Hooded figures, belly dancers, animals, nudes and sunsets are some the striking images that populate Keith Cunningham’s anthology of drawings. Several hundreds of such images are part of his estate, ranging from portraits to abstract forms, including landscapes and still lifes. If Cunningham’s paintings arrest viewers for their large surfaces, dense with rough brushstrokes and dark colours, his drawings are remarkably small, made on loose sheets of paper. Forms come to life through thin, nervous lines that possess a kinetic, almost cinematic quality. Made with quick pencil, pen or charcoal markings, these chaotic shapes express a continuous sense of motion.

In one of these drawings, for instance, a female body is depicted in a moment of extreme dynamism. Her motion is so intense that her anatomical integrity is undone. The ink lines that constitute her body become porous, transforming limbs into graphic signs that seem to merge into each other. Her legs, revolving furiously on the page, disappear completely, coalescing into a thin black line encapsulating the very idea of motion. The impressive sense of rapidity and animation of this drawing reflects the outstanding skills of its author.

Over the five decades of his career, Cunningham produced thousands of drawings. Some, like those depicting dogs or human figures, appear to be inspired by the same subjects that populate his paintings. Others, like his restrained still lifes and sunny countryside landscapes, find no counterpart in the rest of his production. His process, however, tended to be consistent: animated by an obsessive desire to create, Cunningham would sketch constantly, on any piece of paper he could get his hands on, at any time of the day. Many drawings, his widow Bobby Hillson recalls, were made while travelling on the bus or sitting on the balcony, in an attempt to quickly capture the pulsating life unravelling before his eyes.

Not all of Cunningham’s drawings, however, were made from life. Some are clearly imaginative reinventions of people he would see on the streets of London, reworked to include fantastical or exotic elements. Stunning, in this respect, is his series of ‘Odalisques’, a suggestive set of female nudes dancing with veils and, in some instances, snakes. Another outstanding series of drawings is that of the ‘Hooded Figures’, intangible bodies almost entirely covered in large cloaks. Floating in the wind or seemingly emerging from the blank paper surface itself, these figures appear to dissolve before the viewer’s eyes, alluding to ulterior meanings full of mystery and magic. Possibly, Cunningham was attempting to integrate what he saw in his daily life with exciting, distant elements from an imaginary realm of fiction.

Other drawings are dominated by winged, angel-like figures. Heavy, muscular bodies of Michelangelesque proportions, these characters are perhaps derived from the early modern paintings Cunningham studied during his travels across continental Europe. Despite Cunningham’s indifference towards religion, many of his drawings seem to replicate the intense bodily contortions of Renaissance masters such as Jusepe de Ribera and El Greco, who expressed their faith through corporeal and sensual imagery. In a similar vein, the small, semi-abstract drawings of the three crosses on the Golgotha Hill from the New Testament’s ‘Crucifixion of Christ’ reinterpret Christian narratives through a purely artistic viewpoint. More interested in the arrangement of figures and lines than in their moralising message, Cunningham himself consistently referred to these images as depicting the ‘Thieves on the Cross’ rather than the ‘Crucifixion of Christ’.

Cunningham’s drawings have virtually remained sealed off until now, yet their ethereal quality speaks to viewers with a continued sense of urgency. In his series, the familiar and the remote are conjoined in peculiar ways. Reality is registered, internalised and subsequently altered to capture elements of otherness, of transcendence, of mystery, of raw vitality. The delicate, kinetic appearance of these images contributes to this quality of transience, which stubbornly refuses to be pinned down. Such visual mobility seems to find no counterpart in Cunningham’s contemporary artistic environment. Cunningham’s colleague and friend Frank Auerbach, for instance, is known for his bold, heavily worked drawings, in which bodies seem carved onto paper yet emotionally distant. Cunningham’s, on the other hand, are light, animated and ethereal, precise yet always on the verge of disappearing into clouds of doodle-like signs. Viewers are barely able to trace the movements of the artist’s hand on the page, losing themselves in the intricacies of thin, nervous marks.

