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James Cumming created highly individual work that was beautiful and expertly imagined. As a young artist he developed trademark figures, far away from civilisation on the Isle of Lewis, before turning his mind to a personal abstraction that grew from the origins of life, symbols and microbiology. The meeting of colour and line, of geometry, structure and mutation were all deep concerns that flowed through his work, while within his still lifes he developed his own Post-Cubist style that created fascinating distillations of objects in pictorial space. He said 'I‘m only interested in the truth of reality, and I must employ amnesia in order to discover it. If I don‘t forget all that I‘ve done then everything I do hence-forth will be based on one matrix of thought.