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​Mirroring, 2014 is a touchstone of the current state of Preston's art, just as surely as Mountain Path and Floating Worlds marked earlier points in her oeuvre. It possesses complexity without any chaos and calibrates the relationship between a place and is reflection gracefully. It exerts a visual pull in the way clear water segues gently into reflections of flora and then tugs your vision to the water's edge and beyond, where a multicolored sheet of vegetation slows the travels of your eye. There is a pregnant tranquility to this scene, a mood analogous to that of Return to the Pond, 2014, (p.20) which has a smaller expanse of water and a handsome flourish of green vegetation rising from the surface of the pond. One dimension of the complexity in this group of ambitious paintings is the shift between sharp and soft focus. Night Curtain, 2014 (p.18) is a prime ex-ample, in which crystalline clarity in the foliage in the foreground is a counterpart to the atmospheric vertical tendrils of color that interrupt a predominantly black background-a bright flourish in a dark plane that fulfills the title of the painting.

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As much as expansive landscapes are central to the current work, another constant in Preston's art is her resistance to a singular style. She remains devoted to a multiplicity of vision. Patterns of orbs punctuate select pictures, a geometric motif that is organic in spirit and abstracting in effect. In Red Reflections, 2014, (p.32) the orbs appear to float within water and are finely focused; in Riverrun, 2014, (p.33) they are ghostly, seemingly fading away. In Some Memories, 2014 (p.39) there are two kinds of spheres: monochrome versions similar to those in Red Reflections or Riverrun and tightly focused circular landscape fragments like those in Floating Worlds. But Preston also takes delight in casting aside the polish and sophistication of her paintings to try for what she calls primitive effects. The results in White Waves, 2014 (p.25) are lush, seductive, and, in a departure from her intent, quite elegant. The tangle of thick white brushstrokes evokes white foam in an expanse of green.

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The different ways of working are ultimately part of a larger picture, a bigger odyssey. Preston's art, seen in its full sweep, becomes the pursuit of a kind of knowledge that can only be gained through creating a sustained body of work about natural terrain and natural life. It is knowledge that is intimately tied to the observation of natural forms. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the process well in his great early essay, Nature (1836), when he declared, "To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." Preston has remained sharply attuned to such flux, shaping her perceptions into something larger: a vision of landscape that heightens our sense of its beauty in all its complexity. She also affirms the way that the bond with earth, water and sky, while primal, is also inseparable from the intangibilities of the imagination and the human spirit. Invoking the terms of Barthelme's story, the stance of electric awareness just won't do; like his narrator, Preston isn't about to relinquish the humanist per-spective, even in a world that sometimes makes us think the colors of nature could fade from view.​