Phil Cummings - Artist

While I was going through an old portfolio I found this...

Some careless idiot spilled their drink on this ink painting in 1974 or thereabouts. I remember how bummed out I was when this happened. Of course, I had never photographed this piece because it was ruined. But today I photographed it and the instant I opened the photo in Photoshop I saw how easy it would be to at least repair the photograph. All the tiles are more or less identical. This one was one where I created the grid and drew the elements once on a seperate sheet of paper and then used my light box to draw them again and again in the design. As easy as cut, paste and move. Command E to flatten.

Voila!

I LOVE this piece. My friend Lewis suggested a title 'Dame's Garden' and since I had forgotten the original title that's the new title. The original is still damaged, of course but I'm considering using this design as the template for a painting on masonite.

My new cartouche!

I'm close to going public with this site. In fact I put search criteria into Google so theoretically people could be visiting. I'm still a ways from being ready. All the pieces dont have dimensions. Not all the pieces that are for sale are priced. I have to go to Amazon and change the price on my book so that if people start buying it I dont have to ship it. I'll just put the link that takes them to Amazon.

I send these rice-paper letters sometimes to literary agents and people in the art world that I want to contact. In this age of e-mails it makes an impact. Now the cartouche on the bottom directs them to the site. 

The t-shirts are as done as they're going to be at the moment. Some successes from this last print, some failures. The biggest quandry is how to sell them. They are one-of-a-kind, after all. I cant do any kind of volume. I'm working on that problem, and it's a big problem.

I've been going through all my old stuff, things I havent thought of for decades. They were just in these old, rotting cardboard portfolios. I found this ink painting in a rice paper sketchbook. I think it was done when I lived in London in 1977. Being in a sketchbook in the dark has preserved this and the others in the book quite nicely. The inks havent faded at all and the paper hasnt yellowed very much. 

   Finding all these old ink pieces makes me want to do some painting with inks. Could my old inks still be usable? I'll have to look...

Here's a photo of me in 1977 on a walk in Oxfordshire with some friends. 

   This painting was inspired by the radiating energy present in many Australian aborigine paintings and cave art. Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines' is a great book to read about how the Abos believed that the Gods sang the universe into existence as they wandered through it. I tried to make the 'songline' in this painting more complex and urban if you like because I am not an Australian Aborigine myself so I sing a different song. Adding a linear structure to an abstract painting is always a risk but since the Abo's were only a departure point I replaced their simple radiating spirals with concentric circles and straight lines radiating from the center to create simple rhomboids that were then bisected into triangles. The colors and shapes were then improvised to add harmony, subconscious motion and depth.