As an artist, Donald Cumming’s work crosses several mediums. Throughout these modes, the impulse to make work is a gestural one—each mark and move can only happen once, and can exist as they are. There is tension within this knowledge that things may go off the rails, or get lost, sooner or later than expected. Toward these ends, Cumming works within certain controls, seeing how far the variables involved may be stretched compositionally. The results are dream-like moments, seemingly dulled childhood memories diagrammed from a tip of burnt wood against sheer stains of coffee. Color breaks through elsewhere in oil paint, where figures are siloed on panes of cardboard and canvas. The ad hoc mixture of Cumming’s imagery speaks to an artistic process that is more automatic that determined, reaching into the unconscious. At times psychological, even ominous, these works also seek to be as minimal as possible in their delivery. If in dreams you might return to the same place more than once—whether by unexpected revisitation or the desire to course correct—in Cumming’s works the scene found is less so a place than a scenario. Then again, we land upon Catastrophe! III, where we find that veering moment, get lost in its abstraction, and wonder about the II that must’ve come before. Cumming lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
