Three Australian Society Women by Derek Kosbab

These three imaginary women—Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, Mrs Colquhoun and Mrs Wolfson—were painted from descriptions written by Patrick White in his book: Riders in the Chariot:

‘These were obviously three ladies of importance who reached the safety of the floor after the dangers of the street stairs.  They stood around agreeably helpless, while waiters flew like homing swallows.  From the tables, patrons craned outrageously, which might have been disquieting to the objects of their interest if it had not been desired.  For the three ladies were wearing amusing hats.

The first, and perhaps least confident of the three, had chosen an enormous satin bon-bon, of screeching pink, swathed so excessively on one side that the head conveyed an impression of disproportion, of deformity, of bulbous growth.  But the uncertain lady was palpitating with her own daring, and glanced at the closer of her two companions, fishing for a scrap of praise. Her friend would not concede it, however.

For the second lady was secure in her own seasoned carapace, and would not have recognised her acquaintance except by compulsion.  The second lady was wearing on her head a lacquered crab-shell.  She was quite oblivious of it, of course.  But there it sat, one real claw offering a diamond starfish, the other dangling a miniature conch in polished crystal.  The unconscious wearer had divested herself conventionally of her gloves, and was restoring suppleness to her hands.  As she tried her nails on the air, it was seen that those, by some chance, were exactly the same shade of audacious crab.

How the waiters adored the three insolent ladies, but it was at the third and obviously eldest that their most Italianate smiles were directed.
The third, or by now, the first, lady affected the most amusing hat of all.  On her blue curls she had perched an innocent little conical hat, of a drab earth colour, so simple and unassuming that the owner might have been mistaken for some old, displaced clown, until it was noticed that fashion had tweaked the felt almost imperceptibly, and that smoke – yes, actual smoke – was issuing out of the ingenious cone.  There she stood at the centre of the smart restaurant in her volcanic hat, her mouth crimped for pleasure, for she had reached an age of social innocence, where she was dependent on success.  So she smiled, in the abstract, for the blinding bulbs of two photographers, and because she was trying to ignore the arthritis in her knees…. The Crab-shell saw that the Bon-bon had a natural gap between her centre, upper teeth, which gave her an expression both vulgar and predatory.’

These paintings were each painted entirely with a palette knife, thus creating a textured surface more obvious in the larger versions of the paintings above, that appear separately below.

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Acrylic on canvas: 3 x 505mm x 505mm