One of the delights of living in rural New South Wales, between the Illawarra and the Southern Highlands, is the possibility of an after-breakfast jaunt to Canberra, divided road nearly all the way, only four traffic lights and park outside the door when you arrive.
There is the oblique sunlight lying across the land, sometimes a rising moon on the way home, and the seasonal changes to note en route; fog on the escarpment, vineyards and elm-lined driveways on the highlands and drought on the plains.
Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984) knew this land, so it is appropriate that we follow her route.
Neither her pencil sketches of Church Cottage, Bowral (1911), nor a painting of the bare Monaro—Sunday morning: cows at Lanyon (c. 1916)—defers to the picturesque, a quality you might expect of a privileged young woman dedicated to a career as a painter in the second decade of the 20th century.
Whereas her mostly male contemporaries would have put pretty tea parties on her verandahs and mythologised the Monaro, Cossington Smith is intrigued by the way light comes in through open doorways and slices through blocks of shadow. Her paddocks are dry, as they usually are, a single big tree plonked in the centre of the canvas, its leafless and broken limbs providing little shade to three blocky, two-dimensional cows.
These works provide signposts rather than hints to the way her long and prolific career would develop. The brilliant colour would arrive on her palette soon, but her preoccupation with light, of the relationship between the private domain and nature, and of nature itself, are all here. Though some of her paintings contain people, even rushing, pushing crowds of them in her early urban subjects, the empty house and the farm corner indicate her chosen direction. These places are not abandoned, however; there is already the sense that someone has just left or is about to arrive in the room or come through a gate and into the paddock. Activity is not far away.
Grace Cossington Smith: a retrospective exhibition, currently at the National Gallery of Australia and touring until April 2006, is a thoroughly satisfying show on many levels. It contains about 120 paintings (though some will not tour) so there is that good feeling that the effort of going is well worthwhile. The sub title retrospective is well chosen because the works range from 1908–1971, age 16