Foreword

Robert Preston’s life’s work, now into its sixth decade, has been calmly dedicated to understanding and elaborating on the mysteries of existence. His meticulous yet unassuming body of work is marked by a searching curiosity, revealed in the classical study of the human figure and the still life, in the patterns of intention inscribed on ancient artefacts, and by his drawing on an interior life abundantly furnished by an uncommon breadth of reading and looking. He is an artist who takes seriously the unending business of art-making. Never content to simply look for ideas or find some efficient method for their translation into the formal language of art, Preston seeks first to come to terms with their grammar and syntax. His approach to art is to form a deep understanding of the subject or object of his interest, then to bring his prodigious powers of observation, abstraction, and imagination to bear on its representation.

Rather than retrace the trajectory of Preston’s practice, which is addressed elsewhere here, I want instead to look briefly at a small number of works that seem to me emblematic of his artistic project. The earliest, Interior with Chair (1966), recalls the influence of one of his most germinal teachers: the Slade-trained British painter Euan Uglow. From Uglow, Preston learned a system of drawing figures and objects in space attained by taking empirical measurements from the eye to the object of its study. This approach gives the interior study of the artist’s bedsit spatial unity, solemnity and pictorial clarity. In addition to Uglow’s natural approach to perspective, Preston also adopted his teacher’s unyielding, if not always successful, struggle for perfection. He inherited Uglow’s rigorous, studio-based work ethic and, alongside it, the latter’s healthy unease with self-promotion.

That spirit of perfectionism comes vividly to life in the modestly scaled but superbly resolved gouache Voyage of a Singing Rock (1981). In its flattening, separating and reordering of North Queensland life forms under an abstracting and refractive lens, this painting is characteristic of the work for which Preston is most widely known. The upraised flat rock creates a chalice-like arena, animated by the interdependent play of lichens, fungi and grasses. Despite the manifest fixedness of the rock and the delicately equipoised ecology it supports, the work firmly holds the latent potential of its title. It’s as if Preston is visually stratifying the micro-environment and the infinitely complex colour palette of a local rock formation that sits proudly above ground. While its surface might ordinarily be immovable and weather worn, here it is replete with colour, light and life.

Those same visual qualities apply to Chromatic (2015), a work of remarkable skill in its co-mingling of the warm and cool colours of the spectrum. Not unlike music’s chromatic scale, Preston’s adjacent setting of half tones and complementary colours is not a purely abstract exercise, but one determined to create a vibrant field of colour and, synesthetically at least, sound. Similarly, Shepherds of Arcady (Et in Arcadia Ego). After Poussin (2008) is testimony to his constant return to primary art historical sources for both discipline and inspiration. What Chromatic says about his interest in the early-twentiethcentury artist Paul Klee, Shepherds of Arcady echoes in the enduring influence of the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, whom Preston has studied extensively. Rendered in monochrome drawing and wash, the work is an academically long-established study in delineating form through light and shade; it is also classic Preston, in that more than half the pleasure of making it, I suspect, was in paying homage to the genius of Poussin.

This survey represents much of Robert Preston’s distinctive contribution to contemporary Australian art. I last wrote an introduction to his work for a 1992 exhibition at this gallery, focused on a group of works on paper from the early to mid-1970s, and it is a privilege to revisit his career at the same venue almost 30 years later. He has made a profound and lasting contribution to the growth of the visual arts in Townsville and North Queensland as both teacher and artist. He is, in so many respects, highly accomplished for the work the public already knows, but every bit as practiced in the largely — until now — unseen work that fills his immaculate journals, and the countless exploratory and preparatory studies that followed them. Together, they make clear the extent of the thinking involved in developing and refining his work, and the looking that ultimately informs the breadth and quality of his artistic achievement.

Almost paradoxically, there are times when a retrospective can work to contract, rather than expand, the artistic trajectory and force of the career it surveys — when the years-long process of forming a distinct artistic vision appears to end where it began, without much moving the course of artistic inquiry forward. That is not the case in this deeply sophisticated yet entirely unpretentious body of work, nor in the long creative journey to which it bears witness. Robert Preston is completely deserving of the honour this retrospective represents. I commend its curator, Jonathan McBurnie, and Perc Tucker Regional Gallery on its timely and thoughtful presentation.

Chris Saines CNZM

Director, Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art