Elisabeth Cummings

Elisabeth Cummings (born 1934, Brisbane) is an Australian artist known for her large abstract paintings and printmaking. She has won numerous awards including Fleurieu Art Prize, The Portia Geach Portrait Prize, The Mosman Art Prize, and The Tattersalls Art Prize. Her work is owned in permanent collections across Australia including Artbank, The Queensland Art Gallery, The Gold Coast City Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is notable for receiving recognition later in her career, considered by the Australian Art Collector as one of the 50 most collectible Australian Artists.

Early life Elisabeth Cummings was born on 3 June 1934 in Brisbane, Queensland. During the Second World War Cumming’s family evacuated Brisbane and lived in the country before returning to live in Alderley. The family home in Alderley was surrounded by bushlands. The Cummings family owned a holiday home at Currumbin on the Gold Coast where Cummings, as a child, would paint watercolour landscapes. Currumbin and the Australian bush are now regular subjects in her landscape paintings. Cummings initially wanted to pursue architectural training but decided to enroll in art school after meeting and painting with Margaret Cilento. where she was educated by artists Douglas Dundas, Wallace Thornton, Dorothy Thornhill, Godfrey Miller and Ralph Balson. At art school, Cummings was exposed to the work of fellow young Australian artists which she found to be formative to her practice. The artists Cummings cites as influential during this period include Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston, Fred Williams, Russell Drysdale, Sydney Nolan, John Olsen and Jimmy Rose. In 1961 she studied at Kokoschka’s School of Vision run by Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, Austria In 1969 she started teaching at East Sydney Technical College on a part-time basis. Cumming’s starts her paintings by drawing multiple quick sketches of the scene which form the basis for her final full-sized work. Edge of the Simpson Desert, 2011 and Wynne Prize finalist Monaro Shadow and Light, 2015.

Early work Elisabeth Cummings worked part-time as an art teacher from 1969 to 2001 at multiple art colleges including the City Art Institute, Sydney (1975 to 1987) and the National Art School of Sydney. She continued painting independently during this time, winning awards such as the 1974 Grafton Prize and the 1977 Landscape and Still Life Prizes, RAS. as she worked quietly and independently in her studio for 43 years with limited recognition. Ervin, Observatory Hill, Sydney.

Cummings is a frequent traveller and has participated in international and national artist residencies and exhibitions. In 2014, at age 81, participated in an artist residency and exhibition at The Nock Art Foundation in Hong Kong. In the same year Cummings, in a group of nine Australian artists, held a group exhibition at the Waiheke Arts Centre during their residency in Waiheke, New Zealand. Cummings was involved in the travelling exhibition YOUR FRIEND THE ENEMY along with fifteen Australian and New Zealand Artists. The artists were invited to Gallipoli, Turkey to paint the shores of Anzac Cove. She became involved in printmaking through a workshop with Michael Kempson at Cicada Press, a studio associated with UNSW Art & Design in Sydney. Cummings participated in a program whereby artists print with the assistance of students. Other notable participants include Reg Mombassa and Euan Macleod. Cummings has since visited Cicada Press weekly to work with Kempson. Her print work explores similar concerns to her painting, primarily landscape and interiors. The Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia hold three lithographs, Studio, 1986, Dappled bush, 1995 and Windy bush, 1995, and a silkscreen print Billabong, 1999 by Cummings. In 2017 Cummings donated a comprehensive archival collection of 85 of her prints and etchings to the New England Regional Art Museum.

Ceramics Cummings has also explored ceramics and sculpture in the form of small-scale interior sets with figures crafted in clay. These were created together with Lino Alvarez.

Wedderburn In 1970, Cummings began camping in a tent on bushland land owned by Barbara and Nick Romalis at Wedderburn outside Sydney. The move to Wedderburn coincided with a move towards gestural abstraction in her paintings, with Cummings privileging the painting process over the subject matter. Both Cummings and Peart have been involved in campaigns to protect the environment of Wedderburn from development. Following the 1994 fire, Cummings built a larger studio attached to her mud brick house on the land. Her 2001 painting After the Fire, Wedderburn depicts the aftermath of the fires.