Astrid Preston
August 7 - September 11, 2021
Between Worlds
Opening Reception: August 7, 2021 (4:00 pm - 6:00 pm)
Artist Talk: August 21, 2021 (11:00 am)
Craig Krull Gallery: Bergamot Station - 2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B3, Santa Monica, CA 90404 (map) [ website ]
"During these last long months of trying to understand and express the feeling of my ungrounded quarantine existence, I have felt a compulsion to paint objects floating in space. These objects have mostly been flowers, which for me symbolize beauty and hope but also the fleetingness and fragility of life.
My work is always rooted in my experience of the world, with nature as my vocabulary. The paintings are primarily inner landscapes, but they grow out of the act of observing my actual surroundings. They are an exploration and a search—a dialogue between what goes on inside and out.
As my work progressed, simpler spheres began appearing among the flowers. I think of them as protoplanets among archetypal flowers. They serve to activate the space and increase the gravitational attraction among the elements. At the same time the flowers themselves proliferated.
Together these paintings reflect my emotional journey through these months of time suspended—a sense of being adrift between worlds—a time with its own eloquence and imperatives."
- Astrid Preston
August 2021
Dan McCleary and Astrid Preston at Craig Krull, Santa Monica
By Peter Frank, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
No genre of painting could be more anodyne than flowers, right? Perhaps, but the floral history of art brims with vigor, passion, and even fury, as we know from vanitas still lifes and expressionist bouquets. Dan McCleary and Astrid Preston are known for their intimate, transportive subjects – McCleary for his stolid figures, Preston for her delicate gardens – but they stir drama and sensuosity out of virtuosic form and technique. The two artists’ recent emphasis on flowers (coincident, but perhaps triggered by the pandemic’s social muting) focuses them both on familiar forms but not-so-familiar obsessions.
McCleary’s focus, in fact, encompasses other still life subjects – fruit, in particular – while Preston’s attention to blooms does not treat them as natural arrangements. Both artists paint in oils, but to almost opposite effect: McCleary favors mostly muted, opaque colors (especially in his slate-gray backgrounds), while Preston devises an intoxicating array of luminous hues. Their roots are in 19th century French painting, to be sure, but McCleary descends from the mid-century near-tactile realism of Fantin-Latour and Monticelli, and ultimately early Cézanne – not to mention the Italian gravity of Morandi – while more and more, Preston conjures Redon and the color-world of post-Impressionism even as her ties to late Monet remain evident.
The influence of Pacific Asian painting can also be felt in both bodies of work. The title Preston has given her show, “Between Worlds,” seems to refer to the “world” of Impressionism and that of ukiyo-e, the “floating world” of Hokusai, certainly as her downpours of petals fall into aqueous fields of mysterious, indistinct depth, her floral maelstroms marrying Redon’s pastels to Monet’s water lilies in a Japanese ceremony. How different in heft and motion are McCleary’s bunches bursting from glass vases, or his studies of single stems, or his arrangements of mangoes, plums, nectarines, and so forth, set on a level plane and swaddled increpuscular shadow. Dusky as they are, these simple depictions, harkening back to 17th century Spanish masters like Zurburan and Coton – and forward to McCleary’s contemporary Martha Alf – reflect all manner of available light, that in the gallery and that imagined by the painter.
For all the art-historical models they bespeak, the latest work by these two accomplished Los Angeles artists finally belong to an American artistic spirit, the “still small voice” posited against the presumptions of grandeur associated with American art (and life and land in general). Dan McCleary’s self-contained, self-possessed plants and fruits speak of a quieted, interiorized mind, while Astrid Preston’s nebulous flower showers provide a soothing, poignant caress-by-landscape. These veteran painters deal with how things look, allowing us to determine for ourselves how things feel. WM