Image: Grace COSSINGTON SMITH Wildflowers in a bucket 1947, oil on composition board. QUT Art Collection. Purchased 1952.
The work is an oil painting on board and measures 69 centimetres tall by 53.5 centimetres wide. This work is displayed in a salon-style hang which means artworks are displayed both horizontally and vertically, closely together on a purply pink, musk stick candy coloured wall in the entrance to the art museum. The work described is the last artwork on the far-right hand side of this salon hang.
In the centre of this particular work, stands a grey silver bucket overflowing with an enormous bunch of Australian native flowers and wildflowers. On the right-hand side bending towards the far-right-hand corner are branches of native bottlebrush flowering with its distinctive rich red bristled flowers. In the middle of the work and the bucket sit branches of white Geraldton waxflowers, and as the name suggests common to Western Australia. Its small narrow dark green leaves are almost needle like and spill out and down the left-hand side of the bucket. Shooting up towards the far-left-hand side of the artwork are more wax flowers, but pink in colour and above these heads of clover.
Other, unknown varieties of flowers and foliage in whites, pale yellows, reds and shades of green fill the bucket and in turn the canvas. The bucket of wildflowers sits upon a white sheet, creased, and crumpled in places as if thrown down upon a larger piece of furniture in haste. The sheet is painted in the artist’s signature short brushstrokes and encourages a play of light across its surface. The daylight spills in from the window partially shown in the top left-hand corner and into the room in shades of white, blue, beige, creams and yellows. In the middle at the top of the artwork longer brushstrokes indicate a curtain was parted to expose the window glass and let this exquisite morning light in and onto the flowers displayed within.
A brilliant colourist, Cossington Smith developed a technique utilising rhythmic broken brushwork in unmixed, high-keyed colour to create dramatic effect. Her aim, she said, was ‘to express form in colour – colour within colour, vibrant with light’ and colour became the key mode through which she represented structure, depth and solidity in her practice from the private scenes of the domestic interior to dynamic works such as the Sydney Harbour bridge under construction.
The work is displayed in a painted brown oak frame and the artist has signed her surname G. Cossington Smith, in black paint, in the far-left hand bottom corner alongside the year date 47. This work was purchased in 1952.