We see these same tendencies in a painting such as The Music Room (1996), in which Cummings creates a heavily abstracted image of a crowded chamber lit by the glare from a single window. The interior is dark and intimate, but outside the sun is shining ferociously. It suggests that music is a world within a world, an interiorised experience that requires a certain distance, as one sense is privileged over the others. In the rhythms of the brushstrokes, we find analogies for the rhythms of a musical composition.

There are a series of pictures in this show in which this dialogue between inner and outer worlds is echoed, with a door or window providing the connection. It’s a device found in many of Matisse’s works. With Cummings, the most dramatic and vibrant example may be The shearer’s kitchen, Mt. Murchison (2011), where a blaze of sunlight enters by a wide open portal to illuminate a heavily laden table. In the corner, two dogs watch at a respectful distance.

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In the years that separate The Music Room from The shearers’ kitchen, Cummings’ palette becomes lighter and brighter. Landscapes such as After the fires, Wedderburn (1994) or Bird in the bush (1995) are painted in shades of grey, brown, black and a murky yellow ochre. They are tremendously suggestive of the colours of the bush ravaged by fire, and dappled light filtered through the leaves of the gum trees.

On the way there are paintings such as Dry riverbed and rock forms (1994), where the pink-grey tonality and patchwork brushstrokes recall mid-career Philip Guston. It’s possibly the most singular picture in the show – the kind of work art historians call “transitionary”.

By 2000 she was painting The river, a two-metre-long vista in which we feel the powerful horizontal movement of a waterbed bathed in sunlight. The greys and dull ochres are still present, but now suffused with the radiance that gives this exhibition its completely appropriate title.

It’s this brightness that dominates the exhibition, giving Cummings’ late work an electric charge in paintings such as After the wet, Elcho Island (2004), Edge of the Simpson Desert (2011), or White Billabong (2002). We accept these canvases as landscapes, but it is their abstract qualities that hold our attention. The paintings have been put together layer upon layer, with frequent corrections and rethinkings; areas have been painted out or scratched back in; busy, calligraphic marks and lazy, looping brushstrokes create a sense of constant movement. The eye is never allowed to rest, being hustled from one part of the painting to the next, as if there is so much to see one can’t afford to linger too long in any one place. If Bonnard is the presiding spirit in the early work, the later pictures feel more indebted to the churning, restless energy of Willem de Kooning.

Cummings’ excitement in these paintings is almost palpable. We feel her absorption in the work, and the pleasure it affords her, as she thinks back over the details of a landscape she is recreating in the studio. The paintings are visual diaries of impressions and sensations, stored away in the back of the artist’s mind, to be reactivated in the present. One thought, one gesture, leads to another. Cummings is not simply painting what she saw but what she felt, and this can only be done in the language of abstraction. It’s her achievement to take this language, often thought of as difficult or obscure, and create paintings with such an immediate, almost visceral appeal. If happiness could be stored in a jar and spread on a canvas, this is the way it might look.

Elisabeth Cummings: Radiance is at the National Art School Gallery until October 21.