Margaret Anne Dredge (27 January 1928 – 3 September 2001) was an Australian painter and printmaker, active from the mid-1950s until 1997, and teacher of art.
Early life
Dredge was born in Murrumbeena in 1928, daughter of a war veteran, the accountant William Arthur Vickery who brought her up after her mother Annie (née Ashby) and her second child died in 1930 during childbirth. They moved frequently, boarding mainly in Albert Park and South Yarra, then settled in bayside Sandringham where she attended the State School. Her father's fortunes as a freelance accountant improved despite the Great Depression and starting in 1940 she studied and attained her leaving certificate at Methodist Ladies College, and left with ambitions to study art at the National Gallery School, but at her father's insistence went into secretarial work at the Commonwealth Bank. Over 6 months in 1948-50 she worked as a secretary in Sydney before returning to nurse her ageing father. At the Commonwealth Bank she met bank clerk and builder Peter John Dredge, whom she married in 1950 and lived at 34 Codrington Street, Sandringham. Her first children Rhonda and Lesley were born 1951 and 1954 respectively.
Training
In the mid-1950s Dredge studied initially with Inez Hutchinson and made figurative works before moving on to abstraction. By 1958 she had become a member of, and exhibited with, the Beaumaris Art Group, and after the birth of her third child Peter in February 1959, she took art classes with Australian abstract painter/printmaker Robert Grieve which encouraged her move to abstraction.
Career and reception
In the early 1960s Dredge joined the Contemporary Artists Society (CAS), and was on its council, and the Melbourne Contemporary Artists (MCA), greatly expanding her contact with the art world; between 1961 and 1979 she held five solo shows, the first two being in 1964 at Peter Burrows Gallery and Three Sisters Gallery, and entered art awards.
An early review by Bernard Smith of her contribution to a Melbourne Contemporary Artists show in 1963 was ambivalent, but constructive; "Wimmera by Margaret Dredge, is boldly handled and dramatic in handling. But...there is an evenness of accent and an over-stylisation of the composition which robs the painting of tension and surprise."
Dredge began teaching at the Beaumaris Art Group and held life classes at her own home. She was befriended by architect Gavin Hughes when he purchased a work from her, and his encouragement and mentorship furthered her exposure to literature, music and architecture. Hughes and his partner Max Dingle in 2008 bequeathed most of Dredge's works exhibited at her 2012 retrospective to the Shoalhaven City Arts Centre.
Favourable reviews of her 1965 one-person exhibition at the Argus Gallery by Alan McCulloch and Bernard Smith enhanced her reputation, and when she showed at Pinacotheca in 1967 Ken Bandman set her amongst the 'post-painterly' abstractionists."The main characteristic of her work is the severe discipline of line and her brush work. Squares, lines and other geometrical patterns are crossing, overlaying or cutting each other, in bright and vibrant colours, mainly pleasing to the eye. There is an indication of texture there, but texture is not Miss Dredge's forte. It is rather that rigidness of line, that hard-edgedness, and the definite intent of her design that make her work come alive."This attention was followed in Margaret Garlick's review of the 1965 show of the Melbourne Contemporary Art Society which she called 'depressing,' but singled out Dredge's as among "the best paintings" that "showed an understanding of forms within the chosen shape of the canvas. They tended to be rather bold abstracts, like Margaret Dredge's two paintings with strong shapes and bold colors..."
Ann Galbally was impressed with Dredge's Nuns at Dawn, commended in the Inez Hutchinson Award at the Beaumaris Art Group Studio in May 1970, "as a taut spatial structure firmly controlled by a sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of line and plane."