artist profile MICHAEL A. CUMMINGS

Growing up in Los Angeles, California, it was a school trip to a museum when he was around 12 years old that sealed Michael A. Cummings’ future as an artist. “There was an exhibition of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and seeing them I wanted to learn to paint just like that – thick paint on canvas,” he reminisces. As Michael’s mother didn’t want him to paint in the house, he practised in the garage, using acrylics in place of oils due to his asthma. Over the years, he continued to train himself, but things took a different turn when, in 1970, at the age of 25, Michael moved east to live in New York City.

In New York, he enjoyed exploring the city’s wealth of galleries and coming across the work of Romare Bearden proved a pivotal encounter. A twentieth-century African American