Grace Cossington Smith, The sock knitter 1915. Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Amazing Grace
28 February 2005
Grace Cossington Smith painted both familiar material objects like the contents of her room as well as the rapidly modernising Australian landscape. Her focus on colour and light and evocative domestic interiors have led some to consider her the Australian equivalent of Van Gogh. Light and colour were inseparable elements in her art. As she herself once said, “My chief interest I think has always been colour, but not flat crude colour, it must be colour within colour, it has to shine; light must be in it”.
Born in Sydney in 1892, Grace Cossington Smith studied with Dattilo Rubbo at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales in 1910. She attended drawing classes at the Winchester School of Art in England and then later at Stettin in Germany. Her work reflected a middle-class suburban life devoted to painting the world around her. As well as painting flower arrangements and sun-drenched domestic settings, she also produced images of landscapes, streetscapes and religious subjects. In 1938, following the death of her father, she moved from her garden studio to one inside the house, and began painting a series of intimate views of her room.
This timely exhibition comes three decades after the artist’s first retrospective, and is an opportunity to see a substantial number of works from public and private collections. Curated by Deborah Hart, Senior Curator of Australian Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery, the exhibition reveals an adventurous, pioneering artist.
Along with 120 of Cossington Smith’s paintings, many of the 52 sketchbooks held by the National Gallery of Australia will be on display, demonstrating how ideas, embryonic in her sketchbooks prior to the First World War, came to fruition several decades later.
In Cossington Smith’s magnificent late interiors we are made aware of a lifetime of concentrated effort. It also becomes clear how deeply her work is informed by drawing in the architectural intricacies of rooms in which doors, mirrors and windows poetically integrate glimpses of her light-filled garden within the interior spaces.
More Information
Grace Cossington Smith: A Retrospective Exhibition
4 March – 13 June
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Details: (02) 6240 6411
Website: http://www.nga.gov.au/
