Over many decades, Cunningham created thousands of small images on paper depicting dreamlike, emotive representations of the sky. In some cases, the surface is covered by dark clouds of blue and purple, suffusing the image with cold, watery suggestions. In others, the sky is captured in the dramatic moments of sunrise or sunset, with striking brushstrokes of yellow and red. Most of these works were painted in watercolours, but Cunningham sometimes experimented with coloured pencils and wax pastels. The reduced size of these paintings and the repetitive nature of the series materialise the idiosyncratic obsessiveness that characterised Cunningham’s artistic practice.

After abandoning oil painting in the late 1960s, he focused on his career in design, at the same time creating thousands of small-sized pen and pencil drawings. No one knows what inspired Cunningham to produce the ‘Skies’, nor what his painterly process was. Like much of his oeuvre, these small works have been kept hidden for many years, eluding art critics as well as gallerists and collectors. All that is known about them is the date, often (but not always) written in pencil on the verso of each painting.