Currumbin Window, 2011, oil on canvas, 45x45cm 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPxV-NVZbis

King Street Gallery on William - Elisabeth Cummings

http://vimeo.com/71378863

Elisabeth Cummings is one of Australia's finest artists and a national living treasure. In this film, Elisabeth gives a rare up-close view of her creative approach to painting in the field. Elisabeth is overlooking a dry river bed at Fowlers Gap, north-west of Broken Hill in outback NSW. She plays with the forms of the sandy creek bed, the tall gums, red dirt and rocks, native grasses, the distant hills. The playful and decisive mark making is a joy to watch - it's as if Elisabeth lives and breathes paint. What emerges on the board is both evocative of the place, and a singular artistic vision. Towards the conclusion, Elisabeth gives a rare on camera interview.

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Boy, oh boy. If there was an exhibition that I would love to see in the flesh it would have to be this one on at the moment at King St Gallery on William St, Sydney. I’ve long admired her work and at the ripe age of 77 she is continuing to explore and push herself and her medium. I love that about painting and art in general in that it has the potential to be a lifelong calling and that you can keep on delving into subjects, playing with techniques and continuing to sharpen skills until the day you die. I can’t think what it must be like for sports-people whose career essentially ends by their 30s or even less. What do they do afterwards?

The works in this exhibition encompass paintings in oils and, intriguingly, monotypes. I hardly ever see monotypes exhibited in any exhibition nowadays. I think of it as a technique taught in art schools as an introduction to printmaking. But as a serious standalone in a professional artist’s output? For Cummings however it makes absolute sense, working alongside her oils in a unity of purpose and technique (see the one of her exhibited monotypes below). It perfectly suits her way of employing scratchings, scrumblings and astute use of colour, scale and brushstroke to create almost completely abstracted still-lifes and landscapes. Her subject is mostly the day-to-day of her immediate surroundings but far from being banal, she brings to the works an excitement of colour, texture and composition. I love looking at these paintings, even on the internet, which is as close as I’ll get looking at the real thing seeing as this exhibition in Sydney goes from 31 May to 25 June. If you can, go and see it for me please.

'Day to Dusk'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr98k9WhMp0

Elisabeth Cummings in conversation with Peter Pinson

An excerpt of an interview with Australian artist, Elisabeth Cummings. For the full interview, go to the Cultural Conversations web site, http://www.cultconv.com.

The above is an excerpt from the 29 min video below:

http://www.cultconv.com./English/Conversations/Cummings_Elisabeth/HTML5/testimonybrowser.html

Born in 1934 in Brisbane, Elisabeth Cummings is one of Australia’s most respected living artists.  She was listed in Australian Art Collector Magazine 2002, as one of Australia’s 50 most collectable artists. Significant prizes to her name include the Fleurieu Art Prize, the Portia Geach Portrait Prize, The Mosman Prize and The Tattersall’s Art Prize. Much sought after, Elisabeth’s works are represented in many private and public collections, including Artbank, The Queensland and Gold Coast City Art Galleries and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Elisabeth has an enviable history, starting from 1953-57 when she attended the National Art School in Sydney. In 1961 she studied with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, and spent ten years studying and travelling throughout France and Italy. Elisabeth taught at the National Art School in Sydney from 1969-2001 and has been an arts educator at various other institutions from that time until the present day. She is a truly inspirational woman, passionate and dedicated to the journey of art.

Elisabeth assumes a quiet place of wisdom as she intuitively guides each student according to their capacity and personal direction.  After spending time with Elisabeth Cummings, artists feel the benefit of having learned

under an Australian master with 50 years’ experience teaching and exhibiting.  A worthy winner of some of Australia’s most prestigious awards, Elisabeth is respected as being one of Australia’s leading contemporary female artists and colourists. She is a member of the revered Wedderburn art community, NSW and exhibits with Sydney’s King Street Gallery.

Mornington, Kimberley, 2012, oil on canvas, 150 x 175cm

From the two tanks, Fowler's Gap, 2012

Elisabeth Cummings, Rain Clouds Over the Tweed, 1999

Elisabeth Cummings, Purple Hill, 2011, oil on canvas, 65 x 80cm

The Yellow Pot, 1992

After P.D.F 1, 1994

Flinders Landscape, 2004, Oil on canvas, 20 x 25cm.

Through the Window

Still Life on Pink, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 45x45cm

“I start a painting en plein air by quickly getting first impressions and then the painting takes on its own life.”

J's Cupboard, 2014, monotype, 65x56cm

Birds Over the Waterhole, 2008, Oil on Canvas, 86x100cm

Sir John Gorge Mornington, 2013, Oil on Canvas, 135x150cm

Sake Bottle & Shells, 2014, monotype, Works on Paper, 76x56cm

Crinums and Pomegranates, 2014, monotype, 56 x 74 cm

Crossing the Gully,

Moon On Harbour, monoprint, 66 x79 cm, 2006

Mornington, Kimberley, oil on canvas, 150x175cm, 2012

Yellow Moon, oil on canvas, 50x60cm, 2005

Still Life, oil on board, 74x51cm, 1964

Riverbend, diptych, oil on canvas, 175x300cm, 2008

Wedderburn Spring, oil on canvas, 173x196cm, 1993

There’s a tendency to abstraction and painterliness, but with referencing the real world. “I try to be disciplined, but it’s not always easy.”

