Astrid Preston

Dan McCleary and Astrid Preston at Craig Krull, Santa Monica

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.

Peter Frank, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
August 2021

New Territories: Artist Astrid Preston Celebrates the Earth in a Landmark Nature Exhibition

“Los Angeles based Swedish born painter Astrid Preston has long explored and invented new frontiers of an aesthetic naturalism, elegantly remaking urban and rural wildness into provocative, soul satisfying tapestries of life and parkland utopias. Her work has consistently taken technical and philosophical risks, achieved unique depth, and established Ms. Preston as one of America’s most important contemporary landscape painters.” continue reading

Michael Charles Tobias, Forbes
January 2013

“There is a war in these paintings – for Preston bare branches are soldiers and bushes a cemetery. These simple elements tell stories, create moods and speak of the artist’s inner life as she reveals our outer world in a way we have not seen before.”

Reesey Shaw
Director, Lux Art Institute
2008

“The view is utterly believable as a mirror of nature but halfway hallucinatory at the same time. All of her work has this quality. Even the new paintings, so detailed in their presentations of hedges and plants, appear both real and unreal.”

Robert L. Pincus, San Diego Union-Tribune
February 24, 2008

“As a painter, Preston understands that a landscape framed in the mind’s eye is an abstraction, but that a landscape painting is a visual abstraction of that thought. Her work is allegorical, metaphysical, and sometimes surreal….”

Craig Krull
Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica
2002

“Using light, patterning, and crisp juxtapositions, as tools, her paintings present a complex notion of the idealized physical world. Although completely devoid of human beings, they are philosophical considerations of our visual perceptions that probe notions of time, perspective, and memory.”

Michael Duncan
catalogue essay, 2002

“…stand back, and we enjoy the illusion of observing nature. Come close, and all we see is a rendering in paint of the effects of light and shade. Preston has brought us in so close in these new paintings that the first option recedes even as our eye is occupied with the second.”

Peter Clothier
catalogue essay, 2008