A Self confessed solitary artist with a love of bums, human bodily fluid and psychoanalysing, his paintings are simple, uncomplicated abstracts full of the before mentioned bums, tits and other body parts. You wouldn't realise this though without being informed as each canvas only seems to hold a set of different forms and shapes, colours and patterns.
He chooses to use dull cheap paints in a bid to make the paintings non-impressive - Take them as you find them. He does this to invoke a feeling of us not knowing what they are, what they mean or why he painted them and he paints in a way that says 'why be bothered what they are, just look at them'.
'cmyk 300.3' stuart cumberland
Once informed of the build up of his images we can start to see these things in each piece. The above painting, produced with cheap emotionless colours, (faded red, straight black and layered white) has bum holes (pointed out by the artist during his talk) and what I guess might be suggestions of bums, tits, hands and 4 or 5 heads.
Flashes of Keith Haring and Lichtenstein can be seen in these stencilled and painted images and the centre square is left stripped back or removed to take the layered painting back to its simplest form, almost blank, deconstructing or maybe breaking down the image. This idea came across a lot from the artist. He explained in a way that made me feel his work is all about the effort involved and the relief when he completes a work, although when asked how he knows a work is complete he stated "Er..I don't really, they just sort of look done".
Cumberland came across with the attitude of 'If you don't like it, don't look at it'.
'cmy 300 240m' stuart cumberland
The paintings struggle to fit together on one canvas. Shapes battle for the space or try to escape each other and they look to me like a mash up of several paintings chucked onto the canvas.
They have great strength as abstract, unexplained forms but fail to convey any message or narrative but I don't think he's trying to do this anyway, he just paints them.
"I love the messiness of my studio where I can splash and splosh paint everywhere with no worries, almost like the wet rooms older people have in their houses" an idea that definitely spills over into his work. This attitude continues through the artists whole life highlighted by several facts - Kicked out by his wife for going to Rome, house sitting friends houses because he couldn't be bothered to find his own place, sleeping in his studio due to having nowhere to live and when asked by a major gallery to produce a series of paintings on a certain theme for them to sell he said "Fuck off, I'll paint what I like". Thus losing a major show and a big pay day which he admitted was a 'major mistake in his life'.
The artist talked about the influence of freud's Fort/Da theory where a child threw a toy away from himself then pulled it back, delighted he could get back what he'd lost. Cumberland explained this as a sort of 'loss and return' idea manifesting itself onto some of his canvas', Removing some of the paint from the centres of each image, returning the canvas back to its original state.
Cumberland became an artist simply because he didn't want a real 9-5 job and admits thinking painting is now a lost art and a posh luxury to be enjoyed by the rich.
"Painting is dead" he states but I remember reading somewhere the same was said after the Cistene chapel had been finished.
Maybe its just his paintings that are dead?
The artworks? from his Rome trip left me wondering what was going on in his head. Travelling Rome and its villages for 6 months, he drank water at the thousands of free water fountains and let the water work its way through his body, leaving no trace of him ever being there.
Nice work if you can get it, But where is the art? There is no record of the event jus a few poorly taken snap shots of the fountains.
Even if he won't admit it I think Cumberland's paintings are as deep and complex as the artist himself, full of contradiction, confusion, attitude, problems and questions. The finished pieces are a reaction to the process of applying the paint, light on emotion but heavy on humour.
"The stencilled, painted surface signifies a wet, dripping painted line, rather than actually being one"
'Painted circle painting' stuart cumberland
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