Govett's Leap 1933

Curator: Here we have Grace Cossington Smith’s 1933 painting, "Govett's Leap," rendered in oil paint. Editor: What strikes me is its raw, almost child-like simplicity. The brushstrokes feel immediate, like she’s wrestling with the landscape's energy. Curator: Yes, the energetic brushwork! And how she translates the immense scale of the cliff face into these, almost, domestic blocks of colour. It’s quite radical. Do you see how the waterfall almost disappears, a mere sliver of white? Editor: The waterfall's thin white line becomes a symbolic thread, really. It connects the overwhelming power of the heights with a subtle fragility down below in the landscape. The whole image gives an impression of the sublime, evoking something about Australia's cultural relationship to land as a place of both refuge and terrifying, mythic significance. Curator: That is interesting, yes. It also evokes such a personal moment, though. I mean, those greens aren't real greens and those browns are the most unreal, alive browns that I have seen, because the land speaks to me! And they all exist as these flat planes jammed up against one another! It becomes about surface and about vision... about the experience of seeing more than any true record of it. Editor: That's true. And the absence of human figures emphasizes this primal force. Do you think it hints at the looming presence of the Aboriginal past, almost invisible, erased through dispossession yet shaping our perception? Curator: I believe there is also just joy and wonder for the pure force of light… it almost has no real meaning. Maybe in a similar way the leap does, perhaps—light is itself the meaning and feeling. Editor: You are absolutely right. In fact, I may have given it too much significance, too quickly! Light is the most symbolic force after all. The more I observe Cossington Smith’s rendering here, the less I can imagine anything else. Curator: And maybe that's why I enjoy it so much, in the end—no one gets to lay claim. We just all experience its visual light.