Enter a sombre world, populated by dead birds and austere skulls, by fighting dogs and enigmatic portraits. It is an emotionally charged world, tinted with furiously layered browns, blacks and reds, unfolding in coarse, tactile strokes. This is the painterly world of Keith Cunningham.

Admired by art critics and colleagues alike and animated by a rare passion for painting, Cunningham chose to leave everything behind while on the brink of international fame. His strong creative impulse was overcome only by his desire for privacy, which bordered on secrecy. Cunningham tirelessly produced paintings and drawings for decades until his death in 2014, showing them only to a few carefully selected individuals. His works, like most of his personal life, remained undisclosed until 2016 when his widow, Bobby Hillson, organised an exhibition of his paintings at Hoxton Gallery in London, in collaboration with curator Stephen Rothholz and graphic designer Mike Dempsey.

Born in Sydney in 1929, Cunningham travelled to London in 1949, where he first enrolled in the Central School of Art and Design and subsequently secured a place at the Royal College of Art (RCA). Described by the renowned painter and tutor John Minton as ‘one of the most gifted painters to have worked at the Royal College’, he worked alongside artists such as Leon Kossoff, Joe Tilson, Frank Auerbach and David Methuen Campbell, and studied under the likes of Roger de Grey, Carel Weight, Colin Hayes and Robert Buhler, who profoundly admired his talent and inventiveness.

While in Australia and at the Central, he worked and trained as a graphic designer. However, Cunningham always had a passion for painting, which he practiced in between projects as often as he could. Rothholz said:

The paintings he produced at the RCA are extraordinarily forceful yet intimately personal, conveying the quality of an artist who combined technical mastery with a powerful subject matter. Covered with several layers of granular paint, Cunningham’s early canvases reveal a laboured process that possibly emerged from both artistic experimentation and more prosaic financial needs. As Rothholz explained:

This rough, almost raw presence is an integral part of Cunningham’s aesthetic. ‘He had worked extremely hard and long on them’, said Rothholz. ‘It wasn’t something that he just dashed off by the thousands. And they still do have that quality to them.’ Indeed, his paintings arrest viewers with their large surfaces, dense with sculptural brushwork and coats of murky colours. Distorted faces appear out of dark backgrounds, while human skulls seem to dissolve into nothingness and shapeless dead animals lie on bloody tables. Their grim appearance barely conceals a sense of forceful inner violence. Yet, they are intriguing and compelling, pervaded by a subtle energetic force. Some paintings depict studies of bulls: black forms materialising over luminous red backgrounds. Others, simple still lifes with fish and squid, are surprisingly open and even contemplative. Such contrasting emotive states are perhaps explicative of Cunningham’s complex personal voice, as well as of his overwhelming need to create art.

What is certain is that Cunningham’s canvases responded to his own energetic, fermenting personality, and their magnetic compositions soon attracted the praise of his teachers and peers. In 1955 Cunningham graduated with a first-class diploma in painting and was awarded both a travelling and a continuation scholarship – a particularly rare occurrence at the RCA. Thanks to this funding he was able to arrange a trip to Spain, where he became acquainted with the paintings of masters such as Goya, Velázquez, Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán. Such encounters with early modern Spanish works resurface in Cunningham’s paintings, which echo their laboured forms, intense colours and intangible yet haunting spirituality.

Like the painters he admired, he was also fascinated by conspicuously philosophical themes, such as mortality and the passage of time. These figurations, however, were reinterpreted through his own modern eyes, allowing his temperament and talent to shine through each canvas. Cunningham was certainly aware of his own abilities: in a letter composed in 2016, the distinguished painter Frank Auerbach, who befriended him during the RCA years, captured Cunningham’s bold, confident attitude:

Yet, painting was a serious business for Cunningham. He worked daily in his Chelsea studio, painting the same few subjects over and over: human skulls, hanging birds, flayed sheep’s heads, and the occasional portrait. His studio was, possibly, the only space in which his emotions were allowed to surface. He would strike, stab and scrape his canvases into life, infusing his work with a physicality made of paint and texture, which vibrate with visceral, brooding intensity. These remarkable paintings capture Cunningham’s inscrutable mind. Always striving to keep his creative process personal, he did not like to have sitters present, and preferred instead to sketch people he saw on the bus or in cafes. This bizarre behaviour did not escape Auerbach, who in his letter recalled:

