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Elisabeth Cummings facts for kids

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Elisabeth Cummings (born in Brisbane in 1934) is a famous Australian artist. She is well known for her large, abstract paintings and her printmaking. Abstract art uses shapes, colours, and lines instead of showing things exactly as they look.

Elisabeth has won many important awards, like the Fleurieu Art Prize, the Portia Geach Portrait Prize, and the Mosman Art Prize. Her artworks are kept in major art collections all over Australia. These include places like Artbank, the Queensland Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Elisabeth Cummings became very famous later in her career. The Australian Art Collector magazine even called her one of the top 50 most collectible Australian artists.

Growing Up in Australia

Elisabeth Cummings was born on 3 June 1934 in Brisbane, Queensland. During World War II, her family moved out of Brisbane to the countryside for safety. They later returned to live in Alderley, where their home was surrounded by beautiful bushland.

The Cummings family also had a holiday home at Currumbin on the Gold Coast. As a child, Elisabeth loved painting watercolour landscapes there. Today, Currumbin and the Australian bush are still often seen in her landscape paintings.

Elisabeth and her brother, Malcolm, used to draw still lifes that their mother, a primary school teacher, would set up. But their father, Robert Cummings, told them to "let the kids draw what they want." Her father was an architect and a professor at the University of Queensland. He also collected art and was a trustee for the Queensland Art Gallery. Elisabeth often went to painting workshops led by Australian artist Vida Lahey at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Learning to Be an Artist

When Elisabeth was young, many artists visited her family's home. These included Donald Friend and Len and Kathleen Shillam. Elisabeth first thought about studying architecture. However, after meeting and painting with Margaret Cilento, she decided to go to art school instead.

From 1953 to 1957, she studied at the National Art School in Sydney. It was then known as East Sydney Technical College. There, she learned from famous artists like Douglas Dundas and Godfrey Miller. At art school, Elisabeth saw the work of other young Australian artists. She found this very inspiring for her own art. She says artists like Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston, and Fred Williams influenced her a lot during this time.

Studying Overseas

In 1958, Elisabeth won the NSW Traveling Art Scholarship. In 1960, she received the Dyason Bequest. These awards helped her travel around Europe for the next ten years. In 1961, she studied at Kokoschka's School of Vision in Salzburg, Austria. This school was run by the artist Oskar Kokoschka. After that, she traveled to Florence, Italy.

She spent the next 10 years living and studying in Italy and Paris. In Florence, she shared a villa with other artists. There, she met her husband, Jamie Barker, who was also a painting student. Elisabeth's art was shaped by European artists like Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, as well as Australian artists like Margaret Olley.

In 1968, she returned to Australia and settled in Sydney. The next year, she started teaching part-time at East Sydney Technical College.

Elisabeth's Artworks

Elisabeth Cummings is known as a colourist painter, meaning she uses colour in a special way. She works in many different art forms, including painting, printmaking, drawing, and even ceramics. Her art is inspired by the Australian bush, memories, and a sense of place. These ideas are often seen in her semi-abstract landscapes, interior scenes, and still life paintings.

When she starts a painting, Elisabeth first makes many quick sketches of the scene. These sketches then become the base for her final, larger artwork. Art critic John McDonald describes her paintings as having "thick, heavily worked, painterly surfaces with complex marks and intense colour."

Some of her well-known interior paintings include Journey Through The Studio (2004) and Inside The Yellow Room (2005). Her landscape paintings include Arkaroola landscape (2005) and Edge of the Simpson Desert (2011). Her painting Monaro Shadow and Light (2015) was a finalist for the Wynne Prize.

Early Career and Teaching

Elisabeth Cummings worked part-time as an art teacher from 1969 to 2001. She taught at several art colleges, including the City Art Institute in Sydney. During this time, she continued to paint on her own. She won awards like the 1974 Grafton Prize. Since 1976, Elisabeth Cummings has lived and worked at her studio in Wedderburn.

Later Career and Recognition

For many years, Elisabeth Cummings worked quietly in her studio without much public attention. Some people even called her 'The Invisible Woman of Australian Art'. But Elisabeth didn't mind the lack of fame, saying, "I like anonymity."

She had her first big show, called "Elisabeth Cummings 65-96," when she was 62. This was a retrospective exhibition, meaning it looked back at her art from many years. It was held at the Campbelltown Art Gallery in New South Wales. In 2012, she had her second retrospective show, 'Luminous: Survey Exhibition Landscapes of Elizabeth Cummings,' at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney.

Today, Elisabeth Cummings' artworks are part of many important art collections across Australia. These include the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2011, when she was 77, Elisabeth Cummings received the Order of Australia Medal (OAM). This award recognized her great contributions to the visual arts in Australia. In 2018, artist Noel Thurgate painted her portrait, Elisabeth Cummings in her studio at Wedderburn, 1974 and 2018. This painting was a finalist for the famous Archibald Portraiture Prize.

