Cummings would regularly attend paint workshops run by Australian Artist Vida Lahey at the Queensland Art Gallery.
[1] During her youth, the Cummings home was visited frequently by artists including Donald Friend, and Len and Kathleen Shillam.
[2] Cummings initially wanted to pursue architectural training but decided to enroll in art school after meeting and painting with Margaret Cilento.
[2] She studied at the National Art School, then known as East Sydney Technical College, from 1953 to 1957[3] where she was educated by artists Douglas Dundas, Wallace Thornton, Dorothy Thornhill, Godfrey Miller and Ralph Balson.
The artists Cummings cites as influential during this period include Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston, Fred Williams, Russell Drysdale, Sydney Nolan, John Olsen and Jimmy Rose.
[1] Cumming’s work was informed by European and Australian predecessors such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Édouard Vuillard and Margaret Olley.
[7] Elisabeth Cummings is a multi-disciplinary artist and celebrated colourist painter, working within painting, printmaking, drawing and ceramics.
Inspired by the Australian bush, and a sense of place and memory, which are themes in Cumming’s semi-abstract landscapes, interiors and still life paintings.
[8] Cumming’s starts her paintings by drawing multiple quick sketches of the scene which form the basis for her final full-sized work.
[1] John McDonald describes her painting style as "[t]hick, heavily worked, painterly surfaces with complex marks and intense colour".
Elisabeth Cummings has been called ‘The Invisible Woman of Australian Art’[11] as she worked quietly and independently in her studio for 43 years with limited recognition.
[14] She became involved in printmaking through a workshop with Michael Kempson at Cicada Press, a studio associated with UNSW Art & Design in Sydney.
[21] In 1970, Cummings began camping in a tent on bushland land owned by Barbara and Nick Romalis at Wedderburn outside Sydney.
[1] Cummings was joined by artists John Peart, Roy Jackson, Joan Brassil, Suzanne Archer and David Fairbairn.