Work Alec Cumming
Alec Cumming
Alec Cumming: Forms that Flow. Forthcoming Show
Art1821 in collaboration with Alan Wheatley Art, Mason's Yard, St James, London
PV Thursday 3 June - please contact Gallery for an invitation
Exhibition: Fri 4th- Thur 24th June 2010.
Alec Cumming
The works of one of East Anglia’s most promising young artists, Alec Cumming, immediately offers the viewer a series of surprising productions, of luscious and textured oil on canvas, incorporating both the vitality of youth and yielding the promise of what is still to come.
Cumming’s paintings dally with the beginnings of abstraction. Bold forms produced from layer over layer of gestures and marks, hint at things that have been seen, accumulated by way of a sketch, a photograph and objects, brought back to the studio, to spill out onto the canvases in a free but considered manner. Cummings constantly develops and toys with the spaces he is working on and the tools he uses; pallet knifes, brushes and oils, the artist relishing the surfaces of the canvas that flex with the marks that he makes.
Growing up in the Norfolk countryside it is no wonder that Cumming’s earlier works feature large horizontal formats, open spaces and landscape representations, the images formed from the naturally tentative applications of paint. A number of trips to differing landscapes, to Dartmouth, St Ives and the Lake District appear to have brought into focus Cumming’s visual vocabulary, in particular his understanding of the possibilities offered by the depth of the paint he builds up.
This change in his work also corresponds with his move to the city and daily encounters with the more confined urban spaces which demand a different kind of engagement from the artist in the process of looking. With vigour and inventiveness Cummings hoards images and makes relationships between things seen. From these daily wanderings he covers the canvas with layer upon layer of marks, adjusting, looking, taking off, adding on and looking again until the surface can give no more and the work is, for the time being, finished.
Together with his developed sense of form, Cummings economises his palette, which as his work progresses, becomes sparer in range but with an enhanced clarity in the harmony of colours. But as with all artists, often what is to hand and available becomes necessarily important and the colours that are ‘in stock’ are made to work.
This paring down of colours combines with Cumming’s developed use of over-marks, a device that attracts the gaze and pulls the composition together: a series of black lines scoring the canvas, the drip of paint down the image, or the final trace of a mark that hangs across the top.
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