Collections

Symbols

[creator]: Cumming, James William Hunter, RSA · 1922-1991

Firth (op cit., p25), writing of the Late 1960’s states; “He [ie Cumming] became interested in Wittgenstein’s works on the philosophy and logic of language, particularly the Tractacus, and was thereby motivated to seek out the most primitive written word symbols: the Sumerian cuneiform alphabet. In those still undeciphered marks, he discovered once again the spectral echoes of chromosome shape-symbols. Many more paintings followed.” Indeed Cumming was still producing works based on alphabets into the mid 1980s. The present study has a sense of depicting alphabet characters rather than simply random symbols but no direct link has been established with recorded early alphabets. Though undated the appearance of the paper suggests this is probably an earlier work in this field dating to the 1960’s.

Vide RSA 2014.731 and 2014.740 for other sketches tackling alphabets