Pilbara Landscape, oil on canvas, 200x165cm, 2003

The Red Table, etching, 33x35cm, 2001

Desert Sanctuary, oil on canvas, 115x130cm, 2008

“I could spend the rest of my life just painting this bit of bush.” Elisabeth Cummings

Still Life,2010, monotype with overpainting, scraping out, 56.0 x 76.0 cm 

Elisabeth Cummings was born in Brisbane and studied in Sydney at the National Art School from 1953-57, living and studying in Italy and France from 1961-68 where she developed a great passion for Bonnard, Vuillard and Braque in particular, before settling in Sydney, where she has painted, exhibited and taught since 1969.

Pilbara, 2005,Etching, 24 x 30cm

Untitled

ELISABETH CUMMINGS: THE INVISIBLE WOMAN OF AUSTRALIAN ART

Issue 22, October - December 2002

Elisabeth Cummings lives a reclusive life in idyllic surrounds in western Sydney. Though barely represented in our public collections she has an avid following among private collectors and fellow artists, and as John McDonald writes, today she is producing the best work of her career.

Elisabeth Cummings is often referred to as a member of the artists’ community at Wedderburn, on the bushland fringe of western Sydney. But community is hardly the right word, while artists’ colony would be a complete misnomer. Instead of a group of bohemians clustered around some picturesque waterhole, it would be more accurate to

see Wedderburn as the chosen abode of artistic recluses, driven out of the city by steeping real estate prices and the desire for a quiet place to work. These artists, whose ranks include John Peart, Roy Jackson, Joan Brassil, Su Archer and David Fairbairn, are monads rather than communalists. They love the bush, and get along well with each other, but their main point of contact is the occasional residents’ meeting where they discuss how best to discourage the local council from turning the forests into housing subdivisions. 

Born in Brisbane, 1934, Cummings is the senior painter of the loose-knit ‘ecole de Wedderburn’. She bought a piece of land in 1970, and came to live permanently in the area in 1990. After losing her old studio in the bushfires of 1994, she used the insurance money to help build a bigger and better one attached to her house. Nowadays it is hard to say where domestic space ends and studio begins. The dining table is cluttered with diverse objects that are being turned, ever so slowly, into a still life painting; from the kitchen, Cummings can look across to a work-in-progress leaning against the studio wall. 

In a previous life Cummings has been a wife and mother, she has resided in Glebe and in Florence. Now she is content to live alone with her dogs and her work, in a comfortable house of wood and mud bricks that seems to owe more to the natural environment than to human artifice. She paints in the daylight that streams in through the

back windows of the house. From a verandah she looks out onto a gully in which several varieties of gum tree stand in familiar disarray. Large, blackened trunks still bear scars from the 1994 bushfires, joined by gangling saplings that strain upwards towards the sun. Brilliantly coloured parrots flit from one branch to the next. By late afternoon, this panorama of gums, rocks, grass trees, and sparse undergrowth, is bathed in a dappled light – revealing the soft greys, browns and greens that have found their way into so many of Cummings’s landscapes of the past decade. 

In a way that is the exception rather than the rule among Australian artists, Cummings seems to be getting better as she gets older. There is general agreement that the work she is doing today is the best of her career. Yet it is surprising to realise how little attention she has received from the museums and the critics during 40 years of consistent application. When Cummings was given a survey exhibition by the Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery in 1996, I looked up the holdings of her work in public collections, and was amazed at the results. Her only painting in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW was acquired as part of the conditions of the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship, which she won in 1958, soon after graduating from the National Art School. A work in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia had been transferred to Artbank. In the six years since that survey show, nothing has changed. 

This is not, however, a concern for the painter. She is represented in many smaller public collections, and has always enjoyed a loyal following among private collectors and fellow artists. Cummings may be the invisible woman of Australian art, but she has a sense of equanimity that is incredible for one who spends much of her life in solitary communion with a canvas. 

Is she ambitious for her work? Maybe for the work, but not for her career or reputation. “It’s all very well to be ambitious,” she says, “but I’ve still got to do the paintings. All that stuff is so crazy. I don’t need much money anyway, and prices depend on your track record.” 

The fact that the artist is so unassuming about her “track record”, is characteristic. By any objective reckoning Cummings has an impeccable artistic pedigree: she has been painting since the late 1950s, and exhibiting regularly for 20-30 years. The past decade has been the most productive of her life, at least in terms of exhibitions and sales. In an era when the demands of painting seem to be at war with those of professionalism, she has remained focused exclusively on the work itself. She likes the idea of painting as a kind of mysterious journey, with its own, unpredictable sense of movement and change. A work of art grows intuitively, not by means of rigorous analysis. 

Throughout her career Cummings has been a tortoise in an art scene that favours hares. She watched the death

throes of modernism with great fascination, admiring the hard-edged and lyrical abstraction of the sixties and seventies but being slow to assimilate such styles. By the time the lessons had filtered through, it seemed that everyone else had moved on. The artists she returns to, time and again, are the French modern masters, Cézanne, Bonnard and Matisse, although one feels that she has also learnt from the American abstract expressionists and from Ian Fairweather. Among her contemporaries, she admires the work of painters such as Ken Whisson, Aida Tomescu and John Peart. 

Fundamentally, Cummings has never paid much attention to categories, styles and movements. She has always painted the odd “non-objective” composition, but the bulk of her work has a basis in landscape, still life, or – very occasionally – portraiture. In many of her early works her debt to Bonnard is unmistakable, particularly in a series of interiors bathed in the distinctive mauves and dirty yellows favoured by that artist. She persisted with such pieces throughout the 1970s, and into the following decade. In the 1980s the works became more rigorously abstract, incorporating a restrained palette and the occasional use of collage, although the compositions remained tight and orderly. It was not until the 1990s that Cummings reached artistic maturity and began to paint in a manner that was much more free, forceful and confident than anything she had previously attempted. 

