The Totem Pole Painting

Born 1983 in Reading Gemma Cumming has been an amateur artist since she first picked up a crayon and a Professional since 2006.

Inspired by postcards, travel posters and all imagery related to tourism and the sale of a place, Gemma has created since 2005 giant painted postcards, taking beautiful sunny images of places around the globe and exchanging the blue skies with ominous, stormy or unusual skies. She also adds other objects into the works that do not belong contradicting that streotypical message created by postcards. Recently she has also started a series of ink drawings and digital prints on the same theme.

Artists Statement

My work centres around notions of failed perfection, utilising postcards to explore primarily imagery that sells places; which in reality dont fulfil our expectations. It is this idea of the perfect holiday that Im interested in, both from advertising and the way people are persuaded to visit places and through my own personal memories of childhood holidays in Britain. I looked at the Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (2002) and was very interested by his notions of anticipation. He believes that the images that we are presented with persuade us to go on holiday, but that no place can live up to the image we create of it. The anticipation of a holiday is the best bit because we can only ever be disappointed by the real thing.
I use postcards because they are tourist images that have ideas ingrained into them because of the things people write. Notable influences are John Constable and the Romantics, their work making places seem nicer than they are. It reminds me of other English tourist memorabilia like chocolate and fudge boxes. More recently Malcolm Morleys expressionistic paintings from tourist imagery also link by making a beautiful image look hazy and unreal.
The postcards I paint have to include certain elements, including sky that I then replace with imagery of more apocalyptic and threatening skies to subvert the idea of beautiful places. These skies must work with the rest of the image and have most impact when their hue and tone contrast with the originals most prominent colour. I also change other elements in the postcard which are often more subtle than the sky.