When confronted with Cunningham’s drawings, it is almost as if viewers are encouraged to stand still and keep looking, waiting to see if the multiplicity of lines and curves eventually solidifies and coalesces into a singular coherent image, or if it remains a moving chaos of dynamic vectors. When images do stand still and solidify, they appear like sudden revelations of an almost spiritual quality. They seem to remain still for a second, with their furtive intensity, only to disappear again.

The Powers of Drawing

The repetition of certain themes, figures and signs suggests that Cunningham developed, through this medium, a unique language engendered by expressive gestures. Before the major paradigm shift of 20th century avant-gardes, the practice of drawing had been conceptualised, in academic settings, as a subordinate medium, exclusively intended as a preparatory stage to produce ‘higher’ art forms such as paintings or sculptures. In the Renaissance period, when these practices were being developed as philosophical disciplines, drawing was seen as a means to ‘perfect’ forms, an analytical method through which it was possible to conceive and represent an idealised version of the world.

The possibility for drawing to convey more than hastily sketched forms became particularly relevant in the art world after the Expressionist experiments of the 1950s, which originated in the United States but soon came to influence European artists. Within these radical artistic discourses, drawing was recognised as synonymous with transition, openness, becoming. As a method, it liberated individual gestures and assigned them emotive meanings which would transcend conventional limitations of visual culture, traditionally restricted to linear relationships of sign, symbol and content. Drawing made it possible for the artist to channel emotional energy from his or her mind onto a physical surface. Judging from the vaporous, transformative figures of Cunningham’s works, seemingly emanating directly from his own mind, he was certainly aware of the enormous expressive potential of drawing.

The relationship between the artist’s mind, his hands and the surface on which he draws is particularly important in order to fully appreciate the generative potentials of this practice. Images materialise from the contact of body and paper, mediated through the mind and the eyes of the artist. This visual and tactile awareness, an immersive moment that exists between the individual and the world, encapsulates the very experience of drawing. This medium, intimately connected to the production of symbolic meanings, epitomises the infinite powers of the human intellect, through which it is possible to imagine and convey the pure forms which constitute the natural world. In this sense, Cunningham’s drawings carry an important implication: they have the power to embody imagination and abstraction as well as replicate reality. It is not only the material appearance of people, animals and things that is recorded in these drawings, but also the unique way they are seen through the artist’s eyes.

As art historian Ed Krčma has noted in his vast bibliography, drawing is a medium immediately connected to thinking, reflecting, pondering. It is the language of direct, spontaneous expression, entirely ingrained within the realm of non-verbal communication since the very beginnings of human history. Through drawing, germinal ideas and designs are fully developed. For this reason, it is also often conceptualised as an experimental process, connected to what is unfinished, open-ended and speculative. In addition, the fragility and relative simplicity of drawings defy the traditional identification of artworks as commodities. Compared to objects such as paintings or sculptures, they are less expensive and less physically strenuous to produce. They are also contingent because ink and graphite marks on paper tend to disappear over time. Obstinately rejecting heroic and triumphalist narratives, drawings exist in a more intimate dimension, as if they were a kind of background noise in the vast landscape of representational art.

All these elements are particularly relevant for the images in question. The straightforward immediacy of Cunningham’s drawings allows them to powerfully express animation through simple ink marks on paper. Unlike his sombre paintings, covered in impenetrable, rough brushstrokes, Cunningham’s drawings rely on tenuous, often chaotic linear signs to create images. The ink marks make visible not only objects, bodies and space, but also movements and emotive affects, mediated through Cunningham’s personality. His remarkable perceptivity emerges from the myriad of intricate figurations, whose astonishing amount of details becomes even more outstanding given the diminutive size of these works.

As spontaneous and direct as they appear, however, Cunningham’s drawings are also the result of a complex process of intellectual abstraction. Each drawn image constitutes a visual representation of internal, intangible thoughts, reified through human touch. Drawing was seen as the most intimate form of expression, originating directly from the artist’s brain, but also as a replica of the rational basis of human thought. The influential artistic concept of ‘inner drawing’ (‘disegno interno’), developed by Renaissance painters to differentiate mental images from drawn ones, survives today in the English language in the word ‘design’, in the sense of plan, intention, arrangement.

