Earl Cunningham's America
By Wendell Garrett, Virginia M. Mecklenburg and Carolyn Weekley (Collins, 2007, $45)

American folk artist Earl Cunningham (1893-1977) loved to paint the ocean  in such bright vivid colors as orange, yellow, pink, green and blue. Throughout his life, he completed some 400 paintings, most of which depict harbors, inlets, white-sailed schooners, shorebirds, and seaside dwellings and farms. His earliest works were created with five-and-dime paints on wood scavenged from the surf near the fisherman's shack that was his home on Stratton Island off Maine's Old Orchard Beach.

Since his death by suicide in 1977, Cunningham's primitive and detailed paintings have established his place as one of the premier American folk artists of the 20th century.

Earl Cunningham's America, a 143-page catalog published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and co-authored by folk-art expert Wendell Garrett; Smithsonian American Art Museum Curator Virginia M. Mecklenburg; and Carolyn Weekley, director of museums at Colonial Williamsburg, is a captivating and scholarly look at Cunningham's life and work. Filled with reproductions of more than 50 of his brightly colored paintings, the book presents Cunningham as a deeply complex folk modernist who used flat space and brilliant color in ways similar to Matisse and Van Gogh.

The catalog accompanies a recent exhibition at the American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Cunningham was something of a nomad during his early life. At age 13, he left his parents’ home in Edgecomb, Maine, to try his hand as a tinker and peddler. Before World War I, he sailed on giant coastal schooners that carried coal, ice, naval stores and lumber back and forth from Maine to the mid-Atlantic states and Florida. A licensed harbor and river pilot, he married piano teacher Iva Moses in 1915, and the two lived aboard a cabin cruiser. They later traveled by camper truck and spent their summers in Florida digging for Indian relics and opalized coral to sell to tourists back in Maine, where they eventually settled on a small farm.

Often described as a memory painter, Cunningham used schooners, Indians in canoes, covered bridges, horse-drawn carriages and other nostalgic elements in his paintings to evoke an "idyllic 19th-century world," Mecklenburg writes. These familiar objects appear repeatedly and are part of "a visual language Cunningham used to create his own myth of origin for America."

Faced with the rapidly changing world of the early 20th century, Cunningham responded with nostalgia, rarely using such contemporary elements as telegraph poles, automobiles and engine-driven boats in his paintings. Still, his imaginary landscapes are marvels of the unexpected and unlikely—pink flamingoes dot the Maine coast and Vikings and Seminole Indians navigate the same waterways side by side.

The titles of his paintings, which are filled with dramatic sunsets and dawns,  frequently bear the names of actual inlets, ports and harbors between Maine and Florida. Few of his paintings are dated.

In the late 1930s, Cunningham and his wife separated, and he headed south, eventually opening the Over Fork Gallery in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1949. There he displayed and sold crockery, toleware, old photographs, magazines and tools. His paintings were on display but were not for sale.

Wider recognition of Cunningham's work did not come until after his death, when collector Marilyn Logsdon Mennello —who had managed to befriend the distrusting and curmudgeonly artist in St. Augustine—acquired his paintings and displayed them in her Orlando home, which is now a gallery devoted to the artist.

"Ironically," Mecklenburg writes, "the renown he had sought for so long came less than a decade after he died."