A Free-Spirited--but Repetitive--Exhibition

Just inland from UC San Diego, where art steeped in critical dialogue is nurtured and sent out into the world, stands the Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art. Here, the untaught get their due. Pungent social commentary steps aside to make room for gentler, more accessible visions of the world, informed by the wisdom of everyday life.

Paintings by the late Earl Cunningham, now at the Mingei (4405 La Jolla Village Drive in University Towne Centre) through Sept. 10, reflect this unencumbered spirit. Firmly rooted in the direct observation of human and natural worlds, Cunningham’s art exudes a sincerity and childlike candor. The show, titled “His Carefree American World,” is, indeed, free of any tension or strife.

Men and women in his paintings act out their lives according to an assuring order. They bustle about with the industry of ants, bit players in broad, expansive landscapes. Boats of all varieties--canoes, Viking ships, regal sailing vessels--float by, never sending a ripple through the flat, still waters. Animals stand watch over the slow proceedings--quiet observers like Cunningham.

Cunningham, who was born in Maine in 1893, roamed through a series of occupations--”tinker,” automotive engineer, seaman, lapidary, chicken farmer--before settling down to run a curio shop and gallery in Florida in 1949. Despite the variety of his experiences, Cunningham paints with the eye of a career seaman, tenderly interlocking the shapes of land and water in painting after painting. His are nostalgic, generalized views--each quaint, domestic harbor seen from a uniform distance and slightly elevated perspective.

This sense of remoteness shifts attention from the actions taking place to the overall pattern of each scene. Typical of self-taught artists, Cunningham paints in a flat, emblematic style, rendering each subject from its most characteristic angle: the boats in profile, flowers head-on and buildings from a three-quarter view. Unencumbered by the laws of perspective and scale, the compositions instead adhere to an idiosyncratic logic, wherein sea gulls outsize Viking ships and flowers reach to the roof lines of nearby houses.

These whimsical inconsistencies, however, are not enough to save Cunningham’s compositions from being static and repetitive, especially when seen in such a large group. The sameness of the scenes is relieved only by Cunningham’s recklessly bold use of color. Water is more likely to be pink, muddy brown or salmon-colored than blue, and skies are equally defiant of chromatic convention. Striped, streaked and luminous, they rarely recede modestly into the background.

One continuous plane of gold defines both water and sky in “Seminole Everglades Playground.” A cluster of trees cast long, dark shadows that lay heavily across the rich gold and anchor it to the picture plane. In “Morning Rays Through the Carolina Hills,” Cunningham renders light as tangible, by suspending veils of mist between the hills.

A lighthearted tone prevails throughout Cunningham’s work, from the fanciful skies to the chocolate-brown clouds and purple buildings striped with yellow. Trees, flowers and plants cluster together in spunky rhythms, precursors to the more self-consciously naive visions of contemporary Chicago painter Roger Brown.

No dense webs of theory ensnare this work, and the artist’s innocence of the strategies and self-consciousness of the mainstream art world are refreshing. His work follows no clear evolutionary course--works here span the 1920s to his death in 1977--and he so resisted selling his work that he became known as the “Crusty Dragon.”

Floridians Marilyn and Michael Mennello managed to buy only one of Cunningham’s paintings before his death, but since then have collected 350 of the 450 that he claimed to have painted. This show, first presented at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and accompanied by a small catalogue, consists solely of work from their collection.