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  Grace Cossington Smith: An Interior Life November 13, 2005 Producer : Catherine Hunter  Grace Cossington Smith was born in Sydney in 1892 into a middle-class family who always supported her artistic endeavours. From a young age, she sketched everything around her — her family, her house, streetscapes and landscapes — but over a lifetime committed to artistic practice, she would make a great impact on the Australian art scene.As Drusilla Modjeska wrote in Stravinsky's Lunch: "Over a very long life, of which nearly 60 years were devoted to painting, Grace Cossington Smith gave herself, largely undistracted and alone, to the task of painting what she saw, what she felt, and what she knew to be true. It was, she said, "a continual try", by which she meant both in life and in art." Her painting, The Sock Knitter, (1915) is generally regarded as Australia's first modernist work. Painted when she was only 23 years old, the boldly coloured picture was a portrait of her youngest sister Charlotte knitting socks during wartime. Cossington Smith was primarily concerned with form and colour and later in life her work embodied a spiritual quality. This was most evident in the late great interiors of the Sydney house where she lived for most of her life. Art historian Daniel Thomas, credited with rediscovered her in the 1970s, remembers: "She found great subjects just in the house where she was living. And she once said to me when I was admiring the look of some of the interiors, the way the light flowed, and it looked like a place full of memories and things like this, and she said, 'Well yes, I sit here a lot, you get to know it'."  "She was a great colourist and also a painter of light. That sense of light that emanates from her later works of the bush and particularly in the late interiors — there's a fantastic sense of luminosity that comes out of those works," says curator Deborah Hart.The other great subject was the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Not for Grace the great finished engineering feat, but rather the moment of it coming into being as exemplified in her most famous painting, The Bridge in Curve, (1926). "Her bridge subjects, none of them show the bridge completed. She lost interest in the bridge once the arms met," said Daniel Thomas. The Grace Cossington Smith retrospective is at the Art Gallery of NSW until January 15 and will then travel to the Queensland Art Gallery (11 February to April 30). |
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