In her 1996 survey, a work on paper, Shimmering light on the swamp (1992), signalled a breakthrough into a more intuitive and responsive style of working. In this picture, watery flicks of gouache dance across a stark, white surface that seems to exude light. Although Cummings uses a wide array of colours, each tone has its roots in the natural world, with the play of amorphous forms being held together by a tracery of lines as delicate as a spider web. 

Cummings’s major paintings of the past decade have been distinguished by their scarred, heavily-worked surfaces and complexity of colour. They are mostly landscapes, based on the bush in Wedderburn, or Currumbin in southern Queensland, where a parental holiday home is now occupied by the artist’s brother. Like Ian Fairweather, she prefers to work from memories – sometimes dating back to childhood – rather than in front of the motif. She makes numerous sketches but they serve mainly as a visual diary, helping her remember particular aspects of form and colour. In the studio her paintings take on a life of their own, inflected by the light or the weather, or simply by the artist’s mood. Cummings says that a small, dark picture of recent vintage, quite unlike anything else in the studio, was painted while she was feeling ill with a virus that dampened her spirits. 

The best and most typical of Cummings’s works are slow to impress themselves on the viewer. At first glance their colours may seem gloomy

or dull, while her mark-making appears chaotic and arbitrary in its profusion. Yet as one examines the canvas at leisure, the work begins to reveal its secrets. The forms of trees, clouds or the moon detach themselves from the vigorous scrapings and daubings and stand out with clarity; loosely defined planes advance or recede, to create the impression of depth. Perhaps the most striking effect is the gradual unveiling of rhythms and colour schemes of unusual complexity. Soft, pale yellows and greys rub up against the shadowy greens and browns of the bush. In some works there are musky pinks, shades of rust, and vivid slashes of crimson. Little by little, the eye assembles the pieces of the puzzle, establishing a platform for further investigations. No second viewing of one of these works is ever the same, and this helps explain their appeal to private collectors and their neglect by institutions that tend to prefer works that make an instant, albeit superficial, impact. 

More than with most artists, the works of this reclusive and dedicated painter are an acquired taste. Yet once the connection has been made it could never be easily severed. If Cummings has been a slow learner or a ‘painter’s painter’, always behind the times and the fashions, it may be because she has an underlying certainty that time is on her side. 

Elisabeth Cummings in the saleroom 

For an artist of the stature of Elisabeth Cummings, few of her works have been

offered in the saleroom. Over the last ten years, only 22 works by Cummings have been offered and her average price for an oil painting is just $1,183*. A select number of paintings have been available and, of the best works, the prices fetched have been comparable to other painters of her generation. But for the canny collector, now is the time to buy Cummings’s work in the secondary market. 

The top price for a Cummings painting is the $4,320 paid for After The Fire Wedderburn (oil on canvas, 180x180cm) sold by Sotheby’s in Melbourne in 2001. The next highest price paid was for Waterhole (oil on canvas, 167x116cm) also last year by Phillips Auctioneers (now Shapiro Auctioneers) in Sydney. Works on paper or other media are similarly underpriced at $420 for the gouache on paper work Indian Lake and $192 for the ink and wash drawing The Garden. 

Works through her main gallery King Street Gallery on Burton in Sydney range from $1,650 for smaller works up to $11,000 to $18,000 for large canvases. Her works on paper are similarly affordable at $600 to $800. Cummings also produces occasional one-off monoprints that sell for between $800 and $1,500. Cummings is also represented by Chapman Gallery in Canberra. 

Andrew Frost

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Landscapes and private views

January 5, 2012

Elisabeth Cummings is the subject of two exhibitions but the artist remains reluctant to talk about herself, writes Steve Meacham.

Colours of the bush ... Elisabeth Cummings in her studio.

Elisabeth Cummings apologises for taking her time opening the door. She's temporarily confined to a wheelchair in a friend's house in Balmain, recovering from a bone fusion operation on her right ankle, the result of dilapidating arthritis. Fortunately, her wrists aren't as badly affected, so she can wield a brush: ''They're not marvellous, but I can still paint,'' she says.

At 77, Cummings was recently described by The Australian Women's Weekly as ''the Invisible Woman of Australian painting''. Even the media release for the grandest exhibition of her career (so far) - a survey of her work over the past 30 years at the S.H. Ervin Gallery titled Luminous: The Landscapes of Elisabeth Cummings - introduces her as ''one of Australia's visual art quiet achievers''.

So, unless you are an artist yourself, an art critic (the Herald's John McDonald wrote in 1994 that her painting ''calmly restates the imperishable value of a fundamental visual intelligence''), or one of those astute collectors who have discovered her increasingly sought-after works over the past 20 years, you may not have heard of her.

One of the paintings included in a retrospective of her work: Dusk Pilbara.

There's a large part of Elisabeth Cummings that would prefer it that way. ''I am a private person,'' she insists, her jaw firmly set. ''I don't like all this …''

This is two people sharing cups of tea and wafer-thin biscuits over a table that, just yesterday, was a circus of bank holiday entertainment involving clay and two grandchildren, aged 10 and seven.

But this is also the public relations side of being an artist. Some are better at being interviewed, making rich and powerful friends or declaring their genius (real or imagined) than others. It's always been like that.

