Douglas Laurie Cummings, born in Hammersmith in London, was a sign writer, watercolourist, policeman, photographer and graphic artist. He obtained a commercial illustrator’s diploma and took art lessons at Hammersmith School of Art at night before enlisting in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Regiment in World War I. He fought on the Somme and was taken prisoner-of-war. He emigrated to Western Australia with his wife Nell in 1921 as a soldier-settler. They lived at Talley Farm in Denmark (South-West WA) at first but soon moved to Perth where their son was born in 1924.
Cummings joined the police force and became a sergeant. He was appointed official police draughtsman drawing plans of traffic accidents. He also drew cartoons for the police column of the West Australian newspaper. He designed the Pitman & Walsh Memorial which was erected in Perth in 1929. A complete set of the originals of over fifty-six drawings of homesteads commissioned in 1929 by the Western Mail is held by the Royal Western Australian Historical Society. He also painted shop windows, parking signs and other similar commissions. In 1930 he exhibited an oil painting titled Departure for United Kingdom. He exhibited the oil paintings Bathurst Point Lighthouse and Jetty, Rottnest in the Claude Hotchin Art Prize in 1949 and The Causeway, Rottnest and Henrietta Rocks, Rottnest in the Art Competition at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1950. In addition to painting he was a keen photographer. The Art Gallery of Western Australia has a watercolour by him and a drawing of a lighthouse. His watercolours are pleasant but not distinguished.
RED SECTIONS
- Writers:
- Dr Dorothy Erickson
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2011