The life and movement he infused in his paintings emanate not only from his own spontaneous talent, but also from his sincere interest in early modern and contemporary painting. And while the works of 1954–60 echo British post-war figurative painting, they also retain an individual quality in their explicit, slightly morbid themes. In Hillson’s words:

Once Cunningham left the RCA, he was invited to submit his work to the prestigious London Group, an association of modernist artists whose goal was to escape the restrictive standards of the Royal Academy. Cunningham exhibited his paintings with the London Group for two consecutive years, during which occasions his canvases were singled out by high-profile critics for their rough materiality and suggestive, if slightly gruesome, presence. Some viewers identified a connection between Cunningham’s disruptive brushstrokes and Francis Bacon’s bodily distortions, as well as Lucian Freud’s earnest engagement with complex subject matter. However, while Hillson suggested that Bacon and Freud were aware of Cunningham and his works, he never discussed his inspirations nor his process. Dempsey has said:

To explore Cunningham’s possible sites of inspirations, it is helpful to contextualise his work within the London art scene of the 1950s. Galleries and museums were quickly becoming cosmopolitan centres where American and European influences would meet and combine, confronting the problems of figuration and abstraction. Influential artists like Bacon would attempt to position themselves in between such dichotomies, looking to find alternative responses to these questions through a novel use of colour and form. Recounting his impressions upon seeing Cunningham’s paintings, Rothholz recognised in them a trace of Bacon’s unique vision:

In 1960, Cunningham had to move from his large studio in Battersea to a smaller one on Redcliff Road, located in a building owned by Cunningham’s close friend and fellow artist David Methuen Campbell. From this moment onwards, he reduced the scale of his paintings, eventually focusing more and more on watercolours and ink drawings. ‘I don’t know what happened’, says Hillson. ‘He suddenly broke away and wanted to paint and shut himself in his studio and worked and worked.’

The paintings’ coarseness, their dark palettes and grim subject matters were evidently a reflection of Cunningham’s own moods. ‘Thank god he had a terrific sense of humour,’ said Hillson, ‘because sometimes he was a pretty tough guy, as you see in his paintings. Well, he wasn’t like tortured or anything – he was pretty silent, he kept to himself, didn’t talk about himself at all.’ Yet, his quietness could not contain his constant desire to create. ‘I had never met anyone with such energy,’ Hillson continued. ‘Nothing phased him, you know. He just, if somebody gave him a space to fill, he could do the work in drawing, he could do everything. I never met anyone that talented. Seriously, he was always drawing. He had such enthusiasm for everything – he went quieter and quieter as he went on.’

Why this change occurred is unknown. However, in the 1960s Cunningham was still an active member of the London art world. In 1964, he was invited by the treasurer of the London Group to apply for a full membership. Remarkably and without ever explaining his choice, Cunningham declined. Perhaps he was intimidated by the complex politics of the art world, or possibly he believed his painting style was becoming dated, out of touch with the Minimalist and Conceptual experiments of the 1960s. Whatever the reason, this refusal signalled the beginning of Cunningham’s avoidance of the public art scene.

‘He could have made it, I think’, said Rothholz, ‘but he chose not to.’ Cunningham’s aversion to submitting his works to exhibitions was possibly justified by the paintings’ incredibly personal qualities. Perhaps, they represented projections of his complex inner world or extensions of his own mind, which he guarded with vigilance against any perceived intrusion. By 1967 he ceased entirely to show his work in public and refused to submit his canvases to any exhibition offered. Hillson recounted:

This did not mean Cunningham chose to abandon art altogether. He kept producing watercolours and was drawing constantly, obsessively sketching small portraits of commuters on the bus and illustrating with quick, nervous lines the urban scenes of everyday life. His studio, which he continued to visit practically every day, however, remained firmly closed to outsiders. His paintings, along with his vast collections of drawings and watercolours, were kept hidden, amassed in his spare room and facing the wall.

Dempsey is one of the few people who got to see his studio. ‘All of the windows were covered in brown paper’, he recalled. ‘And there were all of his paintings, covered, stacked, I mean, literally, hundreds of them.’ He remembered Cunningham’s secrecy and his reluctance to showing his art to anyone:

After retiring from the public art scene, Cunningham conducted a quiet, simple life, producing a massive collection of paintings, watercolours, ink and pencil drawings and even three-dimensional paper compositions until his passing in 2014. If Cunningham was a guarded, secretive person, his paintings remain incredibly emotive. Today, they are telling of an artist whose expressive visual vocabulary remained preoccupied with creative integrity, of a man who was entirely consumed by an inexorable urge to create.