Elisabeth Cummings New Paintings King Street Gallery On Burton, 24 September - 19 October

There is no illusion in Elisabeth Cummings' paintings, the history of marks and colours are exposed as warranty for the finished products. It is left for the viewer to decide which elements constitute the picture.

The physicality and substance of paint takes precedence in her work, it is not paint pretending to be a lounge room. Paint is left to be paint with all the approximations and idiosyncrasies native to the medium. The resulting tension in the works comes out of the struggle between the vehicle of expression, an interior scene for example, and the paint itself. The play between these two elements each trying to capitulate the other leads to a great complexity within the finished works, ultimately giving them a highly evolved sense of history and experience.

The paintings are charged with all the self-critical re-evaluations inherent in making a painting, leading them to an organic finalization rather than a calculated end. Jasper Johns keenly articulated this lack of control an artist has over their own work in an interview with David Sylvester in 1965; “I think paintings by the time they are finished, tend to take on a particular characteristic. That is one of the reasons they are finished, because everything has gone in that direction, and there is no recovery. The energy, the logic, everything which you do takes a form in working; the energy tends to run out, the form tends to be accomplished or finalized. Then either it is what one intended (or what one is willing to settle for) or one has been involved in a process which has gone in a way that perhaps one did not intend, but has been done so thoroughly that there is no recovery from that situation. You have to leave that situation as itself, and then proceed with something else, begin again, begin a new work.”(1)

Mainly interior scenes or views of the landscape from inside looking out, the paintings reminded me, with their chaotic assemblage of forms, of the late studio paintings of Braque. In Currumbin interior with mango the landscape comes indoors in a collision of muted greens and greys with elements loosely drawn over solid shapes adding a fleeting naivety to the sophisticated paint - work underneath. In Early morning, Currumbin there is a saturation of colour that pays homage to Bonnard as shapes and colour snake their way through an open window. Some of the works have an almost geometric structure that pits itself against the amorphous nature of the compositions. In others such as Grey day from the verandah, Currumbin and Red and white the recognizable forms have been abstracted right out of the canvas.

To work with such open-ended criteria for making a painting must be as satisfying for the artist as it is for the viewer. It also seems a good way of insuring you do not just reproduce a self styled product to order, which has become somewhat of an epidemic with mid-career artists.

1. BBC Interview between David Sylvester and Jasper Johns, 1965
in Art in Theory, 1900-1990, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell, London, 1992, p. 721.

-Richard Lamarck

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