I_ArtMan

About me

Scott Cumming: Born in Chicago, September 2, 1943

My father, Robert Bailey Cumming, was a successful corporate attorney. My mother, Vivien Ruth Larsen, was a photographer's model and an artist. She attended the
Art Institute of Chicago for four years.

I grew up with my older brother, Robert Cumming, in Jamaica, in the West Indies where my father was President of Kingswood Films Ltd.

I have been drawing and painting all my life. When I was 13, I left home and school to hitchhike around the country with a change of clothes and a box of oil paints.

At 15, I painted steadily in Winter Park, Florida, where I enjoyed 'fame' for a short time. After a one man show in Palm Beach, on Worth Ave., I went to Greenwich Village in New York and attended the Art Students League on 57th St. .

From 16 to 19 I was apprenticed to Robert L. Anderson, a graduate of the Ringling School of Fine Arts in Sarasota. In return for helping with his seven children, I was schooled in Renaissance techniques of oil painting. I followed him to Woodstock, Vermont where I had my own studio above the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. When I was 21 I moved with my wife and two baby boys, Demian and Jonathan to Prince Street where I had a loft on the top floor of the Soho Post Office.

I got a job in the Systems dept at Continental Can Co. and attended Washington Irving High School at night for three years. I received a scholarship and some grants to go to Columbia University as a day student. I stayed for three years in 'academia' concentrating on studio courses, graduate writing and philosophy.

I also attended Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts and the New School of Social Research in Manhattan. Except for illustrating four books for Doubleday & Co. and some advertising with Prentice Hall and Artley Advertising on Madison Ave., I have concentrated on fine Art, both oil painting and watercolors. Also, some sculpture, etching, pottery and photography.

I am currently working on 20 egg tempera illustrations for a collection of s

tories retold by me from the Jataka Tales, or Garland of Birth stories of the Buddha. Six of the illustrations are finished. I am looking for a publisher for this project.

At this moment I am living at Venice beach in Los Angeles Ca.