Vonn Cummings Sumner 'Reliquary' Print Available

Artist: Vonn Cummings Sumner
Title: Reliquary
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 24 x 30 Inches
Edition: 25
Prices: $500

Vonn Cummings Sumner is a Los Angeles based painter and professor who transforms existential unease into luminous, gently humorous tableaux. Born in 1973, he earned a BFA at UC Davis, where Wayne Thiebaud first showed the class a Krazy Kat strip and declared George Herriman the equal of Goya; that moment sparked a lifelong obsession with the gender-fluid, brick-loving cat who now populates Sumner’s canvases.

Working in oil on panel, he layers translucent glazes over soft monochrome grounds, creating depth that feels both old master solemn and Sunday paper light. His palette shifts from desert ochres to pool water cyans, echoing the sudden time of day changes that define Herriman’s original strips. Figures are rendered with delicate modeling yet placed in absurd scenarios: Krazy wanders a forest at dusk, dons a haz-mat suit to queue outside a supermarket, or stares at a dumpster fire while clutching a single red brick. These vignettes serve as stand ins for contemporary anxieties pandemic protocols, consumer absurdity, ecological dread yet they maintain the strip’s tender optimism.

Sumner insists the paintings are not nostalgia but sideways self-portraiture; by approaching issues obliquely through an “empathetic effigy,” he avoids didactic cliché and invites viewers to laugh, wince and recognise their own bewilderment. Recent exhibitions such as Second Nature at Morton Fine Art pair Krazy with floating dollar bills, toilet-paper still lifes and protective-tape barriers, turning gallery walls into a gently surreal mirror of our collective moment. Whether teaching at Fullerton College or painting into the night, Sumner keeps the anarchic spirit of Krazy alive, proving that a century old sprite can still help us process the ever shifting world outside the window.