Elisabeth travels often and has taken part in artist residencies and exhibitions both in Australia and other countries. In 2014, at age 81, she was an artist-in-residence and had an exhibition in Hong Kong. That same year, she was part of a group of nine Australian artists who had a show at the Waiheke Arts Centre in New Zealand. Elisabeth also took part in a traveling exhibition called YOUR FRIEND THE ENEMY. For this project, Australian and New Zealand artists were invited to Gallipoli, Turkey, to paint the shores of Anzac Cove.

Printmaking Art

In 2001, Elisabeth Cummings started exploring printmaking, especially etching. She learned about printmaking at a workshop with Michael Kempson at Cicada Press in Sydney. This studio is connected to UNSW Art & Design. Elisabeth joined a program where artists work with the help of students to create prints. Other famous artists like Reg Mombassa also took part. Since then, Cummings has visited Cicada Press every week to work with Kempson. Her print artworks explore similar ideas to her paintings, mostly landscapes and interior scenes. She also made monoprints through Whaling Road Studios.

The Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia has three of her lithographs (a type of print) and a silkscreen print. In 2017, Cummings gave a large collection of 85 of her prints and etchings to the New England Regional Art Museum.

Ceramics and Sculpture

Cummings has also worked with ceramics and sculpture. She made small models of interior sets with figures made from clay. She created these with Lino Alvarez. Cummings has also made small sculptures of figures out of bronze.

In 2012, she worked with Louise Boscacci to make clear porcelain plates and platters. Cummings painted on these pieces. The flat shape of the plates was chosen to look like the salt-covered clay pans found in northern Queensland. This project was called "Cicada Waterfall," named after the cicadas that can be heard in the bush around Cummings' home in Wedderburn. These unique pieces were shown in 2014 at King Street Gallery in Sydney as part of her exhibition Elisabeth Cummings: A Still Life.

The Wedderburn Art Community

In 1970, Elisabeth Cummings started camping in a tent on bushland owned by Barbara and Nick Romalis. This land was in Wedderburn, outside Sydney. The Romalis family later gave ten acres of land to Cummings so she could build an art studio there. Other artists, including John Peart, Roy Jackson, and Suzanne Archer, joined her. The group then bought another 15 acres of land together.

Moving to Wedderburn changed Elisabeth's painting style. She started focusing more on the process of painting itself, rather than just the subject. Both Cummings and John Peart have worked hard to protect the Wedderburn environment from new buildings.

In 1994, a small studio belonging to Cummings was destroyed by bushfires. A lot of her artwork was lost. Sadly, her long-time friend and fellow artist, John Peart, died from breathing in smoke from the fire. After the fire, Cummings built a larger studio attached to her mud brick house on the land. Her 2001 painting After the Fire, Wedderburn shows what the area looked like after the fires.

Art Collections

Elisabeth Cummings' artworks are held in many public and private collections. Here are some of them:

Awards and Residencies

Elisabeth Cummings has received many awards and has been an artist-in-residence at various places:

  • 2014: Waiheke Community Art Gallery, New Zealand
  • 2014: The Nock Art Foundations, Hong Kong
  • 2011: Awarded the OAM for her services to visual arts in Australia.
  • 2005–present: Artist in residence, COFA printmaking department, UNSW, Sydney.
  • 2000: Fleurier Prize for Landscape, S.A.
  • 1996: Mosman Art Prize, NSW.
  • 1995: Camden Art Prize, NSW.
  • 1992: Tattersall's Club Art Prize, Qld.
  • 1991: Fishers Ghost Prize, Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery.
  • 1989: Gold Coast Purchase Prize, Qld.
  • 1988: REIQ Bicentennial Art Award, Qld.
  • 1987: Open Section, Camden Art Prize; Faber Castell Drawing Prize.
  • 1984: Mervyn Horton Memorial Prize, Berrima, NSW; Camden Purchase Prize, NSW; Friends of the Campbelltown Art Gallery Purchase.
  • 1983: Lane Cove Purchase Prize, NSW.
  • 1982: Lane Cove Purchase Prize, NSW.
  • 1981: Macquarie Towns Purchase Prize, NSW.
  • 1979: Peter Stuyvesant Prize, Shoalhaven; Fishers Ghost Prize, Campbelltown City Hall; Gosford Purchase Prize, NSW.
  • 1978: Gold Coast Purchase Prize.
  • 1977: Landscape and Still Life Prizes, RAS, Sydney; Lismore Prize, NSW; Fishers Ghost Prize, Campbelltown City Hall.
  • 1976: Drummoyne Prize, NSW.
  • 1974: Grafton Prize, NSW.
  • 1972: Human Image Prize, RAS, Sydney; Cheltenham Prize, NSW; Portia Geach Portrait Prize, Sydney.
  • 1971: Gold Coast Purchase Prize, QLD.
  • 1960: Dyason Bequest.
  • 1958: NSW Travelling Art Scholarship.
  • 1957: Le Gay Brereton Prize for Drawing.
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