Cummings, though, has sold more paintings - particularly her semi-abstract interpretations of the Australian landscape - since she turned 50 than she ever did before, without changing her essential perspective one iota. Previous interviewers had warned that if she doesn't want to answer a question, she'll avoid eye contact and dissemble. And so it proves.

Her home and studio (effectively since 1975) is in Wedderburn, between Camden and Wollongong (''I look forward to getting back there, but the land is very rugged. I'll manage when I get two feet''). And most of her paintings in the exhibition are either from the bush on Sydney's outskirts or from the camping trips she made, long before it was fashionable, to the Pilbara, Lake Mungo or ''my favourite'', the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

''I've travelled more around Australia in the last 10 years,'' Cummings volunteers. ''But then, I always travelled. The opportunities just arose more, and they were better organised. But a friend and I were camping in the 1990s. Of course, I have always had Queensland. In the 1970s, we went to South Stradbroke Island, and some of those paintings are in the show.''

Reluctantly (on her part) we come to her curriculum vitae, and the interview becomes noticeably staccato. This is what she reveals voluntarily … She was born in Brisbane. Her father was an architect at the local university, and her parents (probably) wanted her to follow in his footsteps. But while they were away doing the big European tour, she decided she wanted to become an artist, studying at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) and they agreed when she sweet-talked them.

She studied for five years in Sydney and won the Art Gallery of NSW's travelling art scholarship to Florence, where she lived for the next 10 years with her artist husband. Reports indicate she doesn't like to talk about him - even though they had a son together, Damien Barker, and remained as a couple ''until 1990'', when she moved permanently to the bush south-west of Sydney.

Her friends, fellow painter Barbara Romalis and husband Nick, had a property at Wedderburn. When Cummings and her family returned from Italy in 1968, they based themselves in Glebe, but she spent time camping at Wedderburn.

''I wanted a studio in the bush,'' Cummings says. ''We visited Barb. I wasn't even thinking of Wedderburn, but she and Nick got in touch to say they wanted to give 10 acres of their land to artists to build studios.

''It was just the most wonderful gift. I put my tent up at the place where I would like a studio, and that was that.''

Other painters followed. Roy Jackson, John Peart. The late Joan Brassil. It was never a commune, Cummings points out. ''No, no, no. It was very ad hoc. It just happened.''

Cummings has won some of Australia's most prestigious prizes: for portraiture (Portia Geach, 1972), landscape (the Fleurier in 2000) and still life. But ''I haven't entered any prizes for at least 10 years''.

As always, she's happiest doing her own thing. Her commercial gallery, King Street on William, has an exhibition coinciding with her grand survey, showing some of her latest works of paper.

So what does she anticipate visitors will get out of her survey show? ''I have no idea,'' she says, predictably. ''For me, it will just be interesting to revisit those paintings. It's just my journey with painting.

''Once you have finished a painting - for me, at any rate - it's gone out of the world. And I think: how did that happen?

''I'm sure some of them will be disappointing. I'll want to take them home with me and do something to them.''

We've talked now, for well over 30 minutes, and Cummings is an ideal subject. So why does she hate revealing her emotions when that - presumably - is the fundamental raison d'etre of any artist, whatever the medium?

''I never think of myself as a senior artist, and I am reluctant,'' she says. ''I am a private person. Painting is difficult enough without all this stuff. I'm not very good at it.

''I thought I would always go on, quietly. Selling a little bit. Having a few shows. And having no other ambitions.

''Perhaps it is diffidence. I am very committed about my painting, that's the essential part. The other stuff? I'm not interested.''

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Interview : Elisabeth Cummings

November 27, 2012, by Angela Butler

I recently went to the Cicada Press studios at COFA to talk with Elisabeth Cummings, an Australian artist who works predominantly in painting, but who also has a bit of a history with etching. Well, more than a bit. Elisabeth is currently working on several prints with Cicada Press Director, Michael Kempson, and the students of the Custom Printmaking class. The following is based on an interview given at the studio in Paddington.

Elisabeth first worked on etchings with Michael Kempson at Meadowbank TAFE several years ago. Prior to this, she had made prints at art school, and again some years later, however she says back then she hadn’t understood a lot. It was with Michael that she started to understand much more about etching: “He was very in tune with what I was trying to do, and then there was the delight of having them (the prints) editioned for me”.

For myself, as a student in the Custom Printmaking class, it has been great to witness that the skills we are acquiring really can translate into art that exists in the everyday world, beyond the walls of art school. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see the process from the very beginning, from making decisions about the size of an image, all the way through to editioning and exhibiting. Every step along the way presents its own challenges, which can be daunting (even overwhelming) but with practise

become less so.  It gives context to the lecturers’ repeated cries during class of wipe your edges clean!

I asked Elisabeth whether she worries about students working with her plates: “It is a collaboration in a lot of ways. I’ve been lucky enough to have students who’ve got stronger wrists than I have to scrape. They might scrape where I wouldn’t scrape but that doesn’t matter at all, I like the chance of what might be, because my work is like that. It isn’t absolutely precise and I’m open to all sorts of things happening.” Elisabeth finds that she learns a lot too from seeing what students are doing. “It’s a very rich experience.”

……………………………

Cummings was born in Brisbane in 1934. She studied in Sydney at the National Art School from 1953 to 1957. Her early work, in painting and print, was more abstract than her present practice. The paintings she makes today are imbued with a complexity of colour and such a range of marks that they are at once aloof and inviting; layered, concealed and emotive. I wanted to find out about how the important elements of her painting translate into etchings.

