As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven, for example, in which paradise resembled the Griffith Park Observatory and the dead were all depicted in profile because their creator felt unequal to the challenge of full faces. There was also a cigar box covered in gold-sprayed macaroni and a clay representation of the animals on Noah’s Ark – anything, in fact, that would challenge the painting of a placid white chicken that hung in a gilt frame on his parents’ wall.
If Cunningham moved on fairly rapidly from the visual arts, either sparing or denying us the fruits of a more fully formed talent, it wasn’t because the impulse to create had withered. Rather, it was that the experience of making material art had functioned as a temporary outlet, being less painful, less embarrassing – both emotions he ascribes to his young, sensitive self – than attempting to capture the world in words.
