Elder Wing of Australian Art: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 12 of 15

In the late 1920s, Grace Cossington Smith saw the path she must follow in a clear light. After several shifts in direction as an artist, she began to invest her paintings with the luminosity of colour and light and the rhythmic patterning of brushstrokes that would define her as one of Australia’s most accomplished modernist painters.
She would later say: ‘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.’

After studying art and drawing in Sydney and briefly in Britain, Cossington Smith lived for most of her life at her family’s home at Turramurra in northern Sydney. Her subjects often reflected a world within close proximity – room interiors, her garden and flowers picked from it. In the mid to late 1920s, the roads across the rolling semi-rural terrain of Turramurra were also a repeated subject of her paintings.

Landscape at Pentecost, a scene barely 500 metres from her home, is one such work. In this painting from 1929, Cossington Smith applies distinct colour in short, sharp strokes – what she later called ‘firm, separate notes of clear unworried paint’. She foregrounds the rich orange-brown shades and textures of a dirt road through a hilltop cutting, before the line of her rutted road draws our eye across the assorted green hues of crops and pasture, towards the purple-blue of faraway hills. Above, a heaven of rolling clouds reflects the tones of the colourscape below.

Cossington Smith’s road guides us to a distant horizon and, in doing so, it presents a vision of hope and promise. With its emphasis on colour and light through staccato brushstrokes, Landscape at Pentecost affirms the direction she has chosen at a crossroad period in her career and heralds the radiant, almost spiritual luminosity of the work she would create from then on. Her road of earthy bold orange transports us beyond her home soil, beyond the backyard studio where she painted, into her future of emotively vibrant colour.