GOOD INTENTIONS JOHN CUNEO’S 4
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I am a magazine illustrator and I’m fond of saying that I do my sketchbook drawings in between deadlines. But lately it’s probably more accurate to admit that I have been meeting my deadlines in between drawing in my sketchbook.
This reversal might have as much to do with the shrinking demand for my professional services as it does with my increasing urgency to get this stuff on paper.
There’s no justifying that urgency, by the way it’s not like the public is clamoring for more little ink and watercolor pictures of mermaids, muses, and middle aged men having octopus sex. But here we are.
I want to mention that I’m rarely entirely satisfied with how these drawings turn out. I believe I’m not alone here Jesus, I hope not (misery loving company and all that), but isn’t there always a little element of even the simplest sketch that all artists just know they could’ve done better if only they hadn’t sacrificed precision on the altar of spontaneity, or vice versa?
I’m convinced that what helps me cope with the lingering disappointment, and what fuels my compulsion to continue drawing, is the format of a sketchbook itself : no matter what manner of ungodly crime against draughtsmanship I’ve committed on that previous page, in a sketchbook there is always and immediately, a whole new page right after it. This new page is pure and white, unblemished and unsullied, virginal even. And for one cruel moment, it promises hope.
If I was an oil painter working on stretched canvas, I think I’d have succumbed to frustration long ago. But because it’s right there in front of me, I will, like a toothless man bobbing for apples, eagerly dive into a new sketchbook page. And then the next one and the one after that.
Partly it’s a purge, I guess, a chance to shower off the stink and start fresh, but also an opportunity to get better at this bewildering thing we do, what Peter Schjeldahl called “the timeless purpose and the impossibility of pictorial art: to reduce three dimensions to two.”
These are lofty and pretentious goals for a cartoonist (and it’s embarrassing to even admit such ambitions) but there is an OCD element to all of this as well — some of the drawings here have been done three or four times, with barely any distinctions between them, as part of a clinical and myopic determination to somehow improve on the near identical effort of the one before it. Sadly, I have no idea if the book you’re holding contains any evidence of this; I don’t know if I’m improving or what getting “better” even looks like.
In fact, out of self preservation, I even resist comparing the work here with the stuff in my previous books. Let’s face it: looking for some kind of artistic progress and not finding it would be a wound that wouldn’t heal. Who needs that kind of mess?
I know this is not the most compelling sales pitch. Nor is this the Artist’s Statement I’d intended to write. Maybe I just want to say that I’ve tried my best here… to get that on the record, before anybody starts pointing fingers. That this is the best I could manage in between deadlines. That I am responsible for the contents of this book and that these pictures don’t just draw themselves, dammit. 4
John
Cuneo, Woodstock, New York, August 2024
Country life. Breaking the pig.
Breann regrets inviting the cartoonist inside.
