Robert Preston: A Life in Art

8 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 of consecration.i 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

1965 as an older student, he took up full-time study at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London. In an interview with Anneke Silver in 1989, Preston reflects on the diverse nature of the teaching at Camberwell.v

I had an odd combination of teachers and lecturers in my foundation year especially. One of the most significant influences on my drawing activities was Euan Uglow, one of the post-war generation Euston Road painters and a student of Sir William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore. Uglow introduced me to measured drawing a la Euston Road School, a particularly objective way of looking at reality.

At Camberwell Preston was reintroduced to Hunt who he had first encountered at the South London Institute. Hunt was also an exponent of the Euston Road School who was taught by its two founding members. His own artwork reflected the major trends in art of the latter half of the twentieth century and the ‘languages’ of midcentury painting. Although not taught by Hunt, they shared common outlook and the older teacher through informal exchanges, encouraged in Preston an appreciation of the link between art and craft, theoretical knowledge, and practical execution. At Camberwell there were other influences including Donald Jackson, a one-time calligrapher and illuminator to the Queen. He introduced him to methods, materials and techniques of traditional illumination and miniature painting. Preston is particularly indebted to the artistic traditions of the Euston Road School through his teacher Euan Uglow. While the history of the Euston Road School is better known in England, as a descriptor it relates to a movement that reassessed the traditions of European painting by emphasising objective realism.vi A return to ‘tradition’ which was a reaction to the extremism of much avant – garde art of the 1930s, especially Surrealism. Almost certainly Hunt, Uglow and Jackson helped to create a perfect armature for Robert Preston’s career as a teacher and artist. Coupled with such diverse art school influences, was his deepening intellectual connection to eastern and western mythology, sacred geometry, and the art of ancient cultures. A deep interest that was in part influenced by his early visits to London’s museums, private study and later by world travel. Visionary literature including both prose and poetry was also a significant influence and Preston looked to other artists who shared this concern. Indeed, for artists of his generation, allegory and myth is a live presence in art making.

To further his employment prospects, he completed a Diploma in Education at Sussex University in 1972 and taught for a time at Seldown Secondary Boys School at Poole in Dorset. In 1973, he took up an opportunity to further his teaching experience in Australia and was initially posted to Innisfail High School. This was to be a dramatic transition from his native England, and he produced almost no work during this posting. By serendipitous fortune, he was offered a position at the newly established art department in Townsville and at the end of 1974, Preston took up a position at the Townsville College of TAFE, where under Jim Cox, formerly of Queensland College of Art, an art school was established. He was soon joined by Anneke Silver and a fellow British artist, David Blackman. Preston was particularly influential in developing the status of art training in Townsville and its reputation for excellence in drawing. The skills learnt at Camberwell under the guidance of Uglow were to surface in his teaching. The system of measured drawing or measuring by proportion from a fixed point was to be a major influence on scores of British artists and quite remarkably, found its way to Townsville through Preston’s expert teaching.

Once settled in Australia, Preston states ‘that he was at an impasse with his work’.vii He looked for traditions of art here in a new country and all he found were other European and American derivatives. However, it was the close contact with practising artists working in the Art Department, that stimulated a new approach to his adopted country.

[Local] artists using abstraction rekindled an interest in formal work. In relation to the objectivity of the work, because of the very strong light under a tropical sun, shadow patterns often manifest themselves more strongly than actual objects; for instance, the kinetic quality of light in water is very strong indeed and minimises the actual shape of objects that are contained in it... This phenomenon is not to be found in the northern European environment.viii

Part of the process of disengagement with the work which originated in England was to abandon a palette that relied on black and white and tone in favour of new colour systems. This didn’t come quickly and Preston notes in his PHD thesis that ‘artists may easily become prisoners of their own style’ and as he states ‘nothing could be closer to the truth in the case of [his] own work at this time.ix The ‘bio-morphic’ works which spanned his last years in England and carried on for only two years in Australia, represented the last manifestations of his former artistic concerns. Preston’s first Australian works, created during his initial five years in Townsville, show a particularly strong analytical response to the tropical environment and he made use of compositional systems such as collage by which he constructed images by organising and reassembling component parts of memory.

This is achieved by, as it were, by pinning sequences of forms onto a formal structure in a similar way to that in which musical notes or calligraphic units are organised on bar lines or guidelines. This allows me to construct visual sentences,

paragraphs… from a personal vocabulary of forms – their adjustment and placing could be analogous to making grammatical sense of completed work. The forms are locked together into a collection which is a compressed visual equivalent of an environment or phenomena transfigured through the rather heavy veil of memory and generally accompanied by a considerable lapse of time.x

This period includes the small number of paintings on canvas produced by Preston.