“With painting, the change is totally immediate, and with etching it’s not”, which can be frustrating for Elisabeth because of her working method. “With painting, I’m changing things all the time, it’s moveable… it’s all in a state of flux and change. I eliminate all the time and re-paint… adding, subtracting, adding, subtracting.”

However she really enjoys how the result is unlike a painting, which she says is the interesting part. “An etching is an etching, it has quite a different quality to a painting”.

With one of her earlier prints, she had planned out very carefully how the plates would go together and she didn’t like the result at all – she had to go back and change each plate to get what she wanted. She likes what happens when she scrapes, and the adding and subtracting on plates which “can make the process very labour intensive”. This is where students, mindful of the opportunity before them and with strong forelimbs, can come in handy.

The Yard – Etching 2010

……………………………

When it comes to colour, it feels like it is both a carefully considered decision as well as an intuitive response in Cummings’ work. “It’s a bit of both. You start the painting and then there is that dialogue with the painting, and what the painting dictates… it’s a process of feeling one’s way”.

I wondered how this translates into the process of printmaking, where the physical matrix of the plate holds the composition and mark-making, and colour is only visible when it is printed. “With printmaking, of course, with a three-plate print, the colour is limited. Working out what to do with colour when you’re used to having a huge range, and having to work out how to get what you can out of that limitation is quite a good challenge. But there are ways … of allowing other colour in, doing a la poupee in certain areas – I love to bring in other bits of colour. It enriches things. You might think ‘Oh, I’d love a bit of yellow in this corner, and blue just here, nowhere else on the plane’ which is when Michael will bring in the a la poupee. It’s wonderful, but it makes more work for the printers!” Elisabeth chuckles at this.

The Red Table - Multi-plate etching.  2001

……………………………

 As a student, my interest in the work of other printmakers is growing in terms of the rhyme and reason for print beyond my own obsession. I asked Elisabeth about other printmakers whose works contained what interested her or revealed something which she enjoyed. Her comments remark on how one marries influence with output: “I really like what Fred Williams did with landscape, with etching. Euan (Macleod) does very interesting things that relate to his painting. That’s always exciting to see, some process that I wouldn’t have thought of using. It’s sometimes interesting to explore that when you see somebody else doing it and you think you’ll explore it yourself. But the thing is, you always make your own mark. The way you scrape through the ground, or what you do with the sugarlift, you’re making your own mark. Of course, one’s influenced by things one sees other printmakers doing, but it becomes changed.”

Elisabeth recently saw Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ etchings currently touring in regional Queensland, and described her experience of being in awe:

“They’re amazing, he is such a brilliant draughtsman, he draws like a dream. You can’t believe the brilliance of the drawing. And the control of the medium, he probably did all of that himself. The control of the

aquatints, the brilliance of the drawing, and then of course the imagery which is so compelling. You’re absolutely knocked out by it… and that’s hard to emulate! One’s impressed.”

Arkaroola Landscape – Multi-plate etching. 2005

A major subject throughout Elisabeth’s career has been the Australian landscape. I wanted to know about this, her experience in country which is familiar but unknown to me. “They’re all based on landscapes I’ve seen and experienced. Sometimes drawings can stimulate the memory, but then the etching, like a painting, takes its own course.”

When I asked where I could go to experience Australia’s landscape, Elisabeth’s response was enthusiastic: “Just go to Alice Springs and go out from there! The East MacDonnells, the West MacDonnells, it’s fantastic. The Flinders. Anywhere! Just go out to western NSW, Broken Hill. You know COFA has a place out there at Fowler’s Gap. That’s all arid zone, it’s pretty amazing, that country.  It’s the desert, and it’s fascinating to be in.”

I told her that I had never been out there. “You will one day. I always wanted to get to Europe when I was younger and I did, but that’s what I missed, the Australian bush and the Australian land. So I’ve been exploring Australia these last few years, and there’s a lot to see, there’s so much to see.”

Termite Mounds – Multi-plate etching.  2010

Some recent prints by Elisabeth Cummings will be shown in an upcoming exhibition of artists who have worked and printed with Cicada Press: “Master Prints” opening 6 December, 6pm, at MLC School, Burwood.

To see Cicada Press printers inking up a Euan Macleod plate “a la poupee”, watch this youtube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqbc8IPNGA

Luminous: The landscapes of Elisabeth Cummings

Edge of the Simpson Desert 2011 oil on canvas 175 x 301cm

Elisabeth Cummings is one of Australia’s visual art quiet achievers, with a career spanning over 50 years and this major survey, examining her landscape works, is long overdue.  Cummings’ landscapes are distinguished by heavily impastoed surfaces and luminous colour, whether depicting the glowing red and yellow ochres of the Pilbara region, the ruggedly spectacular Arkaroola ridges of the Flinders ranges, or the sands of Elcho Island in Arnhem Land.

Cummings’ travels are distilled and brought to life in the sanctuary of her idyllic bush studio on Sydney’s outskirts.

“I just wanted to be out of Sydney, to be in the bush and have a place in the bush. I just love it. You know, in the early days I painted it all the time and I still do, it still creeps into everything”, said Cummings.

Luminous: The landscapes of Elisabeth Cummings features works from the past three decades, comprising of over 40 major paintings, gouaches and prints from public and private collections.

Born in Brisbane in 1934, Cummings studied at the National Art School in Sydney from 1953–57 and in 1959 was awarded the AGNSW Travelling Art Scholarship. She travelled to Europe, where she lived for almost a decade studying under Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. On her return to Australia in 1969, Cummings settled in Sydney, eventually moving to her sanctuary at Wedderburn, surrounded by her beloved gum trees.  

