Corner of the studio

Elisabeth Cummings is one of Australia’s most recognised senior artists. Her paintings have been described as ‘...less representations than … radical metaphors or equivalences’ with her favoured subjects or motifs – landscape, interiors and still life – elided into abstraction with a focus on colour, form and an intuitive exploration of the painting process.

As a young woman Cummings won two travelling art scholarships which enabled her to live and study in Italy and France. The decade she spent in Europe was to prove transformative, inflecting her painting with a renewed appreciation of colour, light and the power of abstraction to evoke memory and sensation.
 
Cummings’ paintings are rooted in familiar visual tropes – landscape, interiors, or still life – expressed through an intuitive, abstract and painterly visual language that is all her own. She has described her paintings as being ‘....about memory and self’, an investment of emotion and experience into the familiar.

In the mid-1970s Cummings and two fellow artists Roy Jackson and John Peart were donated a small pocket of bushland on the fringes of Sydney at Wedderburn, near Campbelltown. There they established an artists’ community, where Cummings continues to live and work today. An inveterate traveller, over the years she has made expeditions around the country and abroad to seek subjects, but always returns to her Wedderburn bush studio for artistic sustenance.

This painting of her Wedderburn studio presents a messy agglomeration of furnishings and textiles, tumbling forth as an accumulation of work and materials born of years of busy occupation. As one looks closer, her working of paint on the canvas is revealed – adding, scraping off or drawing into the wet surface with the wooden end of a brush. Here, the artist’s process is as much the subject of this painting as the room it depicts.