Currumbin Window, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 45X45cm Elisabeth
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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. * 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.h tml 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.