Cummings, who is now in her late 70s, has been painting since the late 1950s and this will be the first opportunity to examine the artist’s landscape imagery in depth, allowing appraisal of her contribution to Australian art practice. 

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ELISABETH CUMMINGS: SLOW ART

MARCH 23, 2014, ANNETTE HAMILTON

 [Photograph:  Annette Hamilton 2012]

Elisabeth Cummings (b. 1934) is not well-known among the general art-going public.  She has been devoted to her art practice, mostly painting, for over fifty years.  Few of her works appear in any public gallery collections in Australia.  Based in Sydney and its bushland outskirts, she has travelled and painted in outback towns and in remote Western and Southern Australia.  In 1996 she was given a survey exhibition by the Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, but at that time she had only one painting in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW, while one work in the National Gallery of Australia had been transferred to Artbank. Nothing had changed six years later.  Recently her work has been receiving more recognition.  Several smaller public collections hold paintings, and she is increasingly sought by avid collectors. She has won a number of prizes, and recognition of her importance as an Australian landscape painter has grown.  The 2002 Art Collector Magazine list placed her in the 50 most collectible Australian artists.

In 2012 she received a major survey exhibition at the S. H. Ervin Gallery titled Luminous: The Landscapes of Elisabeth Cummings.  One of her largest works, Edge of the Simpson Desert, was a highlight of the show.

This is hardly conventional landscape art.  It is edgy, figurative only in places, filled with spaces and lines which demand patient scrutiny before

the forms reveal themselves. It is something like Slow Food. Hers is a slow art: slow to be painted, and calling for close engagement and patient appreciation from the viewer.  She works with the local, and paints where she is. Whether travelling through the remote deserts or sitting on her verandah in her studio at Wedderburn, or inside with the light pouring on the mud-brick walls, her faithful black dog at her feet, Cummings is resolutely there in the moment.

Inside the Studio.  Photograph: Annette Hamilton 2012

She has been called The Invisible Woman of Australian Art (Frost 2002). But she doesn’t really care about visibility, or profile, or her “career”.  Now in her late seventies, she continues to work and live as she has always done.  She paints, and teaches these days in the occasional workshop (see for example Champion 2012). She hates being interviewed especially

about her personal life.  One journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald insisted on an interview while she was confined to a wheelchair following an operation on her right ankle. He tried to force her to reveal elements of her emotional life, on the grounds that this is “the fundamental raison d’etre of any artist”. She found this an absurd proposition, and managed to be so unpleasant to him that he left with his irrelevant curiosity unsatisfied (personal communication, and see Meacham 2012).  Cummings is the last person to want to be a celebrity, although she has many close friends in the art world and always has invitations and events to participate in, if she wants to. But she likes a quiet life, and loves her “bit of bush”, even while mourning the fact that it is being encroached on by the endless march of suburbia.

Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald has been one of the few vocal supporters. In Art Essays, January 21 2012, he pleaded that a new show from the National Gallery of Australia of landscapes to be held at the Royal Academy London should include those artists who are making an outstanding contribution to Australian landscape art today, the foremost of whom is Cummings.  He deplores the short-sightedness of Australian public collections.

“While galleries have been queuing up to buy works by a handful of fashionable artists, they have treated landscape painting as if it were a purely historical phenomenon.” (McDonald 2012)

Cummings herself has nothing to say about the “fashionable” contemporary arts. Her positive frame of mind does not dwell on endless comparisons or bother to condemn the fetishization of certain forms of current art-making and the implicit rejection of the unfashionable genres.

An excellent video interview in Wedderburn, with Peter Pinson, puts a frame around many elements of her life and art (Pinson 2012).  Her father was an architect (as is her son now) and her family supported her interest in art as a profession – unusual for a woman in those days.  She attended the National Art School in Sydney, and won a Travelling Scholarship in 1958 which allowed her to spend time in Europe, staying in a villa with friends near Florence.  In 1961 she studied under Oskar Kokoschka, a late German expressionist associated with Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Kokoschka established his “School of Seeing” at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg, thus re-establishing his ties with the Austrian milieu in which he began his career, and Cummings was able to spend time there exploring the highly distinctive, and disturbing, post war European sensibility.

Cummings is often referred to as “reclusive” (Frost 2002).  Her Wedderburn studio is the site of an artists’ community established in the early 1970s.  Two of its founders died in 2013, Roy Jackson of cancer in July, John Peart in October, a sudden and wholly unexpected death at the age of only 67. Other artists who have worked and lived there include Joan Brassil, Sy Archer and David Fairbairn. A strong community living on land donated by art lovers Barbara and Nick Romalis in the 1970s, the Wedderburn artists’ “colony” continues to offer a refuge and resource almost unique in contemporary Australia.

In the bushfires of 1994 Cummings lost her studio, a blow which might have stopped a lesser person.  But she soon built a bigger and better structure which served as both studio and home.  The house and bushland around often appear in her work, as though the whole life-space is part of a continuous still-life.

Her large oils are notable for their heavily worked surfaces and colouring surprises. They offer secrets: spend enough time with them, and there is the reveal. The forms of the natural world appear through the scraping and marks on her surfaces.  Her palettes seem tasty. Some, especially those reflecting the bushland around Wedderburn, are full of delicious soft pales and shadowy greens and browns. Others, in remote and outback places, are bright and hot, like a hit of chili and vinegar.

