Recent drawings and paintings

Penny Coss classifies her series, Grey Continuum, as drawings. This may surprise us, for they are not executed with charcoal or pencil as that description might indicate, but with the left over sludge contained within the multitude of odd shaped paint tins that line her studio shelves and jostle each other on the floor. The aqueous ghosting marks, their wetness sinking into the dense rag paper as an alchemic mixture of turps, pigment and oil, coalesce then separate, run and drip as Coss, holding tin and brush, physically moves around the paper lain on the floor. The studio makes it's own physical contribution with marks from the old, wide floorboards appearing where the sludge has been particularly liquid. The warmth of the light blue (Nos 3,4,5) faintly resonates like a painterly half-life - we recognise that colour - have seen it from the paintings - and it's possible to envisage that these works are the end product of a creative process, afterthoughts or exercises. They are in fact worked on in parallel with the paintings and afford Coss both the luxury and discipline of the meditative gesture.

If  the drawings are a process of physical mark making, made with speed and assurance, the paintings are built up, scraped back, and physically constructed with pigment. Their scale, like those of the drawings, is neither intimate or imposing - like heroic abstraction - but  accord with  the artist's own frame. Their series title Green suggests a confident move away from narrative structures that have marked previous work. As a pure colour, green  immediately suggests Nature, yet the pigment itself has a very unnatural poisonous history, its active ingredient in the unstable, pre synthetic times being arsenic. Dialectics continue. The original site is a local park that is neither virgin bush nor manicured landscape; but something in between. The Park, as both site of a relaxed suburban engagement with Nature but also a potentially threatening place, hints at Coss' earlier series on missing persons. The Australian bush is famously rarely a verdant green, which troubled colonial painters, and Coss patently understands its olives, khaki and dirty yellow greens.

These new paintings are not however literal depictions of that place but exist as a kind of tremulous haze between abstraction and things that we can see. The artist finds a connection with Gerhard Richter's statement about his painting process that 'the surface becomes erased or more erased.' (1) Looking through into Painting 3, window upon window appears as a body of colour recedes and then comes forward.

That unrelenting piercing light blue is the key colour counterpoint. We see it as reflected sky Painting 23 and imagined as luscious waterfall and in Painting 22 it completely dominates. The artist's task to tease and wrestle from unlikely chemicals, paintings of such  luminous suggestion is testament both to the enduring fascination with the medium and with Coss' own depth of understanding of its possibilities.

Virginia Rigney

Independent Writer

2003

(1)Interview between Richard Storr and Gerard Richter, Art in America 2002, Vol 90 pp 66