Elder Wing of Australian Art: Plain English Tour
Work 12 of 15

Grace Cossington Smith tried many different ways of painting.

In the 1920's she started to paint with colour and light.

Her rhythmic brush strokes,

rhythmic meaning repeated movement,

made her one of Australia’s most gifted artists.

She would later say: ‘My chief interest, I think, has always been colour, but not flat crude colour.’

Crude meaning raw or plain.

She said ‘…it must be colour within colour, it has to shine. Light must be in it.’

Grace studied art and drawing in Sydney and Britain.

She lived at her family’s home at Turramurra in northern Sydney.

Grace painted pictures of things and places close to her.

Like the rooms in her house, flowers, and her garden.

She also painted the hills around her family home.

Landscape at Pentecost

is a place near her home.

In this painting, Grace uses clear colour in short strokes –

what she later called

‘Firm, separate notes of clear unworried paint’.

She uses orange–browns for the dirt road,

then mixes greens for grass and field,

then blues and purples for hills far away.

Up in the sky, the clouds show the colours below.

The dirt road Grace paints leads us to think of hope and good things to come.