John Cuneo's personal drawings in his sketchbooks are very different from the sketches of the other artists I have covered over the past two weeks. For me, Cuneo's sketches represent the best of his work-- they are more intelligent, more trenchant, more disturbing, and definitely more oblique than his finished work which is regularly showcased in magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Town & Country.
The smartest magazine will be the one that gives Cuneo a full page to free associate each month:
In my view, the strange brew of anthropomorphic animals in this sketch rivals the best work of Heinrich Kley.
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| Detail |
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| Fabulous snake (and the crocodile ain't bad either) |
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| A large rodent comes to the door, while Cuneo tries to work out whether that is a waitress or an actress holding that tray. |
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| Preliminary sketch for an Esquire cartoon on aged sperm donors |
The final two sketches today are ones that were previously posted on Cuneo's web site. I am pretending they qualify as "unpublished" because they are such superb examples of the dry wit in Cuneo's sketchbooks.
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| "Gosh" |
Paul Klee wrote that "drawing is taking a line for a walk." In his sketchbooks, Cuneo takes his line on a stroll through some mighty peculiar neighborhoods-- places where many fear to tread-- but the result is some of Cuneo's best work.
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