Grace Cossington Smith Quotes about Art

Grace Cossington Smith was a famous modernist Australian painter. She is best known for her uniquely Australian modernist paintings that were influenced by what Post-Impressionist Europe was doing at the time. Famous Grace Cossington Smith artworks include “The Sock Knitter”, “The Bridge in Curve”, “The Curve of the Bridge”, “Landscape at Pentecost”, “Eastern Road, Turramurra”, “Kuringai Avenue”, “Quaker Girl”, “Waratah”, “The Lacquer Room”, “Interior in Yellow” and “Foxgloves Growing”.

Mini biography: Born Grace Smith on the 20th of April, 1892 in Neutral Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Her mother was Grace Fisher and her father Ernest Smith was a solicitor. The artist died on the 20th of December, 1984 in Roseville, New South Wales, Australia at the age of 92.

List of Famous Grace Cossington Smith Art Quotes

People often say my paintings have this clarity, this light, this grace, as if they have become windows onto something, protective of their own design. Which is something that I value in one sense, but this I find easy. I guess it goes to show that the thickness of the paint won’t have any bearing on whether people see through your paintings or not. Grace Cossington Smith

I adopted a European style because it resonated with me, and it didn’t move and I didn’t shift. And, although it is so ingrained into the way we think about Australian art, it wasn’t as though ‘Post-Impressionism’ was a hemline to be taken up or down—it is more complicated and discursive than that. It was the way I was taught, it was the others around me, before and after, however few—and it was different to ‘Modernism’, whatever we imagined that to be. Grace Cossington Smith

it is odd how people perceive you in terms of ‘major works’. I say this because I stopped painting just as I was beginning to become recognised with my first retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia—it seemed to have marked a definitive end. Well I continued to sketch still lives, interiors, what was immediately around me—I only stopped when I had retreated so far inside myself that I could no longer see, or draw. And that’s when I really knew it was ending—I moved into a nursing home. Grace Cossington Smith

I have never liked to dwell on myself, but what I will say is that I have come to think of my paintings as resistance to ‘objectification’, and that is not to say that they are not objects, it’s just that that was my approach. Grace Cossington Smith

I think I would have been very excited if I were younger again, but it is hard to get excited when you are dead, and never before have I felt the closure getting tighter, the air getting thicker. Grace Cossington Smith

I mean she (Margaret Preston) tried to emancipate Australian art, and a part of this was through encouraging the then emerging Modernist tradition, belonging to it, but also trying to find something different, something Australian, however problematic that seems now. I guess then she thought she was a part of it, and I guess now she is remembered for being symbolic of this, descriptive of this desire of being in it, the centre, or this desire to set the conditions for the ‘now’, the ‘avant-garde’. Grace Cossington Smith

Grace Cossington Smith Self Portrait Painting

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