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In St. Mary's, an artist and gallery grow up together
Friday, Jan. 8, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Candy Cummings frames herself at the December opening reception for her exhibition at Lexington Park Library. Cummings founded the gallery, and her show celebrates the space's fifth anniversary. Behind her is a puzzle-covered mannequin and pieces from her "P.C. Guardians" series, which involves scrapped computer parts provided by SMARTCO, a nonprofit group which accepts donated computers.
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Years ago, though, when a family friend was about to throw away a puzzle collection, Cummings willfully accepted several hundred objects she more or less despises simply because she loathed even more the thought that something could go to waste.
Cummings figured she could distribute them to senior centers. Instead, for some time, the puzzles just took up space in her house.
That was before Cummings went for a dumpster dive. It was before the St. Mary's County found object artist discovered two female, waist-to-feet mannequins and thus realized the puzzles' true purpose: to be sealed with Mod Podge to the mannequins.
The resulting series, "Conundrum," went on to include 15 sculptures in a similar vein, which then led Cummings to check out board games and card games; which then led her to another series of as many pieces called "Child's Play." For that, she often painted in black around the images on cards then arranged the decks, in her own sense of order, on a canvas.
Basically, this is how Cummings operates. (She doesn't find objects so much as the objects find her.)
Or, this is how Cummings — finally in a place that feels like home; finally free of addiction which for years stunted her artistic growth — has operated for the past five years, and mostly the last two years, during which she has produced more work than some artists will in a lifetime.
After leaving her native county for three decades, Cummings, whose e-mail handle is prodigaldaughter, returned for good in the early aughts. Not only that, she bought the house she grew up in from her parents and thus returned to her native home.
Two years after her return, Cummings broke "free" of alcoholism, and remains free of it to this day. In the meantime, "new portals," as she calls them, have unfurled through her mind.
She found she could support herself with art alone.
She found herself working the way she did at Temple University's Tyler School of Arts in the late 1960s: around the clock.
Back then, Cummings' major was painting. After a professor suggested she eliminate black from her palette, she took the advice and ran wild with it, creating big, bright, expressionist paintings reminiscent of the 1960s-esque dresses she occasionally wears.
"It was something that was inside my head and it came out without a hitch," she says. "I wasn't even thinking it. The color calculation took place, and it was freedom … because I had tried so hard to be a realistic painter."
In her home in Great Mills, looking at two such paintings which remain from this phase of her life, Cummings admits she would love to reclaim that style — if only it were possible. (How exactly does one recreate a particular dream-state?)
Ironically, it was her struggles in sculpture classes that held her back from officially graduating from Tyler. But the style of sculpture Cummings has carved a niche in falls within another realm altogether, and creating, for instance, otherworldly pieces out of vacuum tubes, circuit boards, heating coils, fans and transistors — parts which powered appliances from another time — required more than just serendipity.
Cummings' father owned Electronic Service Company in Lexington Park from 1950 to 1995. When he retired, he walked out — left everything — and the property was later purchased by the county. In the time before it was bulldozed, in the time Cummings was moving into her childhood home, her father hauled over contractor's bags stuffed with parts from old televisions and household appliances.
He would stop by once or twice a day, and Cummings tried to sort it all out, cleaning off each piece, drying them in the front yard and beginning the futuristic yet vintage collection of small sculptures which became "Retrotech."
"It was fascinating to him to see that what he was using all his life was being transformed into art," she says, recalling her father's reaction. "He was gleeful. He was laughing at how cool it was. He was looking at this one in particular one day and he said, ‘Do you realize this has thousands of dollars worth of retail parts?'" (She sells much of her work for less than $100.)
The sculptures of "Retrotech" were handmade by an artist who came of age during the 1960s, who let those times go but also did not let them go. Cummings lived for the better part of 30 years in Washington, D.C., where she worked for big catering companies. But most of her life stays off the record, and Cummings, a loner, retains what she calls her "inner child," as in a part of her which refused to become an adult.
