Any new collection of drawings from John Cuneo is a cause for celebration.
Cuneo's newest book from Fantagraphics, Not Waving But Drawing, contains the kind of brilliant, aching, trenchant work that makes Cuneo one of the best draftsmen around today.
Several current illustrators draw with a similar loose, ungainly line but when you drill down on their work, none of them are capable of drawing faces such as this...
...or coming up with the strange, troubled, scenarios that populate Cuneo's world...
Like Cuneo's previous work, the art in this new book is hilarious...
...and profane...
... and often totally indecipherable. Cuneo is definitely NSFW.
When I see Cuneo's work in top magazines such as The Atlantic or The New Yorker, I usually feel that he is much better than their editorial constraints permit him to be.
His best work is consistently his personal work, the type of drawings that are reproduced in books like this, for mature audiences.
I didn't get that that there's more than one artist like this. I thought Cuneo was the same artist who does the New Yorker covers. Thanks for explaining. I like his work.
ReplyDeleteJust ordered this. What can I say, this work shows the bravery of an artist who is willing to (or can't prevent) tear open the top of their head and pour it out on the page. It is a 'mans viewpoint' and there is nothing to apologize for. He is not alone obviously, there are some in the fine art world (Eric Fischl, Mark Greenwold), in the Juxtapose/Hi-Fructose world (Robert Williams), which leads to Robert Crumb, and S. Clay Wilson and other Zap progeny. Perhaps some of my examples straddle political correctness lines, 'do they have sufficient self-awareness and/or irony or are they part of the problem'. (Mel Ramos and Tom Wesselman?) Reflecting truth is nothing to apologize for.
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