Painter, was born in Brisbane and holidayed at Currumbin where her brother now lives and which she visits in order to sketch, developing her abstract paintings later in her studio. She attended East Sydney Technical College and won the AGNSW Travelling Scholarship in 1958. In 1970 she bought a block of land at Wedderburn outside Sydney and moved there permently in 1990. After losing her studio in the 1994 bushfires, she used the insurance money to build a larger one attached to the wood and mudbrick house.
Campbelltown Art Gallery gave Cummings a retrospective in 1996, but Macdonald states that the only work by Cummings in a state collection continues to be an early painting given to the AGNSW as a condition of the Travelling Scholarship. A work acquired for the NGA was later given to Artbank. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and Gold Coast City Art Gallery, however, have works by her and McDonald acknowledges she is well represented in smaller public collections. She shows through King Street Gallery, Sydney, which held an exhibition of her work in September-October 2002, and also at Chapman Gallery, Canberra. At the time of writing, the top price for a work sold on the secondary market (where her paintings rarely appear) was $4,320 for After the Fire, Wedderburn, oil on canvas sold Sotheby’s Melbourne 2001.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
