Paul graduated from Cheltenham University in 1999 with a BA Honors under the tutelage of Anita Taylor, Bob Davison and Paul Rosenbloom.He has been working for the last decade within the creative industries as a digital art director within marketing and advertising for some of the largest global agencies producing work for international brand names. His current location is London and particularly the East End where lives and has a studio. Paul has been painting and producing print work that have been gaining popularity from the outset. His professional knowledge of the digital environment progressively impacts on his traditional fine art practice that he is currently engaged in.
Some of his latter work has dealt with the cruxes of manifesting the digital and virtual concepts into paintings, and attempts to solve the conundrums of translating space and dimensionality onto two dimensional surfaces i.e. painting. This also puts into question its intervention to the spectator. This work has been expressed pictorially and abstractly but nether the less in a similar oeuvre that is distinctly his style. However his work over time has departed from this theme to a more critical and analytical intensity investigating the zeitgeist of societal values and contemporary culture but never quite letting go of the virtual origins that is the starting point of all his work.
Using particular sources such as photography and images scoured from the internet including 3d objects has allowed Paul Cummings to construct a fallacious realism by using advanced digital processes. The final images are then translated as a perfect facsimile into paintings. His work vacillates between reality and its virtual origins undecidedly never settling for one or the other. This fetishistic flattening of surface suppresses a neurotic anthropological undercurrent that is present within his works. His observations make a subtle pun on societal values but he also sublimates the banal in a precise rarified manner. His work and influences are a derivative of photo-realism and its concurrent movement hyper-realism.
