Astrid Preston is a landscape painter based in Santa Monica. Although she is not a photorealist, all of her work is based on photographs, sometimes photos taken from magazines. In previous shows, her paintings featured light that had unreal, perhaps even surreal, overtones, forms that tended to be defined by hard edges, and orderly compositions with very definite and strategically composed vistas. During the past year, Preston began to demonstrate a more romantic bent. Although she had often depicted images of suburbia, she began to paint suburban night scenes, using the dramatic effects of