The problem as he saw it was to disengage himself from the clichés of perception and to present something of the essence of his new environment. Visual perception – and representations of the visual world – involve mind – stretching paradoxes and logical problem solving that Preston has grappled with constantly on his long journey as an artist. The creative flux that he found himself related partly to him struggling to find his own artistic voice but also in the somewhat mixed reception his work received in Australia. However, as he gained more confidence, the scale of his works increased to such a degree that he won the Townsville Pacific Festival John Raggart Acquisitive Award with ‘Versa-tile pool, no. 1, 1976’ his largest painting to date. Praise from the visiting judge, the artist, John Coburn provided enormous encouragement as did meeting visiting artist Michael Johnson who had been an artist in residence at James Cook University in 1975. Both artists were themselves struggling to produce paintings within the confines and precepts of abstraction. After further experiments with abstraction, digitalising of images and conceptualism, Preston turned to non-European art as his reference point. The transition from his formal abstract works of the mid-1970s to a more narrative style corresponds with his extended study into the mythology of non – western cultures. Regular overseas travel to Thailand, Bali, Mexico, Egypt, and Greece introduced figurative elements into his work. It was on a trip to Thailand in 1977 that Preston encountered new socio-cultural contexts in a tropical environment not unlike that of north Queensland. ‘I saw a lot of art [of Thailand] in general for the first time, which dealt with the tropical environment; its denseness and its colour.xi This was an important realization which contributed to new ways of working with colour, form and subject which carried on with renewed energy into the 1980s and beyond which culminated in the survey exhibition in 1989. That exhibition presented over 130 works including those created in Townsville which demonstrated his maturation as an artist in Australia.

Teaching has been an important part of his life in Australia from his arrival in 1973 to his retirement in 2004. While the University College of Townsville had been established in 1960, and James Cook University of North Queensland was proclaimed in 1970, it wasn’t until January 1991 that TAFE’s accredited art courses were discontinued and became part of a creative cluster at James Cook University within the College of Music, Visual Arts and Theatre (COMVAT). A new campus for these developments in the creative arts was established, utilising the former Commonwealth Rehabilitation Centre. The campus housed the Department of Art and Design, the Department of Music, the Tropic Line Research Theatre Company, and the Australian Arts Fusion Centre (AAFC). With the relocation of art training to the university-sector new academic challenges were to occupy Preston’s professional life and he was appointed to the AAFC as lecturer and academic assistant. The Centre was headed by Britishpolymath, Professor Edward Cowie who provided much critical support to Preston. While the Centre sat parallel to College of Visual Arts, each flourished due to their proximity to each other. The undergraduate courses were innovative and included studio-based majors in five named degrees. There was an emphasis on artmaking skills and conceptual development. Art training in Townsville fashioned an industrious and creative learning environment in which making art was integrated with philosophy. Preston quickly turned his mind to upgrading his academic qualifications and completed a Master of Creative Arts in 1991 and then embarked on a PHD. During a period of intense reflection as a doctoral candidate in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the artist ‘scaffolded’ conceptual concerns through an isegesiscal investigation that revealed much about the diversity of artistic influences that shaped him but also how the natural environment of his adopted country has foregrounded his artistic concerns.xii Outcomes of the research included major exhibitions of artwork in Brisbane and Townsville, the realization of two public artworks including a major gateway floor mosaic at Brisbane International Airport, and the conceptualization and fabrication of an artist’s book which lead to the publication of ‘Communion to the Trees’ by Macmillan Art Publishing in 2002.

Retirement from academic life brought new challenges and Preston retells these experiences in a recent conversation with the author.

Having left the University in 2004 and completed a PhD in 2005 I came to something of a creative block. As a result, I began to assess much of the work and many of the ideas I had had in the past and made the time to take on commissions. These were wide ranging and included organising and managing an 18-month sculptural restoration project for the city’s Catholic cathedral to undertaking private commissions for paintings. However, my more recent creative activities have to a large extent been focused on reflecting upon unrealised and unfinished projects – basically filling gaps completing things I felt that needed to be done, things which had been left undone and observing the results separated in some cases by a considerable lapse of time.

One project that occupied Preston was a series of compositional studies of Poussin’s 17th century arcadian paintings that he analyzed with great attention to the artist’s use of line and tone. Advocates of Poussin’s style state that drawing is the most important element of his painting and this obliged Preston to re-engage with his own drawing skills. Like Preston other artists have shared this fascination for Poussin including his own teacher at Camberwell, Euan Uglow. Pablo Picasso’s painting, The Rape of the Sabines was executed at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the autumn of 1962 and he borrowed the composition and figures for this work from Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1637-38). It is also speculated that the analytic Cubist experiments of Georges Braque and Picasso were also founded upon Poussin’s example. Such is the importance of continuing debates in art history, that propels Preston’s sense of freedom to pursue these concerns in his studio.

The title of the retrospective exhibition speaks to the artist’s multi-layered creative concerns and the curation has been shaped not only to demonstrate the breadth of Preston’s almost 50-years of practice in Australia but also the depth of his enquiry. The foundational experiences of his homeland, coupled with a nuanced artistic visual acuity and rich inner world continue to shape the artist and since returning to full-time studio practice, Preston has a renewed commitment to explore new ideas and approaches. The act of transforming object into subject has provided a critical basis for Preston’s investigations into the natural world which continues to this day.

Ross Searle

i Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 2.

ii Robert Preston, Kala: Journeyings Through Colour and Time. (Townsville: James Cook University, 2005), 10.

iii Ibid., 19.

iv Ibid., 9.

v Anneke Silver, ‘An Interview with Robert Preston’, in Robert Preston Survey Exhibition (Townsville:

Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, 1989), 10-25.

vi Ross Searle, ‘Introduction’, in Robert

Preston Survey Exhibition (Townsville: Perc

Tucker Regional Gallery, 1989), 6-8.

vii Ross Searle, Artist in the Tropics, (Townsville:

Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, 1991), 53.

viii Ibid., 53.

ix Preston, 2005, 83.

x Searle, 1989, 6-8.

xi Searle, 1991, 53.

xii Preston, 2005: see the illuminating breakdowns of influences the artist included in the appendices of his thesis.