She isn’t immediate, or obvious. Comparing her visual impact with another little known but successful Australian landscape painter, Jason Benjamin, we see two aspects of the Australian heritage.

Jason Benjamin.  This is Love.  Oil, 434 x 291.  www. Artistsandart.org

Benjamin works on a vast scale with immediately recognisable subjects, in a style securely located in European classicism (albeit with a strange surrealist quality).  Cummings, on the other hand, hovers between the gestural demands of post-war European modernism and the meditative mysteries of the Australian vision imprinted with an Asian sensibility.  There is Ian Fairweather in her slippery calligraphic marks, and Fred Williams in her itchy surfaces.

Ian Fairweather.  Outside the Walls of Peking, 1935.  Oil and pencil on board, 49 x 57 cm.  Private collection, Perth.

Cummings has long been represented by King Street Galleries, now in William Street Sydney.  She feels strong loyalty to the gallery, which has supported her work with well-mounted shows for decades (personal communication, February 2012). She has exhibited in some competitions

and group shows, but most of her professional output has been sold through the gallery. Current listings at King Street have some of her recent works available, for instance Sir John Gorge Mornington, 2013, oil on canvas, 135 x 150;  $48,000.  The recent oils are quiet reflections on landscapes visited in the past.  A beautifully delicate work, The Pink Outcrop, 213, 105 x 130, presents a lyrical pastel shaded landscape, tender and responsive.  It sold for $35,000.

Her works from the middle 2000s show a strong sense of line and composition.  Studio in the Bush (2006), 115 c 130, is a striking work based on her perception of the context of her life-space at Wedderburn. Journey Through the Studio (2004), 150 x 300, likewise offers a stunning meditation on the process of inhabiting the artist’s world, with its red and orange cadmium hues, the outline painting of a dog in the foreground, and the heavy dark wood-stove at the lower right.  A strangely disturbing painting, it repays long scrutiny and engagement.

Journey Through the Studio (2004), 150 x 300. Photograph:  King Street Gallery

Cummings also works in prints and etchings.  Her 2009 Hill End Glimpses is an artful tracery with several images seemingly hidden in the surface busyness.  A woman stands, washing her hair.  Two dogs trot along in the foreground.  A large bird perches on a fence.  Another woman lies reclining, perhaps in her sleeping bag.  The square dark building with its enigmatic figure at the opening could be anything: a shed, or a house, or a storeroom.  These are the painters, on their plein air excursion, taking the measure of the town of Hill End, made famous by the paintings of Russell Drysdale, John Olsen and others (see Australian Government, Hill End painters, n.d).

Hill End Glimpses. 2009. Etching, set of 25.  Image: King Street Gallery.

Arkaroola Landscape (coloured etching, 2005) uses a limited, traditional desert yellow to great effect. This remarkable piece was not hung in the Wynne Prize to which it was submitted that year, but towered over the other works in the Salon des Réfusés (McDonald 2012). Flinder’s Farm depicts the overwhelming quality of the semi-desert landscape and the futility of human efforts to farm there.

Flinder’s Farm.  Coloured Etching 2009.  Photograph: King Street Galleries

She speaks more about her etching and print-making in an interview, during a residency at COFA and work with Cicada Press (Butler, 2012).

She is always seeking new inspiration.  Recently she has spent periods in India, working with children in a remote village, offering informal art training.  She seems to accept no limitations: age, physical health, the effects of arthritis, the death of her close friends – she dwells in an intensely felt but manageable world, living through her own time and in her own places, which you can share through her art, if you so choose.  What a privilege that is.

Fowlers Gap, oil on canvas

Born in Brisbane in 1934, Elisabeth Cummings is now one of Australia's most respected living artists. Cummings works quietly and consistently. While her work is influenced by landscape – or the idea of place – her process is led by intuition.

She is a master of line and colour, which guide her somewhat abstracted paintings and drawings. Embedded within the abstracted works are hints of place – the odd tree or shape of a building and road – which reflect the slow reveal of her time in the landscape.

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Beyond the pale

January 21, 2012

Now in her 70s, Elisabeth Cummings - the 'quiet achiever' of Australian art - is enjoying a new-found freedom to experiment with colour and texture, writes JOHN McDONALD.

A recent press release from the National Gallery of Australia announces an exhibition of 200 years of Australian landscape painting to be held at London's Royal Academy in September next year.

This is a long-overdue event and it is to be hoped the NGA takes the opportunity to make the show something more than a historical survey. By all means tell British audiences about Glover and Von Guerard, Streeton and Drysdale, Nolan and Fred Williams but please don't neglect the present day. By this I don't mean only obligatory inclusions, such as John Olsen and William Robinson, or Aboriginal artists, who might all be classed as landscapists.

The Blue Pear (2011)

Take a glance at Australian painting today and it is a simple matter to nominate a dozen or more artists who have made - and are making - an original contribution to the landscape genre. Look, for instance, at Idris Murphy, Euan Macleod, Jenny Sages, Philip Wolfhagen, Mary Tonkin, Richard Wastell, or the woman many would consider the most obvious candidate of all: Elisabeth Cummings.

If one examines the way these artists are represented in the collections of public galleries, there is little indication that contemporary landscape is taken seriously. With the exception of Wolfhagen, none of the artists named above seem to have a painting in the NGA collection. If they are represented, it is through prints, acquired by that indefatigable accumulator Roger Butler.

