Bold & Artful

In the early days of Sports Illustrated, when it was home to great sports writers, photographers and illustrators, its art director — the late Harvey Grut — commissioned an eight-page spread of Canada geese hunters from Robert M. Cunningham, an up-and-coming painter and illustrator. And so began a career that made Cunningham’s work famous in other magazines, on arts posters and on a series of U.S. postage stamps celebrating the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY. In 1998 he earned a place in the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. Now as a memorial to Grut, who lived at Noble Horizons with his partner, Robert Julien, for many years before his death, the NH gallery is presenting a small exhibition of Cunningham’s acrylic paintings. Included are sports pictures from the 1980s and ’90s as well as images from Eleuthra and even New Preston, near Cunningham’s home in Warren, where he lived until his death in 2010. What will strike you at Noble is the intense color of Cunningham’s palette: bright green and blue and yellow, stark white, slashes of crimson. In the Bahama paintings, these colors are laid in horizontal bands — sky, sea, sometimes land — behind figures such as a native fisherman in his boat. There is no shelter from the blazing, intense Caribbean light. The two pictures of the small shopping heart of New Preston are about antique buildings in stark light and shadow. No cars or people interfere with the careful compositions. Best, I think, are the handful of sports paintings. Cunningham’s bold strokes of color are here laid in smaller blunt, angled strokes that give momentum to pictures such as “Kayaking.” But in a pair of track paintings — “Two Men Jumping Hurdles” and “Time Runner”— the boldness is toned down, the runners given an impressionistic and gentle heroism. And do note the wonderful extra-dimensional touch Cunningham achieves by placing the time runner’s left, forward foot outside the picture plane. Nice. “Robert M. Cunningham” continues weekends at Noble Horizons’ main building through April 3. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.