David W. Cummings

David W. Cummings

David W. Cumming's roots were in an orthodox allegiance to a classical style loyal to the majesty of the grid and the primacy of flatness and the picture plane. But he also harbored an unruly urge to rococo exuberance. His muse was Cézanne, who loved stable structure above all, but lit an iconoclastic fire that radically engulfed the world of art. David’s work follows a stately trajectory from pure color field abstraction toward a hybrid of formalism and image-making. - Peter Delman
"Cummings has found a way to use color at full strength without sacrificing pictorial structure. His color sings as color--and makes compositional sense at the same time." - Theodore F. Wolff
David William Cummings was born in Eastern Oklahoma. He received a scholarship from the Kansas City Art Institute where he received his first formal training and acquired a deep appreciation and love for the French painter Paul Cezanne. He has been and is still Cummings’ most important influence. He moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco where he was able to study the then popular Bay Area figurative movement. Both the painters of that movement and the light itself of Northern California were a great influence on his thinking of color, but he decided to abandon any literary or graphic reference to color in nature and pursue a more violent expressive use of color in his work. Upon receipt of his M.F.A degree, he moved to New York City to a loft in SoHo. Working with his ideas of color, he was included in a group show at the O.K. Harris Gallery and in a major museum show “ Lyrical Abstraction” that was first shown at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut and then travels to several museums across the United States with it final exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He also had his first solo exhibition at Henri Gallery in Washington D.C. He also exhibited in shows with the Allan Stone Gallery and Gallery Alexandra Monett. Cummings continued to work and pursue his ideas in New York City, until when he gave up my loft in SoHo and moved to his studio home in a converted factory building in Jersey City. He continued to exhibit in New York City and Brussels. David’s work and ideas have made a meaningful statement and contribution to the visual arts. COLLECTIONS: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA Center for Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium / Aldridge Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut Jeugd en Plastiche Kunst, Ghent, Belgium /Phoenix Museum of Fine Arts, Phoenix, AZ / Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY / CIGNA Foundation Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania / University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota / Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation, Richmond, Virginia / Chase Manhattan Collection, New York, New York/ The Port Authority Collection, New York, New York / Chemical National Collection, New York, NY Citibank Collection, New York, NY / Federal Land Bank Collection, St. Paul, Minnesota / Rutgers University, Newark, NJ New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey
David W. Cummings in his studio in the 1980s.
David W. Cummings at Drawing Rooms' Dvora Gallery, Jersey City 2020