Jug with Old Lamps

	Artist: James Cumming
	Title: Jug with Old Lamps
	Year: c. 1967
	Medium: oil on canvas
	Dimensions:
	Suggested topic: still life
	Source: RSA
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© the Cumming Family
Description: James Cumming produced a range of works in his career, including immaculately worked landscapes, figure studies and still life paintings.Jugs and Old Lamps belongs to a series of still life paintings carried out over many years where homely objects are clustered together on a table-top. This painting, although it seems quite abstract, draws attention to specific details, such as the shoulder of a kitchen jug, the profile of a lantern, and so on. The shapes and the general rusty colours help to create a sense of a found assortment of objects in a garage or a shed. This painting was executed in a very painstaking fashion. Although the shapes and textures look quite haphazard, if you look at the brush strokes and the edges where shapes meet, you will see that they have been painted with great dexterity and precision. The palette is dominated by deep reds, oranges and a great deal of white. Cumming has effectively used dashes of white to add glittering highlights to the metallic objects in the arrangement.This is a complex composition. Traditional still life paintings often attempt to render the objects in an arrangement with great realism. Picasso and the Cubists began to subvert this notion and created very fractured images in which objects merged together and were seen from different angles simultaneously. Cumming has employed a method where we can see through some objects. The shapes need to be well defined, as the overlapping forms need to stand out on their own as well as fit harmoniously into the painting as a whole.