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Margaret Wilson paints using external referents that are personally important. Actual elements of the Northern Australian landscape are re-organised for her images. For example, a burnt out landscape after sunset, a blue sheet of lake, a patch of water and burnt vegetation are features which have been absorbed into the large work, Blue Flat.
Yet Wilson believes in a generality of her images; that they are common visual property. While specific places are influential, their presentation is generalised. Wilson accepts that her images could be true for other parts of Australia such as the landscape of Central Australia. Similar images could have been made there and elsewhere. The works are not records of specific landscapes, rather they reflect the enduring historical and contemporary energy of the land.
Wilson 's work has been described in relation to the Colour Field painters of the 1960s. This association can be justified on the grounds that the paintings on canvas are large in scale and use colour without attaching it to recognisable and readily identifiable subjects. Wilson's work has also been related to Post Painterly Abstraction, which Greenberg characterised by 'openness of design'. But regardless how 'minimal' or 'abstract' Wilson's paintings appear at a cursory glance, they are, on closer examination, suffused with a type of descriptive content which refers to the natural world.
Margaret Wilson's work is not 1960s Colour Field painting revisited. It comes from a different place and the look is different. The works of art are documents which present an understanding of the nature of the landscape with its often almost imperceptible movement over time. These works explore the underlying vibrations of heat and energy inherent in the vast