"'Winter Solstice'" Drawing

Andy Cumming is a Scottish artist based in East Lothian whose practice explores human creativity, existentialism and our instinct to construct meaning through images.

An early influence was the development of children’s artistic expression — the way instinctive marks gradually become forms, symbols and visual languages. This developed into a wider fascination with image-making as a fundamental human impulse: our need to find patterns, construct meaning and give form to experiences that can be difficult to articulate.

Over the years these interests have taken Cumming through mythology, psychology, alternative histories and internet conspiracy culture. His four-year project Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia (2014–18), presented as part of Edinburgh Art Festival, explored mythmaking, constructed identity and belief through the creation of a fictional occult artist whose world existed through artworks, photography, film, performance and social media.

His current practice brings these questions back to painting and the physical act of making. Inspired by nature and the legacy of Impressionism, his mixed-media paintings move between landscape and abstraction, suggesting water, vegetation, reflected light and atmosphere without resolving into fixed representation.

Working intuitively with oils, spray paint, acrylic paint pens, chalk and sawdust, Cumming builds, disrupts and revises his surfaces, allowing accidents and material resistance to influence what happens next. The paintings are arrived at rather than simply produced.

Existentialism is central to this process. Painting becomes a way of being present and of finding or constructing meaning through experience, uncertainty and action.

At a time when artificial intelligence can generate increasingly convincing images almost instantaneously, these ideas have taken on renewed significance. Rather than rejecting AI, Cumming is interested in what it reveals about human creativity and what remains distinctive about the physical act of making. His paintings deliberately retain evidence of that process — time, touch, uncertainty, revision and imperfection.

Cumming studied Fine Art Printmaking at Gray’s School of Art before completing an MA in Fine Art Printmaking at Edinburgh College of Art.