TOMOTHY CUMMINGS
BLUE BOY
December 14, 2023 - January 27, 2024
IN THE NEWS
Timothy Cummings - BLUE BOY
While most of Cummings’s paintings are dream-like fantasies filled with myriad detail and discovery, each has a figure or figures. Much of Cummings’s work addresses the issue of youthful turmoil, of that awkward moment between childhood and adulthood, of identity, of gender. The artist often paints figures as a child might conjure them in his/her mind, giving a dreamlike, fantasy quality to a grown-up persona.
Mostly intimate in scale on small wooden panels (from 8 x 10 to 38 x 48 inches), Cummings’s acrylic paintings, carefully and meticulously created, suggest a master’s technique with imagery that could only be contemporary. Inspired by Renaissance paintings as well as by primitive art, Cummings’s new works transport the viewer from this world into a world of transformation where anything is possible.
The artist’s love of clothes that adorn his characters is evident in his new work. As a teenager he made puppets with elaborate costumes. His love of plaids, lace, striped socks and magic hats continues to this day, as does his love of flowers based on real, yet imagined blooms. His recent painting Clairvoyant exemplifies this love of “fashion” and costume in which the artist paints the clairvoyant little gent with patterned feathers in his hat, a luxurious striped shirt with beaded necklace, a rainbow of colors that sing together.
Over the years, Cummings has created portraits, faces, sometimes perforated with spots and dots, at other times traversed by drawing lines and flourishes, turning a young boy’s head into a mask. It is always the eyes that communicate to and gaze at the viewer with undeniable intensity. It is the eyes that hold the secret.
A realist of sorts, whose focus is the human persona, particularly the face, Cummings is a unique colorist. Color is as much a subject for him as the “sitter” in the portrait. His colors tend toward the upbeat, lots of blue skies, brilliant reds and yellows as if his figures are bathed in a joyful palette from an imagined world.
About the Artist
Timothy Cummings was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1968 where he grew up in the midst of Spanish Catholic and Native American culture, fertile with religious imagery and iconography in the churches. Murals and retablos he saw depicting death, martyrdom, and Day of the Dead imagery influenced him. Cummings is completely self-taught. In 2014, he returned to New Mexico after living in the Bay Area for many years. He has had solo exhibitions at Nancy Hoffman Gallery (New York), Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), KiMo Theatre Gallery (Albuquerque), Transarte (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Hampden Gallery (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Tenderloin Salon (Berlin), Wilkes Bashford Company (San Francisco), Global 33 (New York), among others; and his work is in the collections of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Napa, California) and the Weatherspoon Art Museum (University of North Carolina, Greensboro).