Fred Cuming is a distinguished, senior member of the Royal Academy, whose work has long enjoyed success and critical acclaim.
Fred attended Sidcup School of Art in the 1940s and after National Service he attended the Royal Academy Schools.
He was elected ARA in 1969 and Royal Academician in 1974.
He is also a Member of the New English Art Club and an Associate of the Royal College of Art.
His painterly landscapes evoke shifting effects of light over surfaces, in particular sand and sea.
The paint is applied in an assured and confident manner with great subtlety and skill. Although his work depicts a traditionally figurative subject, his approach is very much imbued with a modernist attitude: abstraction is the absolute essence of all painting. His unique painting style beautifully captures the uncertainty and transience of our lives and the natural world around us.
“I am not interested in pure representation. My work is about responses to the moods and atmospheres generated by landscape, still life or interior. I am interested in the developments of 20th-century painting in abstraction...and in new ideas and art forms. My philosophy is that the more I work the more I discover. Drawing is essential as a tool of discovery; skill and mastery of technique are also essential, but only as a vocabulary and a means towards an idea. I struggle to keep an open mind.”
He has had many solo exhibitions in London and New York and was awarded the Grand Prix Contemporary Art Award at Monte Carlo in 1977, the Royal Academy’s House & Garden Award and the Sir Brinsley Ford Prize (New English Art Club, 1986).
His work is represented at the National Museum of Wales and the Monte Carlo Museum.
In 2001 he was given the honour of being the featured artist in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, with an entire gallery within the show dedicated to his work.
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Landscape Near Ryeoil on board 10" x 12" £2800 |