stool at the National Gallery - they did not very much care for painting on frosted glass. If she wanted a work of hers on their walls, and to sit on a high stool it would be necessary to paint direct from Nature. Then an inspiration came - 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 man with the buttons on his jacket at the turnstile recommended "a promising young feller". He was very nice and helpful and promised that everything she did was to be from life, and it was. After some months of careful teaching, the promising young man 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- they went to Melbourne The Victorian National Gallery had acquired a new master and it was to this great man she was sent. And so she began her drawing lessons with one of the kindest cleverest of artists - Fred Mc Cubbin. He didn't really teach - the students would wait and when the lesson came, it was only to hear that still more could be done. Yet he was the best teacher she could have had. He allowed her to feel that there was someone to help but not to influence. However life was not always so peaceful - at intervals another Master appeared- Bernard Hall - austere, biting and immaculate, where Mc Cubbin was gentle, generous and disheveled. At various times in the year the new Master demanded that victims of a certain standard in drawing should be laid on the altar of pain under his supervision. The teaching was magnificent,but wasn't he vitriolic! Nerves of iron and talent were necessary to withstand his onslaughts, especially to one such as she, who did not appreciate his liking for hideous models. Fate intervened to help her - it was necessary to choose numbers to get a place at the model and as she often got the worst place, she was allowed because of the crowded classes to work quietly at still life in the adjoining studio. Here she would work day in and day out at her precious eggs! Many days would she spend painting at a small high light, such perfection of detail being demanded. And the next year was a happy one for the Still Life Scholarship was hers. It would seem that a liking for inanimate objects was born in her. Then comes a domestic upset and she must return to Adelaide. Her art work was really begun at this time. As a young girl not yet in her twenties, she made up her mind to teach art for a living from Monday until Saturday and paint her own pictures the rest of the time. To choose her own subjects and do them in her own way, leaving all thought of selling out of her mind. Against all opposition of friends and relatives she painted eggs, onions and dead rabbits - just everything she liked. It was no use explaining to people that the other more "beautiful" subjects - landscapes, sunsets and ladies - did not interest her - not at all. Every weekend found her painting away at her eggs; her ideal at the time was to paint them with such fidelity to nature that they could almost be used in the kitchen If you could cook - I can't - you could make an omelette or bake a cake - with my eggs! But then a disturbing thought came to her as they were wont to do. If she really painted as well as that, surely she would be the very best painter of Still Life in the world! The doing of it was so easy. It worried her, there must be more if she could become famous just for that. She must take a trip abroad to see really where she stood. She began to save and soon the pence had become sufficient pounds to go away. Her art tour began in Venice, but as nothing impresses the ignorant - Titian and the rest did not impress - in fact her feeling was one of sympathy with an irate American lady whom she heard saying - "Rubbens - Rubbenns - if I see any more of that man's paint I'll go mad!" It took Munich and modern German Art to awaken here, but it took a while. There were two very strong elements in Munich at the time - the dead Realists and the lively Moderns. Naturally being who she was then, she condemned the Moderns and went willingly with the deads. At the Secessionist Exhibition, she overheard - they were speaking German- apparently sane artists and students talking about a picture that had a large pink dragon, with a lady victim clad in yellow being rescued by a gentleman in black clothes- even with her Australian German she understood they were actually admiring it - she felt sick. She wrote home - - "half German art is mad and vicious and a good deal of it is dull: I am glad to say my work stands up with the best of them" To the pure all is pure, to the blank all is blank She had to leave such a mad country and risk her morals in Paris. There she found Realism triumphant - myriads of canvases - but again its very multitudiniousness-ness made her think that if painting is as easy as this, why is it regarded as art? So again she paid her door money to a Modern show and this time, she tried to think. But it was more outrageous than the German stuff. There was only one thing to do - get a teacher to explain what these people thought they were doing . The wise man realized that our little Australian was really worried and wanted to learn. So he sent her to study Japanese art in the Musee Guimet , to let her learn slowly that there is more than one vision in art - - that a picture that is meant to fill a certain space should decorate that space. She found at last that the eggs could appear different and suggest something more than being merely edible.