This neglect is not confined to the NGA but is repeated in almost every public collection. Galleries have been queueing to buy works by a handful of fashionable artists but have treated landscape painting as if it were a purely historical phenomenon. The latest video, the latest silicone sculpture is greeted with breathless excitement and forgotten just as quickly. There is no interest in artists who have been painting landscapes at a high level for 10, 20, maybe 40 years, even though this is one of Australia's biggest contributions to world art.

I know this is a familiar and sad song but it would be reassuring to think the curators of Australian and contemporary art might take a peek at Luminous: The Landscapes of Elisabeth Cummings, at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. This show has been put together with almost unseemly haste, allowing barely two months between idea and realisation. Although this left no time for a catalogue, the exhibition itself is a marvel. Maybe some shows benefit from a short preparation time.

It has been more than 15 years since the last survey of Cummings's work, seen only in Campbelltown and the Gold Coast. Now, at the age of 77, she is finally getting a survey in a reasonably central location, though not at the Art Gallery of NSW. Most of the 51 works in this show were painted in the years after that 1996 survey. They are so superior to the earlier works that one could be looking at different artists.

The painter of pictures such as Minerva waterhole (1977) was an earnest trier who seemed determined to fill in every bit of the canvas as if it were a particularly difficult jigsaw puzzle. It is a bush landscape with abstract overtones, in which each form stands out from the next. Five years later, the same subject is given a more thoroughly abstract treatment. The work is larger and more ambitious but still feels laborious, with each transformation of the motif being handled in a way that betrays the mental effort involved.

A gradual loosening appears in works such as the gouache on paper Shimmering light on the swamp (1992) but the first piece in this show that reveals Cummings as a confident, masterful painter is After the fires, Wedderburn (1994). Living at Wedderburn, on Sydney's western fringe, she watched bushfires come right up to her doorstep. Venturing back into the forest, she observed the changes in the familiar landscape. The result is a painting that feels dark and sooty but also strangely damp, as if a little rain has fallen. There are hints of new life in the undergrowth and a new-found freedom of invention in her drawing. Suddenly she is no longer devoted to appearances but to the feelings generated by a place.

The paintings that follow, such as Bird in the Bush and Bird over Stradbroke (both 1995), are breakthrough pictures. In the latter, she uses a bright-yellow line to cut across the composition. In the former, it is a dirty yellow that arches across a grey-green canvas, mimicking the flight of a bird. In these pictures she stops trying to make every bit of the composition work in a spurious harmony. The paintings are full of discords, jagged lines and loosely brushed areas of colour. There is nothing predictable about these works, which never let the eye settle.

Cummings turned 70 in 2004 and has gone on to make the paintings of her life. She is the outstanding exception to the unwritten rule that Australian artists tend to lose their way as they get older. Every recent solo exhibition seems to have produced at least one great painting, brought together in this survey.

When Arkaroola landscape was rejected from the Wynne prize in 2004, it towered over everything else in that year's Salon des Refuses. The recently retired curator of Australian art at the AGNSW, Barry Pearce,

fought to acquire the painting for the collection, even though this tacitly acknowledged the poor judgment of the trustees who ignored it in the first place. The picture still looks good today, with its complex meshing of shades of orange and red. But alongside paintings such as After the wet, Elcho Island (2004), Riverbend (2008) and At the Edge of the Simpson Desert (2011), it seems remarkably subdued. Not only are these paintings much bigger than Arkaroola landscape, they take more risks with colour and texture and display more subtlety. In brief, they are the works of a more accomplished painter.

Riverbend, in particular, is a unique picture. Suffused with pale light, it is almost formless but still suggests a scene of water, leaves and sunshine. The title echoes that of a famous polyptych by Sidney Nolan but the reference is merely coincidental. It is impossible to imagine the Cummings of the '70s and '80s attempting such a work, which seems to have been painted purely by instinct.

In Riverbend, Cummings uses veils of colour to create diaphanous effects. By contrast, in At the Edge of the Simpson Desert, she takes a bold, upfront approach to the colours and shapes of a stark, arid environment. This dynamic landscape is also one of the most recent works in this exhibition, indicating that Cummings is in the prime of her career. In fact, she has yet to peak.

I can't think of a younger Australian artist who could pull off a large-scale work with comparable verve and confidence. It's somehow more exciting to think of such a picture being made by an older artist rather than an up-and-coming prospect. It feels like the realisation of a life's efforts, rather than a promise of future triumphs that may or may not eventuate.

While the landscapes are being shown at the S.H. Ervin, Cummings's dealer, King Street Gallery on William, has organised an exhibition of her monotypes, depicting interiors and still-life subjects. These works are modestly sized, uniformly priced, and demonstrate many of the same qualities as the large-scale landscapes. They are, if anything, more playful; perhaps more pleasurable for the artist after the intense concentration required by the bigger pictures.

Thinking again, I wonder whether there is anything too intense about Cummings's working methods. While the smaller pieces seem fresh and spontaneous, the larger ones have a meditative quality. One imagines her coming back to these works time and again, thinking about them over several months and returning to a canvas only when she feels she is in the right frame of mind to take it to the next stage.

Cummings inspires feelings of partisanship because - apart from being an outstanding painter - she is a retiring, modest person in an art scene that favours aggressive careerists. The pay-off is that she spends time in the studio that others spend on the social circuit. While the results speak for themselves, the only difficulty is to get the would-be tastemakers in our public galleries to come and take a look.

Below - two images from the vimeo video:

River Gums Fowlers Gap, 2011, gouache on paper

Fowler's Gap, 2012