• Alec Cumming engages with a unique kind of abstraction, which allows him the pleasure of observing the world and translating it into a visual dialogue.

    Alec Cumming is an artist who works internationally, having spent several years working in India. He now spends time considering his influences in different locations such as California and Sri Lanka. His practice, oil on canvas, is traditional in medium but the images that jump in and around the canvas are vibrant and playful. Within his work Cumming continues to explore the idea of fleeting moments.

     

    Currently settled back to the UK, the artist finds himself considering the visual stimulus discovered in his three years spent in India, and travelling since then, and how these staggeringly different locations play out on canvas with his current settled space in Norfolk.

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    Questions such as how this imagery translates into a 'pan global' vocabulary interest him the most. Creating a dialogue of mixing a Western and Eastern influence and the back and forth nature of the discussion happen on the surface of the canvas; moments, that may or may not have existed.

     

    Within his own abstracted painting style there are shapes and forms that lead to suggestions of 'things'. These ideas of semi-recognisable forms can suggest a narrative. Such forms appear through drawings, thoughts, ideas and experiences. The paintings may suggest spaces he knows, fabrics, places, an interesting space between buildings seen whilst walking in the street, a moment glimpsed whilst laying poolside, or even a collection of observed objects, tyres stacked on the road or a table laden with drinks and paraphernalia.

    Many of these important elements are enhanced by a desire to explore the way light in these places enhances the compositions. He allows himself to glimpse, noticing a bright harsh light that makes colours pop and resonate. He wants his paintings to have the same resonation.

    Alec Cumming was born in 1986 and graduated in 2007 from Norwich University of the Arts with a degree in Fine Art. He has enjoyed success with a number of major solo shows in London, throughout the UK and abroad. He exhibited at 9 India Art Fairs and is the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition with the British Council in India. In 2017 Cumming was selected for a Residency with Dyad Creative in conjunction with Museums in India and the South Asia Collection in the UK, where he made his monumental painting project 'Dialogues with India'.

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