Alec Cumming’s octopod locks rise up the stairs, pulling his face in their wake. He spots us and bounds over, all apologies. He is rather late; but time, more malleable for him than most, is forgotten as, seated before Snarl, he vibrates with an open energy - the only moment of worth is now. You can see that in his work; the movement of pigment on canvas, stark slashes, dark lines, broken ridges.
Discussing past experiences and work, eyes sloping up to the right, hands circling, he constantly breaks off on tangents - a song, a childhood memory - spiraling away, always on the move.

Why do you paint?

“I started painting when I was nine years old. I used to go to this old lady - she was a painter, a water-colour artist - and I used to go to her house each week for two hours and draw from observation and I did that for about six years, paint from still lives, properly learning to draw because, you know, you’ve got to learn the rudiments before you start abstracting.
That was the instigator, amazing. In the winter we’d sit indoors painting boxes of vegetables and in the summer we’d go out into the garden and draw from nature.

The abstraction came about quite naturally. I start after going to Cornwall, I was 16 and I went to Cornwall for a week and drew - did loads of sketches - and became obsessed with these Cornish artists - none of who I can remember now. I went in the Winter which was fantastic because everything was so dead. It was beautiful; true atmosphere. So I made loads of observational drawings and then when I got back I wanted to do something with my sketches. I’d been playing around with things for a while looking for new things - I felt the life stuff wasn’t going where I wanted so I did some sculpture, big plaster wall-hangings made from hessian - all about negative space from observational drawings of chairs... it was bloody banal actually, rubbish - but it was Cornwall that really made me think about what it was that I was actually drawing...

The drawings are important because they become like a tool. The works not planned - the way a thing starts is that I’ll make drawings and drawings of surroundings - where I am, what I’m in - thats how its worked for quite a few years. When I used in the country, my work was about fields, how I lived in fields and had a studio that backed on to this beautiful rolling... well, not rolling, no, because it was in Norfolk...

Did the nature of the Norfolk countryside - the blockish-ness - affect that period of your work?

Plots of coloured land... that was where I’d get that idea of where... some of the stuff from about 4 years ago is much more atmospheric. The colours and the placement was meant to instigate ideas of place, wet landscapes - a lecturer I had at art school he said they reminded him of Cornwall - he used to live right in the hills in the middle of Cornwall. He said it rang so true of where he was from but they were paintings of Norfolk, to me, inspired by Cornwall... so it went in, it affected me.
There is that pace to life both here and there but there are two sides to it all - in the past it was about that slowness and that deep thought, higher thinking - it used to be about slowing down, taking time to appreciate and look but I don’t live in the countryside anymore, I haven’t been back there for any stretch for maybe three years and my works changed, really changed. Now, its more about the energy and instant things and responses. I didn’t really know what I was painting and the painting was becoming a bit pointless - I was wondering if I really was a painter because I felt there was nothing going on in my paintings.

What was lacking?

I felt that I was going through the motions - some of them sold, they were successful from that point of view but I felt like they had no substance. They were empty... but then I started to look around me at where I was - the city - and that began to make more sense. After that it became a lot more intuitive and less considered and overwrought... I began to understand and transcribe what was happening around me and to me - reconsider and open myself up again and through that process I gained a greater knowledge of what it is I do.

It used to be the case that I would make work that I could sit back and look at, for myself - it wouldn’t necessarily represent something but it would help me think - a way of getting my thoughts down.
All my sketchbooks are full of single line drawing done with a certain amount of intuition and they don’t have any corrections - if a mark's made its made. That's my outlook.
My method is strange.
If you go to my studio at the minute I’ve go 4 or 5 pieces on the go - i have them around me. I’ll do a bit and then have a sit down, a cup of tea and a cigarette -just toy with ideas then I’ll get back up and go over to another piece. Sometimes they take months or weeks but I’ve done a painting in half an hour and there it was: finished - but the length of time I spend on a painting bears little relation to the time spent putting paint on canvas, its the time spent thinking and looking and sketching.

If something becomes successful I find I have to change and move on after a while or else I start putting down/making marks for the sake of it - because I know that it works and thats when the aesthetics die - it stops being interesting to me... some of the most pleasing paintings that I’ve done haven’t worked on one level or another - they probably look terrible but to me certain marks and movements within them conjure-up something in the mind, they’re stronger like that for me. The beauty lies in the unpredictable.

Article by Dan Richards