photo: Mark Olencki
After receiving degrees from Brevard College and the University of North Carolina, Cunningham spent the better part of a year in Lausanne, Switzerland. before coming to Spartanburg, SC where he worked as an architectural illustrator and a graphic designer.
In addition to his career in the commercial arts, Scott Cunningham has been deeply involved in the development and promotion of the visual arts in Spartanburg and the surrounding region.
He has served The Artists' Guild of Spartanburg in various capacities including President, Treasurer and guild representative to the United Arts Fund Task Force, The Guild of South Carolina Artists as Treasurer, and was involved in helping to start The Guild Gallery on Main in downtown Spartanburg and The Art of the Upstate Gallery at the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport.
Since August of 2000, he has scheduled and overseen curation of exhibitions for Spartanburg Art Museum (110 exhibits through 2/08).
The quest to find a balance between fine art, art education and commercial art has led him to his latest project, sparklenet.com and its affiliate websites, most notably theartistindex.com.
Beginning about 2005, Cunningham began to channel his creative energy into the production of fine art.
Cunningham confides, “I’m a people person. Even when my subject matter isn't human, I try to reflect some aspect of humanity in the work. I will explore relationships between trees as if they were people. A forest becomes a dance, or a party, or a street scene. Sometimes I interject the human element by the theme of man vs. nature, the impact of one on the other, the state of their coexistence and the lack of concern one may have for the other.”