Author(s): Gavin Fry

Art

At the age of twelve, Margaret Woodward was given a glimpse of creative chaos in an artists studio. Her testing childhood passed into a conscious endeavour to become an artist. Recognised and established as a distinctly original artist, Margaret Woodward has behind her a lifelong struggle to reconcile conflicting demands: poverty and self-sufficiency; relationship and isolation; art and life. And, in her fascinating personal insights at the end of the book, the intuitive and the conscious. Australian women artists are not unacquainted with these struggles; this life and work reveals them in unusual intensity. Winner of the Wynne Prize, the major prize for landscape and numerous other prizes, Margaret Woodward spent the early part of her life as a dedicated art teacher, first in secondary schools and late in art colleges both in Perth and Sydney. Today she is a full-time painter exhibiting regularly in all Australian states. How her highly individual style has evolved and what she has achieved, is explained in this book by an informative and sympathetic text by Gavin Fry.The colour plates and numerous black and white illustrations and photographs cover all periods of the artists work, from the earliest student essays in landscape, to the recent imaginative compositions of figures and the haunting waterlilies series. This edition includes extra pages of recent works and a commentary by Margaret Woodward about the Portia Geech portrait painting prize for women.