Dose of Beauty #3

There is a diverse group of paintings, sculptures and mixed media pieces that evoke in me a strong feeling of love. The response is not the same for each piece, but it is always love in some form, or a mixture of love, awe and desire. I thought I would share some of these with you over the coming weeks and months. Art to soothe the soul. 

Not long ago, there was a study at the University of London, conducted by Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology, who scanned the brains of volunteers while they viewed 28 works of art. He explained, “We wanted to see what happens in the brain when you look at beautiful paintings.” The experiment concluded when you look at art, “whether it is a landscape, a still life, an abstract or a portrait—there is strong activity in that part of the brain related to pleasure.”  When viewing art they considered most profound, the volunteers blood flow increased in a certain part of the brain by as much as 10%, which is the equivalent to gazing at someone you love. 

 Elisabeth Cummings in her studio 

Elisabeth Cummings is one of Australia’s most respected living artists with a career spanning over 50 years. Slow to recognition, she gathered momentum in her 60's and produced her most important paintings in the decades that followed. In 1976, Cummings and a small group of artists formed an artists' community around Wedderburn. After being gifted 10 acres of secluded bushland from local residents, the property became jointly owned by five artists, and came to be known as Widden Weddin. Elisabeth continues to work from her studio there today. 

Her paintings are grounded in memory and her experience of place, distilling into visual form her response to her surroundings, including Australia’s unique landforms and ecology, as well as beloved internal spaces.   

Under the Trees, oil on canvas, 2020 100x30cm

In this abstract landscape, playful and decisive mark-making moves rhythmically across the canvas. It is both evocative of a place, and also completely abstracted into a kind of call and response of marks, forms and color. One thought, one gesture, leads to another. The painting has been put together layer upon layer, with parts that are painted out, and scratched back in. There is a focal point on the left, a nest of information, where the colors intensify. A concentration of more saturated shapes that abut and weave together. Even within all the busyness, there are distinctive moments that guide our eye, or beckon us to stop and look longer. Greys and dull ochres suffused with radiance, twisting this way and that. 

The feeling is one of pure response. It is of a hand that trusts the eye and transmutes the sensations of this specific place. The more you look the more you find; negative space through tree trunks, rocks, a creek bed, native grasses, all present. Or, you could see only a superb and luscious abstract language. 

 At Ross River, water color monotype, 2023, 20x27cm plate 34x44cm sheet 

Above is a small monotype in the same muted palette. Also a landscape, but printmaking offers Cummings another way of interpreting the subject matter. I'm always interested to see  work with a very distinct language carried over into another medium. Here, the light areas are very flat and open, revealing the papers surface. The landscape is less congested. The reddish oval, reveals the inky medium with its uneven watery quality. The print also results in a very specific patina, some areas of color are compressed and unify. But the wide variety of lively  mark making, loose line quality and rhythm are immediately recognizable without skipping a beat. A gem of a print! 

I hope you've enjoyed these two special works! 

“You’ve looked at so much and experienced so much color, so many shapes, and they excite you… Putting them together and pushing them around, it’s frustrating, it’s difficult often, but it’s exciting.”
—Elisabeth Cummings, 2023