Grace Cossington SMITH

Australian 1892–1984

The leafy street is typical of the garden suburb of Turramurra on the North Shore of Sydney; 43 Kuringai Avenue is the address where the artist lived most of her life. The family home, renamed Cossington by her father, though bought when semi-rural and named, appropriately, Sylvan Fells, had a large garden running into a bush gully close to the Kuringai Chase. Garden and gully formed constant subjects for Cossington Smith whose studio within the garden was built under a large gum tree. By 1943 advanced contemporary Australian artists were painting pure abstraction, expressionistic and emotional subjects and surrealist images. Cossington Smith’s choice of her street as her subject may have had a small impetus from looking at images of the inner city and working life shown in the Contemporary Art Society exhibitions. These images were in paintings made by artists as diverse as Yosl Bergner, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan. The majority of Cossington Smith’s subjects were still life, interiors, bush and garden scenes and landscapes.

Cossington Smith uses one of her favourite compositional devices, a straight path or road that begins at the bottom edge and runs up the canvas to disappear over a rise. The viewer stands with the artist and looks up between a cathedral-like frame of tree trunks on the left, branches overhead and solid hedges on the right. Bruce James in his monograph on the artist, in discussing this uplifting form, considers it implies infinity, the spiritual dimension to life that, for Grace Cossington Smith, a devout Anglican Christian, was the ultimate meaning behind her art. The light glow where the path disappears in the background arouses expectation of some greater reality. This kind of conjunction of constructed form and radiant light is seen at its most luminous effect in Grace Cossington Smith’s greatest painting, The bridge in-curve, 1930 (in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria).

Jennifer Phipps