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James Cumming’s painting The Seaforth was included in touring exhibition, Fourteen Scottish Painters, an important survey of Scottish painting in the early sixties, a year after his first major exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. The subject remains enigmatic, a bust portrait of a man, using techniques derived from cubism, a palette knife used to incise sharp lines and paint scraped back to reveal glowing colour in a lower layer. But his title allows us an in: The Seaforth, a Highland soldier from a regiment steeped in blood and glory for a hundred years, a decorated warrior with a glint in his eye, a man from the harsh Highlands transformed into the cutting edge of the British army, bent to the British colonial project, but still fiercely independent. Cumming’s experiences as a post-dip student in Lewis, his deep sympathy for a simple, hard life on the fringes of Scotland persists in this soldier portrait.
As a painter, James Cumming was possessed of a singular and highly personal vision. Several phases of interest took place in his work, Still Life, Portraits, Space Age, Puppets, Circus and the Electron Microscope brought forth another series of works concerning the visual nature of living cells. The hand of the draughtsman is always very much in evidence, an assured line in absolute control of the formal arrangement. James Cumming was born in Dunfermline and studied at Edinburgh College of Art. In the early 1950s a travelling scholarship took him for a year to Callanish on the Isle of Lewis leading to his acclaimed series of Hebridean paintings. His considered and meticulously wrought style became concerned with geometry, structure, and abstraction. He also began to lecture on a regular basis at Edinburgh College of Art from 1950. Whilst artist in residence at Hospitalfield in Arbroath in 1960-61, his work and language in abstraction had a significant impact on John Byrne and Alexander Fraser. His most distinctive work of the 1960s is rich in colour, where it is employed, but essentially tonal. His later career was more concerned with natural and cellular forms, vibrant colour and a more prominent geometry.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1962, 1971, 1972 (Festival), 1985 (Festival), 1995 (Memorial)
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