Artist Profile

ELISABETH CUMMINGS

With some paintings I feel good about them. Some. Some. Not all. Of course you are always wanting more. One’s greedy.

LANDSCAPE. IT IS A WORD THAT SEEMS A LITTLE BIT like a solid container. A sturdy vessel for the spectacle, the scene, the entity of a view splayed before us. Still life. It sounds like something animate that has been jarred for the winter or a table where dust never falls. Yet the best examples of both disciplines serve to unravel rather than encase.

Established genres need to be broken apart in order to come alive, knitting together and ripping open or patching in and then scraping away, exposing the problem of making art, touch by touch. Elisabeth Cummings’ work was born within scenes of the interior, has traversed the landscape and clearly transcends both categories.

This year the most comprehensive display of Cummings’ career is on show. Her second major survey show , debuted at Canberra’s Drill Hall and opens at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney in May, is accompanied by a new monograph that testifies to

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