graceann  cummings

I tell people that I paint God’s mistake which I know is controversial whether you are deeply religious or the opposite such as atheist. Yet my work is not about God, religion, or atheism. 
My art evolved from a paranormal moment I had in 1995 when I was told: "God is Forgiven" I did not immediately understand that phrase and I spent several decades discerning its meaning which is about the trauma associated with the inescapable relationship that mortality has with innocence. Our birth is not the intent of death, but it necessarily creates our personal annihilation. This personal destiny leaves each of us vulnerable to condemning our connection with innocent others who “created us to die” without our permission. In the darkest depths of awareness this personal destiny gives us the autonomy to recognize that we are entitled to not want to live because we did not ask for nor create our existence. Thus, our “error” is our ownership of blame for mortality which is not the power over death; it is our power over cruelty. This inescapable destiny is where my art begins its expression(s).

MY ART

I use the ancient form of 2-D art to represent TIME as broken yet unfinished and continuing. Like the backside of a hung painting, we are absent before our birth and brought into reality through “others” who have marked our canvas of life already. Once born we see ourselves reflected on the "front side" of life yet witness our previous absence. My art examines this division as the relationship between hope and trust relevant to innocence. The birth of each of us is a natural hope for existence that we can trust is fragile because we know the destiny of individuals. My art contemplates this existential paradox of hope & trust with my rotation of mediums, vivid colors, energetic brush strokes, narratives of time-conflict, emotional dichotomies, vortex compositions showing our inescapable connection to a fractured reality, rhetorical wordplay, and weapons symbolizing our relationship with mortal vulnerability. My “signature” is broken mirrors that capture the WITNESS as part of my art reminding us of our entitlement to mortal existence, innocence and choice.