Since the early 1980s and for the next 20 years, Keith Cunningham created thousands of small paintings on paper which all represent the same subject: a dreamlike, emotive representation of the sky. At times, the surface is covered by dark clouds of blue and purple, suffusing the image with cold, watery suggestions. At others, the sky is captured in the dramatic moments of sunrise or sunset, with striking brushstrokes of yellow and red. The majority of these works were painted in watercolours, but in many cases Cunningham experimented with coloured pencils and wax pastels.

The reduced size of these paintings and the repetitive nature of the series materialise the idiosyncratic obsessiveness which characterises Cunningham’s artistic practice. After abandoning oil painting in the early 1960s, he created thousands of small sized drawings in pen or pencil, capturing through intimate lens the bustling London life, and a set of original book covers for the publisher Peter Owens.

It is not known what inspired Cunningham to produce the Sky studies, nor what his painterly process was. Like the majority of his oeuvre, for many years the Skies have been kept hidden, eluding critics as well as gallerists and collectors. All that is known about them is the date, written in pencil on the verso of each painting. Beyond that, we must rely on what information can be extracted from the images themselves. It is in part due to the lack of factual evidence about this series that this text will be mainly concerned with a historical and theoretical analysis.

Some Sky works, in line with Cunningham’s drawn production, are landscapes, inventively reworking the English countryside complete with murky hills and roads conceptualised as straight graphic lines. Other scenes, however, are more transcendent, taking place entirely in the elevated realm of the atmosphere, composed of broad, diluted brushstrokes, pigments delicately combining into each other.

If such seemingly endless repetition of the same subject might appear dull and uninteresting, the multiple emotional and intellectual suggestions of these paintings are immediately apparent. Concerns with the concept of infinity and the impossibility of its representation, spiritual ideas of elevation and discursive considerations over painterly media are only some of the aspects that make this series so unique.

Despite its primordial majesty, the sky can of course be easily conceptualised through scientific language. An abstract yet active space, the sky becomes a site of fermenting movement in which galaxies collide and merge, stars come into existence or explode, black holes devour energy and big bangs create life from nothing. Such agitated planetary activity is, however, entirely absent in Cunningham’s paintings. This is not to say, however, that motion and life are absent from these works. On the contrary, these images are pervaded by a subterranean, alchemical energy that seems to take place on an atomic level, impossible to see but nevertheless perceivable. Precisely due to their apparent lack of movement, these paintings are animated by processes that are created by the encounter of pigment and hand.

The sky and its artistic representations have always possessed contradictory elements. Despite its infinity and ubiquity, it constantly conveys a quality of personal intimacy. Within its endless expanse humans have, since the beginning of time, undertaken quests in search of individual meaning, looking for answers regarding one’s place in the universe, one’s connection to the world and nature at large. In iconographical approaches, the sky in art signifies a longing to understand existence and a desire to connect to both an inner, authentic self, and to an indefinable, external truth of nature.

And yet, the sky is also a human site, which can be understood, controlled and replicated through perspectival and mathematical strategies. Its explorations, in art, allow artists and viewers to understand the properties of all things in nature. The sky’s porous boundaries come to life in Cunningham’s series of paintings, which enact nuanced transgressions of form, colour and content.

It would be tempting to conceptualise Cunningham’s Sky studies as rhetorical devices, ascribing them some sort of moralistic quality possibly engendered by the artist’s biographical events or emotional states. Traditionally, the sky has been associated with feelings of longing for freedom, needs of emotional escapism or spiritual elevation. This thesis might even be supported by the presence, in this series, of a small number of paintings which represent what is unmistakeably the Golgotha Hill, the site of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion according to the gospels. This appears to be one of Cunningham’s most favoured themes, having explored it at length in his drawn production. In these works, a soft hill immersed in a brightly red sky is populated by a rapidly sketched crowd, made entirely of short, quick black lines.

