Elisabeth Cummings, Red room at the Green Mango, 2006, oil on canvas, 115 x 130cm. Private Collection.
Elisabeth Cummings, Rain clouds over the Tweed, diptych, 1999, oil on canvas, 195 x 220cm. Arthur Roe Collection.
Elisabeth Cummings, Interior, 2001, oil on canvas 120 x 200cm. Collection of Regina and Philip Law.
Elisabeth Cummings, Interior, 1974, oil on canvas, 113 x 94cm. Collection of the artist.
Elisabeth Cummings, The shearer’s kitchen, Mt Murchison, 2011, oil on canvas, 166 x 200cm. Pauline Hunter Collection.
For Elisabeth Cummings – perhaps one of the most highly regarded artists of her generation – it would seem it was a long road towards recognition. According to Drill Hall Gallery curator of exhibitions, Tony Oates, while the artist was always admired among her peers, her more recent acclaim is perhaps a result of what he calls her “unflagging commitment”. He continues, “Cummings has been making fine paintings for many decades – after a while people have to take notice. Her paintings show an inventive intelligence – a vitality that reflects her vision of light, space and environment.”
The show will, as Oates explains, “represent her immense oeuvre and characterise the adventurous spirit of investigation and vitality that is inherent in her art practice.”
Cummings studied at the National Art School in the 1950s, an exciting period in Australian art when ideas of contemporary art were beginning to enter teaching. The artist’s practice walks a delicate line between figurative and abstraction, leaving the audience to question whether they are observing an interior scene or a landscape and maintaining connections with her revered forerunners such as Bonnard and Vuillard.
Oates believes Cummings’s work possesses a quintessential Australian character, explaining, “they evoke our ‘bush’ environ with great sophistication.” Describing Elisabeth Cummings: Interior Landscapes as a beautifully curated exhibition, the show promises to explore the “breadth of work of one of Australia’s most senior living artists.”
Interior Landscapes
Elisabeth Cummings
Orange Regional Gallery
18 November – 21 January
Blak In-Justice, now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, challenges the brutal systems that shape Indigenous incarceration in Australia—while charting the healing power of ancestral knowledge in the process.
Mungari, a landmark exhibition at Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum, marks the return of the Gweagal spears to their ancestral country while speaking to the constellation of relationships that knit together people, objects and place.
Revealed: New and Emerging WA Aboriginal Artists is an annual celebratory exhibition of Aboriginal artists from across Western Australia. Now showing at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, the event has a community spirit and passion that grows each year.
There are many parallels between skin and painting. “Paint is a thin skin on a surface—a layer that transmits ideas into the world,” writes Jennifer Higgie in Thin Skin, the accompanying publication to a 2023 exhibition featuring paintings by thirty-six Australian and international artists.
Tina Havelock Stevens likes to feel the wind in her hair, which probably goes some way to explaining the generous punk spirit that infuses her multidisciplinary practice, the subject of the exhibition Now is a Beginning at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.
Congratulations to Julie Fragar, who has won the 2025 Archibald Prize for Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), her portrait of fellow artist and colleague Justene Williams.
