Seattle painter Bill Cumming was 93 years old when he died this morning of congestive heart failure. As an artist and a person, he was a treasure. I got to interview him in person once, probably five years ago now, at Tacoma Art Museum, in a group conversation about the so-called Northwest Mystics. He was one of the last remaining links to artists like Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, and Mark Tobey.

I think it's safe to say that Cumming had more personality than all those guys put together. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

The story of his amazing life, from being blacklisted as a communist to marrying seven women, is on Historylink here. I like this moment:

When Bill was still a toddler, the family moved to Portland, Oregon. ... An unknown woman receding down the sidewalk a block away appeared to him to be his mother, leaving him. The tear-clouded vision that burned itself into his memory was transformed in later life into a prominent motif in his paintings: shadow-clad, light-spangled backs forever leaving the observer.