Is this an image of salvation, or one that simply explores colour relations within imaginative settings? The Three Crosses, which together seem to form a sort of architectonic composition, emit powerful rays of light which forcefully exit the borders of the images, escaping the limitation of the small paper surface. Reds, purples and light blues all melt, like stained glass panels, in the luminosity emanated by the crucified figures. The emotional and spiritual power of the biblical characters combines with the kinetic energy of the sky itself, creating a striking vision in which the luminosity of the sun and that of the dramatic violence of the Crucifixion merge into an individual, almost blinding blaze. It quickly emerges, then, that Cunningham’s Sky Studies cannot be reduced to a dull repetition of bland metaphysical composition.

By definition greater than anything else in nature, the sky has been conceptualised in infinite ways throughout human history across cultures and times. Countless stories, symbols, patterns and words have been created to convey the awe-inspiring dispersion of boundaries that is engendered by the sky. Limitless, unspeakably ancient yet persistently contemporary, the sky constitutes an unfathomable entity in which humans, through the mere act of looking, can rediscover a primordial sense of intimate belonging. The sublime vastness of the sky is both intuitively known by everyone and impossible to clearly define.

Painting the sky circumscribes all these meanings and suggestions, adding to them another complex intellectual layer, that of representation. By translating reality into image, artists initiate a process in which something is both lost and gained. Irrespective of their truthfulness to nature, images carry the unique, emotive mark that the hand of the individual, which transforms things from universal to singular. What’s more, images also always bear a tangible, temporal quality derived from the artificial modification of forms and colours through the artistic medium. Pinned down onto surfaces, images lose the timeless, eternal fluidity of natural entities. Continuous tension between what is and what has been, what was seen by the artist and what is perceived by the viewer, assumes compelling meanings when applied to the subject of the sky. Such inspirations have been explored in numerous instances throughout history, assuming their most influential configurations in the experiments of 19th century ‘weather’ painters and Romantic artists.

Painting the sky

The sky has always been a central element in art. In the western tradition, the celestial sphere was elevated by early Christian painters to the site of the divine, removed both metaphorically and literally from earthly matters. If, in medieval images, the sky remained isolated from the rest of the figuration to convey a sense of rarefied, immutable, ineffable transcendence, in the early modern period the sky became a perceptible space in which events could take place, a mirror of the tumultuous circumstances of earth. First void, then full, the sky remained a symbol, which could variously express not only the passage of time, or meteorological conditions, but also, more importantly, human moods and emotional dispositions.

The vaporous nature of the sky, understood to be made of intangible yet ubiquitous airy substances, was in the past intimately connected to the productive impulses of artists. The flow of airs and ether was believed to inspire (from the Latin ‘inspirare’, literally ‘to breathe in air’) artists with the ineffable substance of creativity. The importance of the sky in art, both as a source of inspiration and as a suitable subject to represent, subsisted in the 19th century. John Constable (1776 – 1837), the influential painter of the English countryside, who helped redefine landscape painting itself, was famously preoccupied with the representation of clouds.

They became, in his poetic, a discursive element which reflected the moods of the earth itself, exuding energy and purpose, and ascribing a layer of ulterior significance to the things seen in nature. Constable was fascinated by the contemporary developments in meteorology, and combined these scientific studies to his artistic interest for the emotive potentials of clouds in oil painting. Observing nature, he recorded different cloud formations and their movements, noting the direction of the wind, the time of day and the date. Such studies found their places in the dramatic renditions of his large landscapes, influencing the course of 19th century art.

A similar interest for the emotional meanings of the sky can easily be found in Cunningham’s paintings, especially in the eruptive reds and purples of the clouds covering the small, rectangular paper surfaces. Cunningham employed clouds as a means to explore tonality amid darkness: contrasting warm reds and bluish shadows, bright yellows and rich browns, he at times seemed to transform the intangible cloudy conformations into biomorphic shapes, following the free expansion of liquid pigments on paper. The discursive suggestions materialising from Cunningham’s use of water-based colours to represent water-based elements, additionally, must be acknowledged. In these paintings take place a form of spontaneous creativity that, through their very medium, transcends form and colour, allowing the expression of random, chance-based effects that are inherent to natural substances.

