Late life `rock star'

At 91, Elisabeth Cummings (1952) remains one of Australia’s most respected working artists, with two major exhibitions in Sydney this year.

Considered by many to be an `artist’s artist’, she has won many awards throughout her career but only began to achieve widespread public recognition and acclaim in her 60s, calling herself a `slow developer’ who quite liked the anonymity of her early years.

Understated in life, but bold in practice, Elisabeth is known for her semi-abstract landscapes and interiors, with a rich sense of memory, movement and place. Her work after reaching the age of 70 has been hailed as the best of her career.

Elisabeth has inspired such a devoted following, in 2023 Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald dubbed her a `rock star’ of the Sydney art world writing:

`One of the main reasons Cummings was slow to be noticed is her inherent modesty—not a condition that afflicts many artists. Always feeling she had more to learn, she has quietly outstripped those who think they know it all as her dedication and self-criticism began to produce canvases that could hold their own in any company. From being a marginal, almost invisible presence in the Australian art world, Cummings has risen to a level that should make her an obligatory acquisition for the major public art museums.’

Her climb epitomises the quiet dedication of `Nil sine labore’.

But in typically understated fashion, she has described her artistic evolution simply as: `I just kept on painting, I suppose. And slowly, slowly, there were changes.’

Born in Brisbane in 1934 Elisabeth was raised in a creative home. Her father, an architect and academic, was passionate about art and the family home was often filled with creatives, including famed Queensland wildlife sculptors Len and Kathleen Shillam.

Elisabeth spent much of her childhood at Alderley which, at the time, was still predominantly bushland, and at the Cummings’ holiday home at Currumbin, on the Gold Coast—a location that features in many of her paintings.

As a young child, her schoolteacher mother would arrange objects into a still life for Elisabeth and her brother to sketch, until her father urged his wife to `let the kids draw what they want’.

Elisabeth remembers her years at Girls Grammar from 1949 to 1952 as a time surrounded by `interesting, stimulating teachers’ and good friends. After graduation she moved to Sydney to study at the National Art School, and in 1958 she was awarded the prestigious NSW Travelling Scholarship which allowed her to spread her wings and travel to Europe. She spent the 1960s travelling, studying and painting in Italy, Paris and London before returning to Sydney.

`Being aways from Australia, what I missed the most was the bush,’ she would later say. `Just that physical thing of Australia that’s so, so different to Europe.’

She immediately started searching for a bushland studio and made a fortuitous connection with art patrons Barbara and Nick Romalis, who, in the 1970s, gifted her and several fellow artists 10 hectares of land at Wedderburn, 60km south-west of Sydney. It was to become an influential artists' enclave. Elisabeth still lives and works there, although her original 70s studio was destroyed, along with many artworks, in bushfires that tore through the area in 1994.

Despite the loss, she rebuilt and has gone on to produce some of the most celebrated works of her career featuring not only the landscape of Wedderburn, but scenes from within her studio.

A 1.8x1.8m oil-on-canvas work, After the fires—Wedderburn, completed in the months after the bushfires was a finalist in the 1995 Wynn Prize, alongside another of her pieces, Birds over Stradbroke. Elisabeth’s work is regularly praised for its unexpected use of colour and texture to produce an emotional, rather than realist, rendering of landscapes.

Describing her motivation as she paints, Elisabeth has said: `You want the next paining to be alive. I want it to move.’

Underlining her rise beyond artist to icon, Elizabeth has been the subject of several paintings for the Archibald Prize, with Peter Wegner's Kindred spirit portrait of her a 2026 finalist.

In 2011 Elisabeth received the Medal of the Order of Australia for her services not only to visual arts as a painter and teacher—she taught at Sydney’s National Art School from 1969-2001—but for her work in environmental conservation.

Elisabeth’s work can be found in the collections of major Australian public institutions including the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia. She is also included in the collections of the Australian Club, Artbank, Macquarie Bank, NAS, College of Fine Arts UNSW, and regional art galleries across Australia.