Expression from chaos

An elephant emerged at last.

After a couple of years of working on a series of abstract pieces framed on a grid, one canvas had remained chaos to Cumbee Tyndal. As she prepared to place her artwork alongside her sons’ in an upcoming family show, she took a look at a pencil drawing her son Charles had created after a family trip to the Serengeti in Africa three years ago.

When she glanced back at her own canvas, she started to see an elephant in it, too. As she continued to work, an elephant’s eye emerged in its center. As a widow, she said she can identify with the matrilineal elephants they had seen at the Ngorangora Crater.

“It represents the fragility of life, and the state of elephants in this region is fragile,” Cumbee said.

The end result, “Tembo,” the Swahili word for elephant, hung next to Charles’ drawing in The Joy Gallery at Homewood Cumberland Presbyterian Church last month as part of an exhibit of the Tyndals’ work. 

Alongside their work are photographs by Charles’ older brother, Wilson.   

“Once we started to get the work together, we could see the repetition of shapes and lots of destructive images from the fire and chaos of our family situation,” Cumbee said.

Some of Wilson’s framed images are of a fire he captured on a trip to Brevard, North Carolina, using a camera his mom gave him on his 16th birthday. Two other photographs are of fire hydrants at his aunt’s house in Birmingham that he edited to stand out in blue from a black background. Not represented in the show is Wilson’s new favorite artistic medium, a guitar, also a gift from his mom.

Charles has taken art lessons from Cumbee’s longtime friend Maud Coirier-Belser, who has a studio on Church Street in Crestline, for three years and enjoys drawing with pencils. Many of his pieces in the show were of animals he saw on their safari, but lately his work is becoming more conceptual and illustrative of his dreams of being an architect, Coirier-Belser said. His most recent work, “Somewhere Only We Know-Winter,” depicts an abstract barn and tree; he plans to create a different variation on the same setting for each season. 

Cumbee’s work stems out of what she teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts — that concepts should be more complex than representations of the physical world.

For the series displayed in the show, she started by embedding a grid with masking tape on a large canvas, just like a Hindu temple begins its process, as she teaches in her art history class.

From there, she spilled paint on the canvas in colors used in the temple. A yellow landscape becomes a green field of grass, so she began with yellows and then greens.

Once the paint was there, she sanded off parts of it or splashed mineral paint to take some of the paint away. For Cumbee, sanding was another way to deal with sorrow both physically and as a metaphor.

One of the end products of this process is a painting she named “The Destroyer.”

“In my recovery from the death of my husband, I saw God as a creator and a destroyer,” Cumbee said. “It makes more sense for me.”

Charles and Wilson grew up crawling in the gallery Cumbee runs at ASFA, and the family would create together when the boys were little. 

Both Charles and Wilson won arts awards at Crestline Elementary and have taken art classes at Mountain Brook Junior High from a former student of Cumbee’s at ASFA.

Today her studio is next door to Wilson’s room, and the boys often complain when she is using a sander at 10 p.m. But they understand her work, too.

 “I always encourage my kids to use art as a means to get things out that you need to get out,” Cumbee said. “There’s a therapeutic element to it.”