The many qualities that are peculiar to the medium of watercolour may seem limiting, if compared to other painting techniques such as oils or acrylics. It is a medium of fluidity, or nuance, even of hazard. Watercolours are essentially transparent and dry much more quickly than other pigments, thus not allowing artists to rework paintings at length. Brushstrokes that are too close to each other or accidentally superimpose will merge in varying degrees. The brushing technique, and in turn the trace of the hand of the artist, remain conspicuously visible in the finished product. Perhaps more than other techniques, watercolours require much advance planning, in order to reduce the complexities of nature into an economical language of form, line and colour and ensure both accuracy and emotional impact in representation of natural subjects.

If Constable’s watercolours emerged from a direct inspiration and investigation of nature, those of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) appear more powerful and immediate, conveying not only the formidable power of natural elements but also a troublesome evocation of human spirit. In his notebook of skies, which strongly recalls Cunningham’s series for the repetition of subjects and obsessive attention to details, watercolour techniques become supreme interpretations of emotive and spiritual moods. Unlike Constable, and more in tune with Cunningham’s creative process, Turner worked both from nature and from memory, drawing quickly to produce tiny yet powerful sketches.

The sky and the sublime

How, then, is it possible to encapsulate the infinity of the sky? A first focus on this subject initially originated in 17th century Dutch genre painting. Less than two centuries later, in an attempt to cope with the ineffable beauty of nature, British Romantic artists and poets conceived the concept of the sublime, defining it as a passionate sense of astonishment and abandonment within the forces of nature. Sublime experiences, whether in nature or in art, inspire awe and reverence, and above all an emotional understanding that transcends rational thought and words or language. For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective and the objective, of internal and external, of intellectual and material world. Emotions were allowed to overwhelm rationality when experiencing the wonders of creation. Soon, dramatic depictions of the sky were employed to convey such feelings.

The visionary poet and artist William Blake (1757 – 1827), for instance, rendered the sky with a peculiar intensity, both in colour and form similar to Cunningham’s experiments, albeit through different media. Blake’s quality of deep, troubled, fermenting spirituality emerging from his etchings seems difficult to reconcile with Cunningham’s disinterest for religious matters. And yet, they both attempted to visualise the tension between seen and unseen, limit and unlimitedness, through a focus on frames, edges and boundaries.

Both for British Romantic artists and for Cunningham, edges are not the site of self-containment, but that which signifies the abyss between what can be seen and what exceeds representation. They are spaces inhabited by the sublime. If form, colour, matter are all limitations that hinder poetic expression, the unlimited, on the other hand, is detached by these limitations, and finds beauty in indeterminacy, unlimitedness. Cunningham’s skyscapes then, are not flat expanses of physical distance but an open, penetrable and compelling space, dimensionally and intellectually profound, in which viewers are emotionally and spiritually immersed. The banality of quotidian things forcefully contrasts with the contemplative meanings of the sky as a retreat from the world itself, a philosophical mode of seclusion and intellectual absorption.

In this sense, the category of the sublime might be particularly productive to fully appreciate the power of Cunningham’s Sky images. Traditional landscape paintings tend to maintain the oppositional categories of form, light, colour. Even just viewing landscapes solidifies notions about distinctions of nature and culture, such as the different politics of rural and urban, the spiritual qualities of real and ideal, the worldly and the spiritual, the fantastical and the tangible. But Cunningham’s skyscapes seem to undo such oppositions. They are both transcendent and mundane, both immersive and truncated, both world into themselves and imaginative retreats. We both inhabit those spaces and imagine them. Their view is partial, truncated, obstructed, but also impossible to constrain, because they take place not only in the realm of the visible but also in that of our psychology.

These paintings constitute a threshold, both windows on colourful worlds and walls between what is real and what is imaginary. Mediating between these two opposed categories, the picture edges keep at a distance the content of the paintings themselves, keeping them out of reach, ensuring that they remain detached, psychologically separated. They produce a sense of separation between world and viewer, between vision and reality. These paintings construe the sky as an inaccessible object of desire, always seen but impossible to reach. The sky is continuously represented, and yet increasingly impossible to define. Its boundaries, reified by the edges of the small pieces of paper, become permeable, no more circumscribed by the flat surface but merging each image into the other, producing a vertiginously infinite figuration. Both whole and complete yet infinite and elusive, this figuration is constantly beyond the viewer’s grasp. By definition immaterial, the sky reproduced in these paintings moves past the worldly categories of language and form. It is a set of images that signifies the very inadequacy of representation itself. It is an exercise in the art of the invisible, which creates new worlds by way of reproducing ours.