Even still, it is the adult Candy who makes the art. Her work is not rebellious. It is not intentionally different. It is not a statement. Cummings likes an abstract painting about as much as she likes a messy room, which is to say she doesn't much like either.
Whether it's "Retrotech" or "P.C. Guardians," a newer collection of scrap computer parts from SMARTCO (a nonprofit group that accepts used computers) which are neatly arranged on canvases, the omnipresent theme is uniformity.
"I don't like asymmetry," she says. "I'm a Libra. Actually, I'm like a double Libra, so that would astrologically explain it. But the main thumbprint that runs through all of the art is balance. ... You see balance in everything I do. And everything is overworked."
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Cummings refers to the gallery she started at the Lexington Park Library as her "first sober act."
As her art of assemblage has matured, and as her house has begun to swell with newer illustrative paintings and sculpture than a regular sort of house would be able to hold, Cummings' library gallery, her five-year-old "baby," continually matures.
Library director Kathleen Reif admits she was skeptical of Cummings' initial proposal. Following in the footsteps of other initially energetic volunteers, Reif assumed Cummings would "drop the ball." On the other hand, "It is really exciting to see that it has worked," she said, at an early December opening reception for Cummings' exhibition, which was intended to celebrate the gallery's fifth birthday. (More than 20,000 people visit the library each month, and Reif believes the gallery adds another dimension.)
After passing through the front door and hallway, visitors should see the gallery space immediately upon passing the check-out desk. The space is nicely lit, and cordoned off from rows of books by a short shelf which allows artists a space to display sculpture. Shows by local artists are rotated every few months, and though the gallery is considered an altruistic rather than a sales venue, artists do not have to pay a commission if something sells.
Cummings' exhibition, which is on display for another week, amounts to a retrospective of her recent work. She has produced enough of it, as it happens, to fill several exhibition spaces, and Cummings also has an ongoing show at Café des Artistes, an upscale French restaurant in Leonardtown.
At the opening, Bob Hoffman of Washington, D.C., unveiled a series of harmonica cases Cummings has designed for him. He says he has amassed the worlds' largest collection by finding artists he likes and asking them to design cases with the materials he supplies.
Thus far, Cummings' has designed about 30, and willfully agreed to what Hoffman offered to pay — provided he lower it a bit.
"These things just fall from the sky," she says. "It's coming to me for living a decent life. I'm sort of blessed is what I am trying to say."
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Cummings' home has become a virtual museum of her art, and even the stuff she can't claim as her own — like the macramé on a particularly crazy lamp shade — attracts a closer look.
Her house even resembles her art. It might be the only house on the block with hanging beads in entranceways, and in which the kitchen wallpaper is faintly visible beneath her own red paint; at the same, it probably also ranks among the most meticulously ordered.
The focal point of her studio (her living room) is a display of mermaids which were formerly Barbie Dolls, until Cummings cut the legs off and added tails. ("Neptune's Kingdom" included 125 "vignette sculptures.")
Across from the mermaids, one finds her workspace: a low, rectangular table pushed up to an equally low couch.
The first time we met, before our first interview, Cummings shook my hand then told me her art was weird.
We were in Leonardtown at North End Gallery, a cooperative space operated by local artists. From there, I walked to Heron's Way Gallery, where I saw one of her puzzle piece-covered mannequins and a frame that held a children's board game, not a landscape.
Weird?
For the time, no. For the area, yes.
Heron's Way is no more and North End has twice rejected Cummings' membership application (though North End members have exhibited work at the library).
Surely she knows her art does not fit North End's aesthetic. Why did she try?
She says it would be nice to have a permanent venue to display work. She says it was an "impulse" — her "inner child" acting out.
A couple doors down from North End, at Café des Artistes, Cumming's work has managed to draw eyes away from plates. Some works have sold, and owner Karleen Jaffres recently asked Cummings if she wouldn't mind extending the show, as none before it had garnered such a response.
If you go An exhibition of work by Candy Cummings will continue in Lexington Park Library's art gallery though Jan. 15. The library is at 21677 FDR Blvd., Lexington Park. Call 301-863-8188.
