Grace Cossington Smith - Yellow Room Interiors

Yellow Room Interiors

Smith's indoor views show the pleasant aspects of a suburban home in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s. In these works, her love of the colour yellow is most obvious. She loved the colour because it is the colour of the sun, as well as being religiously significant because yellow is a colour of glory. She also regarded yellow as the colour of the Australian bush, rather than other painters at the time who tended to see the Australian countryside as being more reddish than yellowish. Her paintings explore the perspective, shapes and colours of objects inside seemingly ordinary rooms. They offer a vision of the type of furniture, clothing and other objects which suburban people had in their homes during this time. Drapery, chair and window, 1942 shows what seems at first to be merely a couple of chairs in front of a window, but the viewer is drawn into the wonderful spaces created around these delightful objects, and the folds of the drapery which create a lovely feeling of light and shadows.

Increasingly she would concentrate on these interior views, with ten room paintings exhibited in her solo exhibition of 1947. Her large oil, Interior with verandah doors of 1954, shows an accurate depiction of her house with a large window and a door opening to the outside on the other side of the bed. The painting is the first of her larger room interior paintings and prominently features yellow in the colouring. She also experimented with views in mirrors, such as in Interior with wardrobe mirror, 1955, which shows a mirror on an open wardrobe door that is opened at a 45 degree angle, whereby the viewer is given a view of the yard outside the house from the reflection in the glass. The angular cutting into the basic composition with these doors adds dynamism and gives it an energetic feel.

In all her later paintings she used a unique style of squarish daubs of paint applied on the canvas, in colours which were varied but which tended towards the yellow end of the spectrum. Many of her room interior paintings show the same room from different angles, or even multiple views from a slightly different or the same angle. In some paintings a door or window is the dominant focus for the painting, while in others the viewer is shown the entire room. Her use of colour has been compared to the work of Pierre Bonnard, though she said she found Cezanne a more important influence on her. Her style of many multi-coloured brush strokes was used not only in her interior views, but also in her still lives.