Repetition in the Sky Studies

Among the many striking qualities of Cunningham’s Sky series is the continuous repetition of the same subject over more than three thousand sheets of paper. Seen as a whole collection, this incessant repetition creates a sense of rhythmic movement. The recurrence of recognisable patterns can build a tension, especially in those cases where there is no variation and only subtle details (light brushwork or colour nuances) appear to change.

What makes such a repetitive sequence of images so compelling? Cunningham combined a complex network of chance-based figuration with ancient yet influential ideas about the inherent creativity of nature itself. The result is a figuration which seem to contain, despite their repetitiveness, scenes that not only appropriate the concept that art is the mirror of nature, but contain an active, creative power in themselves.

In historical artistic practices, repetition was often used as a means to study or perfect forms, to become more proficient at panting or to investigate the effects of light over matter. For instance, the Impressionist painter Claude Monet famously produced, in the late 19th century, (1840 – 1926) a series of paintings known as Haystacks, in which the same subject, apparently mundane, is replicated countless times in order to analyse the mutable effects of light, atmosphere or weather at different moments of the day or of the season.

Since the inception of early 20th century western avantgardes, however, artists employed repetition as an intellectual device which merged with revolutionary art forms. Such radical conceptual change engendered a number of complex art historical implications, which questioned the validity of accepted norms such as originality and authenticity. In such discourses, critics generally identified an original (nature, reality, identity or concepts) which is subsequently repeated in artistic representations with varying degrees of success. In this sense, repetition acquires a new value as mimesis, a mirror or stand in for something else. Due to the diffusion of photography in the 19th century, the problems caused by the possibility of accurately and truthfully copying things through images were analysed by the philosopher Walter Benjamin in the seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). In this text Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction devalues the ‘aura’ of an art object, destabilising concepts of originality and artistry. Following his ideas, critics in the 20th century associated the repetition of similar objects or subjects in art to a lack of creativity, or to an absence of an ineffable sparkle of genius.

These attitudes, however, changed in 1968 when the influential French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published his monumental book Difference and Repetition. Analysing the history of philosophy, Deleuze showed that both difference and repetition have always been conceived as negative categories, which only exist in relation to other entities or kinds of knowledge. In rupture with this ideas, he reconceptualised them as categories in themselves, as active forces which produce new meanings, potentials and possibilities. Within such philosophical apparatus, Deleuze wanted to emphasise not the representation but rather the actualisation of differences themselves. This concept had enormous consequences in the field of art criticism. Each artwork can be understood as an event which does not repeat an original, but initiates an unfolding, ongoing multiplicities of significance, actualising becoming. In every repetition there is also always difference, and within this difference a world of plurality can be born.

Such considerations are particularly fruitful in the analysis of Cunningham’s Sky studies. The repetition of the same subject signifies to us not only the passage of time, endlessly progressing yet also immutable, eternal like the circles of life, but also the infinite possibility of new meanings and configurations. If, in spiritual contexts, repetition allude to the divine inner workings of nature, the infinitesimal elements that constitute the sky, the particles that compose the atmosphere, make it a fermenting, moveable entity, the realm of creation itself.

Cunningham’s images of the sky, just like miniscule atomical elements, seem to elude representation, existing in a networked reality in which identity seems to change shape every time it is seen. Each image becomes multiple when it intertwines with new contexts, when it is viewed in conjunction or juxtaposition with another. It becomes impossible to differentiate between each image, because at any moment they may seem to mutate into something else. Such epistemic gap constitutes the power of Cunningham’s Sky works. An infinitesimal moment of visual collapse, of spatial slippage, both embodies and originates the intellectual cogency of these paintings.