Cossington Smith painted two very different meetings in relation to the Second World War: one of a major event and the other of everyday experience. Warden’s meeting is about ordinary people contributing at a local level to a cause greater than themselves. Cossington Smith was a Warden for the suburb of Turramurra. As she said, ‘Of course I had my unimportant war job, quite unimportant, but I mean it was what civilians did.’ (Interview with Alan Roberts, 1970).

Signing is about the historic Yalta Agreement in 1945. It is a tense, ambiguous depiction of the encounter of world leaders, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, with photographers in the background. The artist focuses our attention on the act of signing, as if to convey that with a stroke of a pen the fate of millions of lives is sealed. ⨪