[Norman relates Cummings’ "individuality of style" in his line drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings.]

...His line drawings are different from Picasso’s or Cocteau’s...in that they stop abruptly at the point where movement has been caught....

...In watercolor...he achieves--again with a minimum of strokes--an Oriental simplicity. His watercolors are deceptive, because Cummings is after an impression, sometimes so fleeting as to be gone with a change of light; but having caught what he wished, the picture remains without embellishment....

In his watercolors Cummings is not so much painting a picture as capturing a poetic metaphor in paint; that is to say, he is celebrating Nature, as he does so often in his poetry....[His] watercolors...fail to satisfy Western eyes used to projections of mass instead of space. In this...he is more Oriental than occidental, as though he really were an inhabitant of China "where a painter is a poet."

It is with his oils that Cummings calls for consideration as a painter wholly apart from his other, writing self. His oils reveal a mastery of his medium in which the tactile and the sensory combine, and in this combination faces, landscapes and flowers no longer celebrate life, but are a part of it....