Celebrated for her vibrant and distinctive pictures of indigenous flowers, artist Margaret Preston was an equally colourful and outspoken personality. Less well known is her legacy as a generous and insightful teacher and keen cook, and her deep sense of civic duty. She was passionate about the need for a modern national culture that reflected everyday life. For Preston, the building blocks of such a culture were not to be found in the Australian pastoral landscape tradition, but in the home and garden. Maintaining that art should be within everyone’s reach, she published widely on the methods and techniques of a host of creative pursuits—from pottery, printmaking and basket weaving, to the gentle art of flower arranging. She devoted much of her career to the genre of still life, depicting humble domestic objects and flowers from her garden, and often painting in the kitchen while keeping 'one eye on the stew'. Drawing on recipes from handwritten books found in the National Gallery of Australia and richly illustrated with Preston’s paintings, prints and photographs this book sheds new light on the fascinating private life of a much-loved Australian artist.

Over a 60-year working life Margaret Preston (1875-1963) established herself as one of Australia's best-known artists. Her bright decorative prints of distinctively Australian subjects have delighted the public since the early 1920s. The National Gallery's 1987 publication The prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisonne was a historic event, being the first monograph the Gallery published on an individual artist, and also the first catalogue raisonne it produced. Following its publication, many more Preston works were discovered, and this new expanded edition reproduces a number of these prints for the first time while also filling some gaps in previous biographies, particularly on the period up Preston's marriage in 1919. The emphasis throughout is on Preston as printmaker--her techniques and the influences on her work.

Hidden from view for decades, the work of Hilma af Klint (1862?1944) has captured the imagination of contemporary audiences. She is now widely regarded as a pioneer of twentieth-century abstract art. Her paintings are monumental in scale, with radiant color combinations, enigmatic symbols, and otherworldly shapes. In an era of limited creative freedom for women, her secret paintings were an outlet for her prodigious intelligence, spiritual quest, and groundbreaking artistic vision. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings includes over 125 artworks, ranging from enormous canvasses to small watercolors; pages from her detailed notebooks; and a selection of photographs and other images. Five essays and an illustrated chronology reveal new research on af Klint, her practice, and her place in art history.

Margaret Preston, Australia's foremost woman painter between the wars, sent a series of shock-waves through Sydney's art circles with her vital art, her spirited journalism and her belligerent enthusiasm for living, during a career that spanned over seventy years. 'A red-headed little firebrand of a woman', she was an artist who never stood still, moving from realism to Post-Impressionism, to an Aboriginal-inspired style of art with unceasing verve and freshness.

This richly illustrated monograph is the first publication to look in detail at the life and art of Margaret Preston, an artist who practised in her native Australia from the mid-1890s right up to her death in 1963.

Cressida Campbell is a renowned and gifted artist who depicts the essence of her familiar subjects in water colour, painted woodblocks and woodblock prints. Conscious of the legacy of Margaret Preston, Campbell portrays beauty in everyday scenes such as domestic still lives, industrial maritime scenes and rooftops overlooking Sydney harbour. Her work is given depth through solid composition and vivid colour. A fine draughtswoman and strong designer, her works show graphic elements reminiscent of Japanese prints. WOODBLOCK PAINTING OF CRESSIDA CAMPBELL is the first comprehensive survey of her work in print. It spans pictures produced from 1984 to 2007 to guide the viewer through the imaginative world of one of Australia's most uncompromising artists

A rich and focused collection of works by over fifty outstanding Australian women artists who worked in Australia and abroad between 1880 and 1960. This book also provides great insights into women's professional and economic strategies of the time, in a predominately male environment and how women played a crucial role in the development of impressionism and modern art in Australia in the first decades of the 20th century. Some of Australia's most important women artists represented here include Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Ethel Carrick Fox, Clarice Beckett and Hilda Rix Nicholas. An impressive selection of prints from Australia's most influential print makers, including Thea Proctor, Dorrit Black and Ethel Spowers. Also included are rarely or never before displayed works by artists including paintings by Dora Meeson, Florence Rodway, Grace Cossington Smith and Hilda Rix Nicholas. This important book brings much deserved attention to a group of talented, dedicated and determined women artists for whom the desire to create was paramount.

This treasury of Australian art created between the two world wars sheds fascinating light on the country's incredible artistic growth and the flowering of modernism Down Under. This volume comprises some 400 works by Ralph Balson, Frank and Margel Hinder, Roland Wakelin, and others in the Australian vanguard. Arranged by theme, the art reflects a remarkable range of styles and genres: abstraction, landscapes, still lifes, portraits.

This is the first time that Australian artist Margaret Preston's printed oeuvre--from her early etchings to her last woodblock prints, including over 400 works in all--has been catalogued in its entirety. Uncovering a wealth of information about this inventive, prolific artist, who continually strived to create a national art relevant to her time, Butler's study is absorbing and authoritative.