Veranda Basking — the veranda as the right place to be in the heat of the day, the covered threshold between inside and outside where the warmth becomes comfortable rather...
Veranda Basking — the veranda as the right place to be in the heat of the day, the covered threshold between inside and outside where the warmth becomes comfortable rather than overwhelming. The veranda is one of Alec Cumming's defining subjects: its presence in the architecture of India, Sri Lanka and the Mediterranean as the place where life happens at the pace that heat demands.
Within his work Cumming continues to explore the idea of fleeting moments — those split seconds that feel both fully present and already half-remembered. "There's a certain split second I'm chasing," he has said. "Like waking up somewhere hot and the light hits your face — not quite familiar, not quite strange. I want the painting to capture that feeling — the moment it all clicks into place."
Basking is precise: the slow, passive absorption of warmth, the body or the space doing nothing that couldn't wait. Alec Cumming is a British artist who paints oil on canvas from his studio in Norfolk. He spent three years working in India, and since then has drawn on locations including California and Sri Lanka — a pan-global visual vocabulary that produces paintings where Western and Eastern influences are in ongoing dialogue. He shows with The Edit Gallery in Cyprus, Paul Stewart Gallery in Paris and exhibits at art fairs in the USA and UK.. This is the oil on canvas companion piece to the Veranda Painting 1 screen print, the original work from which his printmaking practice also draws. In a white grain tray frame and ready to hang. Our guide to investing in original artwork is worth reading. Signed. £900.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Alec Cumming
Alec 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 he continues to explore the idea of fleeting moments. Currently settled back to the UK, He 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.
Questions such as how this imagery translates into a ‘pan global’ vocabulary become interesting. Creating a dialogue of mixing a western/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’. The ideas of semi-recognisable forms can suggest a narrative. 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, bright harsh light that makes colours pop and resonate, a shimmering haze feeling. He wants his paintings to have the same resonation. This of kind Abstraction allows him the pleasure of observing the world and translating it into a visual dialogue.
