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Robert Preston: A Life in Art Robert Preston is an elusive figure in Australian contemporary art. Despite being one of the first art lecturers to be appointed to the Townsville College of TAFE in 1974 and enjoying a long career as an educator and studio artist in his adopted city, he is not fully known in the canon of Australian art of the mid-1970s to the present. While unremarkable for artists who chose to work in regional settings where whole careers are overlooked by the art establishment, this lack of esteem impoverishes our deeper understanding of Australian art in all its forms and contexts. The often skewed ‘field of cultural production’ is a problem that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analyses in terms of the mechanisms through which some artists are elevated into the canon by the agents i of consecration. Therefore, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery’s retrospective exhibition, ‘Robert Preston, Inner Visions: Observation, Abstraction and Imagination, 1955-2021’ is especially welcome, since it is more than 30 years since the artist’s survey exhibition was
presented by this same Gallery in 1989. The present exhibition helps to extend our knowledge of this artist as it draws together Robert Preston’s creative development
as an art student in the United Kingdom, his move to Australia and his maturation as a significant artist in Townsville. Born in Yorkshire in 1942 during the height of World War II, Robert Preston’s mother made the decision to relocate from London to the relative safety of northern England for his birth. The war years created major upheaval for families leading to over a million people being evacuated from towns and cities in the United Kingdom. None so more than his own parents who married at the beginning of the war in London but due to his father’s war service were separated as a family until 1946. Although not ‘artistic’ in the accepted meaning of the word, his parents – each in their own way – influenced his nascent pathway to art. ii His mother was culturally adventurous and encouraged in her three sons an interest in music, literature, English history, architecture and the habit of visiting museums and art galleries in London. All three children played musical instruments. In his childhood his father developed considerable skill as a draughtsman and illustrator, and members of his extended family in South America made careers as textile designers in the USA. The subject of his father’s artistic interests stemmed from his other great passion, pursued during his long summer holidays, which was that of natural history. An enthusiasm that was passed on not only to the artist, but also to his two younger brothers. Family excursions to the Kent coast instilled in Preston a love of the coastal littoral which later manifested in his passion for working en plein air. The experience of visiting the then King’s Library of the British Museum (now the British Library) and the National Gallery, London accompanied by his mother were to have
a lasting impact on the young Preston. His immediate emotional response in seeing the Library’s illuminated manuscripts–and realizing that within each page contained a distilled, concentrated vision–was to imagine each page was a world unto itself. From a young age his ‘quick eye’ elevated his wonder of 14 and 15th century Italian altarpieces and icons in the National Gallery, and he delighting in the impact of Carlo Crevelli’s The Vision of the Blessed Gabrielle (1489), in terms of its visual clarity, precision of drawing and finely attuned detail. As a child he not only reacted to the impact of artworks seen in museums and libraries but also to illustrations on the printed page and reproductions including the beautifully produced posters with travel scenes painted by famous English artists such as Norman Wilkinson. He had ready access to illustrated junior natural history books and annuals which in the hands of expert illustrators such as Eric Ravilious and Gertrude Hermes were richly visual.iii Also important were books containing colour reproductions of artist’s impressions of the countryside, the seashore, aspects of nature study, the behavior of the weather and the cycle of seasons throughout the year. Such images established a link between nature, the seasons, and the temporal state. A metaphor that was to surface later in the artist’s mature work in Australia with its synthesis of the visual synergies between time, colour and geometry. As Preston reflects after more than half a lifetime in Australia ‘(he) finds it difficult to remember a time when he did not attempt to translate both his interior and exterior worlds into visual images’.iv By his late teens, a career in art was furthest from Preston’s mind and by 17 he was serving with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps on a four-year deployment at home and overseas. While army life was less than fulfilling, it meant that from an early age he was financially selfsufficient, and the discipline instilled by the army was to be useful in civilian life. On completing military service and considering his future, the possibility of a career as an artist was foremost and he set his course towards further study. His first formal studies were at the Inner London Education Authority’s South London Institute where he first encountered Gerry Hunt a part-time instructor who taught drawing to Robert and his brother, Ilrick. In
