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rtist Elisabeth Cummings has an original and intuitive approach to the act of painting, based on her considerable experience, observation and memory. During the past two decades she has been an intrepid traveller, camping in remote places at Lake Mungo, in the Pilbara, the Kimberley and on Elcho Island. Just last year she was camping and sketching in one of her favourite places in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia at Parachilna and Grindells Hut. The intense light and immersive space of these places, etched over eons by ancient riverbeds, are evoked in her masterly paintings Pilbara Landscape (2003), Arkaroola Landscape (2004), Ant Hill Country (2000), and Edge of the Simpson Desert (2011). As she recalls: “I sometimes dream of this country, the rugged mountains a bit south of Arkaroola. There is such a presence, you feel it, just a glimpse compared to what Aboriginal people know about their country, but I want to keep seeking it out. The painting is just an excuse to sit there in it all day, not travelling through. The more you return, the more you discover.” A new survey exhibition, Interior Landscapes, held at the S.H. Ervin Gallery at the National Trust Centre on Observatory Hill until July 23rd, focuses primarily on her work from the mid-1970s to her most recent canvases. Of special interest are two pen-and-ink studies of Florence in 1959. These were owned by her friend Margaret Olley, along with a painting by Cummings that was destroyed when Olley’s Brisbane home burnt down. Other sketchbooks document travels in Europe, Africa, Turkey, New Zealand, Bali and China. They reveal her remarkable ability to capture the spatial dimensions of a subject with just a few succinct lines and notations. Born in Brisbane in 1934, the eldest of three children, Cummings began painting at a young age. Her father Robert was professor of architecture at the University of Queensland and took Elisabeth and her brother Malcolm to painting classes run on Fridays by the painter Vida Lahey. Cummings remembers the marvellous sense of freedom she enjoyed painting on large sheets of paper in the exuberant company of other boys and girls. Her parents owned a large painting by Vida Lahey and kept open house during the war, welcoming regular visits from artists, including Donald Friend, and Len and Kathleen Shillam. Cummings first thought she would train as an architect, but after meeting the artist Margaret Cilento (1923-2007), recently returned to Brisbane from New York and London, she felt encouraged to leave the provincial city to study in Sydney. At East Sydney Tech in Sydney, Cummings received a very thorough training in life-drawing and painting from her teachers Dorothy Thornhill, Godfrey Miller, Wallace Thornton and Ralph Balson. The sculptor Lyndon Dadswell taught her to model the figure directly in clay. She says: “You could be more expressive and more abstract, we didn’t have to be totally representational, and Dadswell was open to the more expressive.” A group of her clay sculptures from 2009 shows her ongoing interest in shaping three-dimensional form. > OPPOSITE PAGE: Elisabeth Cummings working on her canvas Monaro Shadow and Light (collection of the artist) in her Wedderburn studio.
16 T R U S T / AUTUMN 2017