Candy Cummings - ARTIST -Loannae O'Neal Parker report on Cand Cummings

"Art is to these locals like the air they breathe — an irrepressible part of their lives" by Lonnae O'Neal Parker, Saturday, March 26, 9:44 AM (Washington Post)

Usually, the ones with the art in them feel it. Some dabble, daydream or hobby-out their passion. They sing in the shower, scribble verses on napkins or sell their drawings at craft shows a couple of times a year. But the irrepressible ones crave creative. They bend wires into sculpture for 12 hours at a time. They write rhymes before dawn to get ready for a poetry reading at 7:30 a.m. The arts call them, which doesn’t always mean it pays them,

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merely that it takes them to another world. Or grants them communion in this one. “We can either be artists with a capital A, or we can make art with our lives,” says Patti Digh, author of the book “Creative Is a Verb.” “It’s so beautiful when you’re in the presence of someone who is letting go of outcome and making a strong offer to the world.” Some would-be artists had inner critics, or third-grade teachers, or father figures who told them to settle down, so they put their creativity away. The irrepressible ones, who make art like they breathe, never really can.

1,000 works of art

Break the threshold of Candy Cummings’s Lexington Park home and the rooms start to speak. Circuit-board and heating-coil sculptures adorn the walls. There are torsos of naked mannequins covered in puzzle pieces, Barbie dolls waving out from sea motifs, beads hanging in doorways, paints layered so heavy they turn cloth cushions to leather.

More than 1,000 pieces of art grace her well-ordered, three-bedroom home, each with something to say and without enough white space in between so their voices flow one into the next. The effect is dizzying.

The art world has a term for it: “horror de vacui,” or fear of the void. Cummings, 60, a caterer for 20 years who was a painting major in art school, simply says: “This new art has been coming out of me for the last six years. I stopped drinking and everything changed.”

Her “Memory Bytes” features a Breathalyzer affixed with plastic bugs. Her creativity was “behind doors in my brain where it was kept safe. It came out once my sensibilities cleared and my spirituality cleared.”

Cummings gifts visitors with an old television vacuum tube tied with a satiny ribbon and a ring made from a hose clamp. They came from tons of parts given to her by her father, who owned an electronics business.

She sells her work — she had pieces at a Heron’s Way gallery in Leonardtown and at Lexington Park Library, where she convinced them to feature a gallery for local artists — but she also gives it away. “It’s karmic,” Cummings says. “Talent is a gift and you have to use it. If you have the gift and you don’t use it, you’re gonna pay, in one way or the other.”

Irrepressible art is a beautiful notion, says Rebecca Hoffberger, founder of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. “It’s not meant to match your couch or get into some good gallery. This is art that bubbles up from deep within and has the hot magma of your essence interwoven with it.”

Hoffberger picked up colored photocopies of Cummings’s work from a foot and a half of mail she gets daily from artists around the world. She called Cummings, who had just been through a tough round of chemotherapy for lung cancer, to tell her she was interested in including her work in the upcoming exhibit “All Things Round; Galaxies, Eyeballs and Karma,” opening this fall.

“There were these things that were kind of round globes with spiky protrusions made from all electronic gears she had inherited from her dad, and I could see where the spherical was a real and honest obsession with her,” Hoffberger says.

At the Lexington Park Library in late February, visitors pore over Cummings’s work at a reception in her honor. Cummings stops at an old table she painted in a casino motif, with playing cards and dominoes.

“I got it from a thrift shop,” she says. “I thought it was beautiful.”