The manifold implications of drawings materialise out of the physical contact between the artist’s body and the material’s surface. From a psychoanalytic point of view, drawn images retain a transcendent, almost talismanic potential that derives from this touch. Such potential can assume multiple interpretative possibilities, transforming drawn images into indexes of human emotions. In Cunningham’s drawings, especially those that portray people and bodies, they emerge in their conspicuous attributes of melancholy, memory, nostalgia and loss. Through the power of drawing, such intimate moods are made universal.

Between Reality and Imagination

Even those readers who will casually engage with this catalogue by distractedly flipping its pages will notice how Cunningham’s drawings are innerved by a continuous, pulsating sense of formal animation. Seemingly static compositions, such as his still lifes and busts, are pervaded by an inner throbbing electric activity. The quick marks of ink on paper produce internal combustions that give life, dimension and power to the images, pervaded by an unseen sense of volumetric intensity. If Cunningham’s paintings, dense with layers of pigments and heavy brushstrokes, appear grim and almost violent, struggling to connect with viewers, to express his inner voice, these drawings suggest a reappropriation or reconstruction of life. They exist between the opposite states of light and darkness, of strict control and abandonment, of pulsating action and stillness.

It is not casual that Cunningham chose to focus primarily on the human body in his drawn production. Both a subject and instrument of knowledge, it is through the body that information about the world is registered and negotiated. The making and unmaking of human forms is conjoined in these drawings, whose focus on animated bodies and faces seems to constitute both cause and effect of their ambiguity. Representing movement implies the passage of time, the attempt to reproduce different states of motion two-dimensionally. In many of these drawings, the atmosphere is intimate and even ethereal, as if the natural world surrounding the human figures participates to a continuous movement of bodies and forms. Through a unique use of pen and pencil, he produced images that confound both their own medium and viewers’ perception, creating endless networks of isolated figures and recessive planes.

The outstanding quality of animation and vitality that sets Cunningham’s drawings apart also reflects the conditions of their production. Observing life from his balcony or sitting on the upper deck of a London bus, he quickly sketched on scrap paper the faces of people going about their business, who would later become the subjects of his impressive series of portraits.

Other drawings, on the other hand, appear inspired less by everyday life and more by intimate creative impulses. Cunningham’s fascination for transcendent themes, such as angels and crosses, did not stem from an inner religious sense, but rather from his academic interests. Just like the artists of the Renaissance he studied in his youth, he was compelled to experiment with different compositions of bodies, to explore the infinite differences of embodied tensions and release, the complex pushing and pulling of skin, muscles and bones.

A similar emotional drive emerges from Cunningham’s drawings of the sky, perhaps his most technically ambitious series. In these images his exquisite ability to simulate chromatic nuances through black ink reaches its peak. Through rapid yet secure marks, in these small sized composition Cunningham accomplished striking renditions of natural light, serene and airy yet dense with affective connotations.

Across such a diverse oeuvre, an overarching motif remains consistent: what appear at first to be commonplace subjects are transformed into sites of imagination and wonder. The faces of the commuters Cunningham saw on the bus, for instance, are displaced onto voluptuous bodies of dancers, snake tamers, winged figures. The banalities of everyday living are transfigured into magical events, made more momentous by the nervous ink line, quickly sketching figures and landscapes with short yet confident traits.

But Cunningham’s drawings possess a potency that goes ever further. They affect viewers with their unique animation and expressive modes, but they also receive and encapsulate the viewer’s affects, creating a dialogue of sorts, a conversation over the potentials of lines, space and blank surface. One could project onto Cunningham’s quickly sketched figures an infinite number of meanings and narratives, which would all resonate with equal force.

Cunningham’s drawings reveal how meticulous the process of drawing can be. Some of his figures, recurring over dozens of sketches, attempt infinite variations on the same theme, like a piece of classical music. In his ‘Dancers’ series, for instance, each body is repeated in endlessly changing positions, as if to try to catch the ultimate perfection of forms and motions. In this sense, Cunningham’s approach to drawing can be conceptualised as a net of expressive modes, rather than a set of definite processes. Rather than offering artistic renditions of people, landscapes or animals, these drawings seem to explore what drawing itself can do, how can the medium be pushed further, how can, in a sense, the static essence of ink and paper embody the fluctuating quality of life, breath, motion.