The Four Seasons

For nearly two decades Paul Cummins MBE has worked with clay, wire and ceramic glazes. In a recent body of work titled The Four Seasons, Cummins turns his hand to painting, with a series comprised of four large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas. The Four Seasons traces the journey of the seasons and the cycle of life and colour, from the first delicate buds of spring, through to full and abundant blooms, and finally, to natural decay. Within this seasonal narrative, sunflowers, daffodils and lilies are rendered as contemporary painted tapestries, drawing on the visual language of the decorative arts and, in particular, the organic, flattened and flowing botanicals of Art Nouveau.

Each of Cummins’ canvases is built around the sunflower, the one constant presence that changes shape, colour and posture as it responds to the seasons of the year. In Spring, it opens amid red irises and daffodils against a deep blue ground, which Cummins describes as ‘an explosion – a real big hurry to get out into life.’ By Summer, four sunflowers are seen standing in full bloom beside rich pink hibiscus flowers. The sunflowers’ petals have wilted ever so slightly, and have been bleached by the hot sun. Autumn brings a single sunflower, dried and turned to seed, its head darkened, hanging above a group of pale pink calla lilies and papery orange physalis lanterns. This season is significant for Cummins, who views these flowers as embodying ‘life and passing’. In the final work, Autumn gives way to Winter, with a display of the harmonious coexistence of natural dormancy and new winter flowering. The sunflower is spent, dry and shrivelled, shown alongside fresh red amaryllis flowers and a group of whitish-pink winter shrubs, perhaps cotton bolls. The mood of Winter is altogether more sombre, with the ‘lightest and last speck of colour within the paintings’. While Cummins describes this work in elegiac terms, he also calls it ‘the crescendo of the piece’, drawing a natural comparison with ‘The Four Seasons’, Antonio Vivaldi’s eminent violin concerto of 1725.

The sunflower carries particular importance for Cummins, who lives and works in Chesterfield where they are grown in abundance. For him, sunflowers ‘radiate the sun itself’, and have ‘a particular magic in the way they move throughout the day and follow the sun on its journey across the sky.’ Its continued presence across all four canvases provides a single thread through the series, a subject observed closely enough that even the most subtle seasonal changes in its form are perceptible.

The four seasons have long offered artists a framework through which to explore themes of colour, mood and even mortality. In ancient mythology, the Horae – goddesses of the seasons and the natural order – were depicted on Roman sarcophagi and in mosaics, as the seasons became a powerful allegory for the cycle of birth, life and death. Between 1563 and 1573, Giuseppe Arcimboldo created a highly distinctive series titled The Four Seasons, a series of portraits featuring heads in profile, constructed entirely from seasonal foliage, flowers, fruits and vegetables. A century later, towards the end of his life, Nicolas Poussin painted his own series The Four Seasons (1660-1664), a set of landscapes that meditate on the inevitable passage of time, the stages of human life, and cyclical order of the natural and divine world.

In 1896, Alphonse Mucha, a key proponent of the Art Nouveau movement, began making a number of lithographic series titled The Seasons, which perhaps bear the most striking resemblance to Cummins’ paintings. While Mucha’s works depict women as botanical forms, they are each used as allegories for nature and the cycle of life. Aesthetically, they share with Cummins a decorative, pattern-based foundation of flora, harking also back to the late-19^th century cultural interest in the use of negative space and perspective Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts, which were imported heavily into European markets from the 1850s onwards.

The seasons have also inspired painters through sustained serial observation rather than direct allegory. Perhaps the best-known example of this is Claude Monet’s Haystacks (1890-1891), which saw the artist return repeatedly to this single subject near his home in Giverny, tracking it through various times of day and different seasons, using the shifts in light and colour to represent the passage of time. These much-admired paintings and their depictions of atmospheric effects would again find resonance a century later in the works of Cy Twombly, who between 1993 and 1995 created his own Four Seasons series of canvases. Twombly’s paintings translated the same cyclical structure into gesture and colour, with each panel becoming an expressive meditation on a season’s particular mood rather than a depiction of any specific flora. Where Twombly abstracted the seasons almost entirely, and Monet observed them through repetition and shifting light, Cummins’s The Four Seasons occupy a middle ground, remaining highly legible and specific in their arrangement, while also containing a humanised and emotional register for each season in turn.

In recent decades, David Hockney brought this subject to the fore of his practice. Having begun his use of the iPad in 2010, a year later Hockney embarked upon his monumental series The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, a sequence of iPad drawings made following his return to his native Yorkshire, having spent decades in California, where, as he noted, the changing of the seasons was almost imperceptible. Beginning on 1^st January 2011, the series charts the landscape in growth, from bare trees and sparse white snowdrops, to blossoming branches and the emergence of new life. ‘My subject is the living world, which is always changing and never twice the same’, Hockney said, a sentiment that echoes Cummins’ own attentiveness to the sunflower’s seasonal transformations.

Cummins continues this long tradition of art that places growth, transformation and renewal at its centre, examining the eternal cycle of life that comes with the four seasons. His sunflowers and more transient flora are not purely allegorical figures, nor are they intended solely as abstract representations of mood. For Cummins they are rather part of his personal fascination with growing, sketching and photographing flowers in his own garden at home, observing the ever-changing states of the natural world. The resulting series sits within a long lineage stretching back to antiquity and beyond. As Cummins puts it, ‘a flower has a memory, each one is slightly different.’ In The Four Seasons we witness the comings and goings of the seasons as the sunflower’s memories unfurl.