1001 Nights Cast

Looking through double glass, the sky above the clouds appeared like the flip-side of a Baroque ceiling and she felt the ecstasy of flying with the gods. The solid white bank below looked secure enough that Georgia thought she could walk right out on it to the horizon if the cabin door opened. At the time she did not realise that she was being closely studied by an elderly couple, so immersed was she in translating that new weightless space of levitation into rapid pencil sketches. It was only after they landed and were waiting in the transit lounge in Heathrow that they approached her and introduced themselves.

‘Bill and Margaret Preston’, Australians by their accent and directness but otherwise hard to place, for in spite of the conservative tweed coat, hat, gloves and handbag, the woman carried, rolled up under her arm, sketches of aerial views! They invited her to share a martini while they waited for connecting flights. In fact they each had two! It turned out quite miraculously that they knew each other’s work. Georgia remembered being quite struck by Preston’s Aboriginal Landscape in Yale and O’Keefe’s flower paintings had impressed Preston back in 1937. It was such a fleeting afternoon in the limbo space of departure lounges that she half expected they had been a mirage, until the letter arrived from Sydney some months later, written as if from one’s oldest friend. It took her a moment or two to remember who this Margaret was. It began:

Dear Georgia,
I fear the martinis went to my head when we got talking, so I wanted to explain, as one modernist painter to another, how I came to paint aerial views. Some background is necessary. Back in the 1930s Bill and I moved out of Sydney, I’m sure for similar reasons that drew you to the desert landscape of the American south west. The bush around Berowra became ‘My Backyard’. Our house was in walking distance of a major gallery of Aboriginal carvings and paintings of the Ku-ring-gai people though sadly they had long gone. You might recall that when I wrote on Aboriginal art for the MoMA show on ‘Art of Australia’ I wanted American viewers who were seeing barks for the first time to realise that their rich symbolic life might not be visible to the human eye but that symbolism expressed through its tribal totems had opened up a new world for me. I experienced that profoundly during those years at Berowra, though it was a difficult time for me and I know I did not make sense of it in my painting, then.

For a long time I found it impossible to handle the deep space of landscape…I burnt more than I framed. In fact for a while I packed away my easel altogether and made a full cook book of meals and several rag rugs! Bill watched patiently as I cut up and looped four of his suits and several pullovers into rugs! Dear Bill, he even encouraged my manic activity by bringing home a range of new synthetic materials passed on from the buyer at Hordern’s. Curiously the simple process freed me to think about other things. My favourite rug was based on an abstracted Hakea plant, with its bright red seeds encased in a nutty brown cover surrounded by a series of long curved leaves. I had drawn it up on the Hessian backing like a map of the region, marking out our house, the river and the township of Berowra. The rug blurred and coarsened the design, making it difficult to see whether it was a landscape in a shield design or an oval study of the plant, or a composite view of all these things. I have always loved Leger’s order and the luminous arcs of the Delaunay’s. The piecemeal nature of rag rug making with its loops of different fabrics allows for it to be seen as partly abstract and partly landscape, a patchwork collage made out of the Australian bush and Cubism!

Just before the war, when we moved from the bush into a furnished hotel I passed the rugs onto the maid, as she had admired them so. But I missed seeing the Hakea rug by my bed every morning before I reached for my slippers. I’d look down onto the coloured abstract map of Berowra on the floor, like the aerial view you have of Aboriginal rock carvings in the bush, which you can only see when you walk across the sandstone ledges.

I think it was this daily ritual of standing up and looking down that finally gave me a way to paint landscapes like ‘Flying Over Shoalhaven River’. Every day as the souls of my feet stepped onto that rug I experienced the possibility of a new kind of space, one that is both grand and immersive. I’m sure you understand what I mean!
All the best and good flying!
Margaret’.