James Cumming’s sketchbooks are truly unique. Their pages lead you into the mind of the artist; where colour, shape, line and symbol mutate in and out of consciousness, making connections and swerving onto new and diverging paths.
Dated to around 1971, this sketchbook contains studies that informed Cumming’s paintings Hollow Vein, Silver and Nuclei – Dark Screen. The development of the signs for the latter can be seen through the sketchbook but culminate on pages 73-75. Derived from cellular biology, the shapes were formed and developed by Cumming into the final painting through the matrices of thought he describes on page 87.
