Narrative Sensibility: The Art Portfolio of Phil Cummings
Phil Cummings was born in Manhattan, New York, and has lived around the world, working as an artist and in the film industry. Phil’s paintings and prints tend to have a narrative sensibility about them, whether they exist alongside a defined story, or are stand-alone pieces.
The style that Phil uses in most of his artworks is fascinating – while the artist works in traditional media including acrylic paint, ink, and lithography, his style seems at times like it could be digitally rendered. Bright, vector-like planes of colour mark a great number of the artist’s compositions, with faces, figures, and landscapes distilled into their most essential shapes and hues. In our previous feature, we looked at the way Phil uses repeating patterns to build up his bright, graphic images.
Phil's art portfolio website, www.philcummingsart.com
This frantic, patterned brightness is sometimes offset by more subdued works – the pieces in Phil’s gallery of seriographs and lithographs are no less colourful but seem somehow quieter, and more serious. These works seem to draw from a different pop art moment but are no less enticing.
