Margaret Preston

I had some spare time today so I went to the Art Gallery to finally see the Margaret Preston exhibition.
On the left in this image is her well-known picture of gum blossoms, and on the right is the needlepoint version I stitched when I was at university (I bought the kit at the Australian National Gallery). So I was quite pleased to see that there were stitching kits available in the gallery shop today and bought another, this time a cross stitch version of a massed vase of wildflowers.
I love Margaret Preston's flowers, from all the different periods of her art. It is fairly obvious that she loved them too, as she imbued them with such vibrancy and vividness. Even at her most extremely modernist, or in a woodblock print where the petals have artificial black outlines, the flowers just leap out of the frame at you, begging to be plucked. You can almost smell them: cinerarias, pelargoniums (pelargonia?), dahlias. Of course the most amazing are the natives: bright orange-red coral flowers, stark red-and-black Sturt's desert peas, furry flannel flowers, delicate rock orchids and gnarly banksias. It's just too much for the senses.

Take a look.