John Cuneo has built a career out of drawing what most of us would prefer to keep to ourselves. For more than four decades, the Woodstock-based illustrator has been turning private compulsions into public images—ink-and-watercolor scenes that feel at once classical in technique and faintly illicit in spirit. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among others, but regardless of venue, the throughline is unmistakable: Cuneo is less interested in appearances than in what leaks out around the edges.
His figures—human, animal, and often some uneasy hybrid of the two—are caught mid-thought or mid-act, suspended in moments where decorum has already failed. There’s a long tradition behind this kind of satirical draftsmanship, from Hogarth to Daumier, but Cuneo’s sensibility is distinctly modern, rooted in the language of therapy, confession, and the low-grade anxiety of contemporary life. Desire, shame, vanity, boredom—his subjects wear these states plainly, sometimes literally, their bodies becoming vehicles for psychic weather.
Much of this imagery originates in Cuneo’s sketchbooks, which function less as preparatory tools than as a parallel body of work. These pages, filled without assignment or audience in mind, allow him to follow an idea wherever it leads, no matter how strange or uncomfortable. It’s here that his line feels most alive—probing, elastic, capable of toggling between caricature and something closer to empathy in the space of a few strokes. When these drawings make their way into magazines, they carry that rawness with them.
“Art Monkey” sits squarely in this lineage. The simian painter, perched before an easel, is an obvious stand-in, but not a flattering one. Cuneo collapses the distance between artist and subject, suggesting that the act of creation is driven less by lofty intention than by something more primitive—a mix of instinct, habit, and the need to externalize whatever is rattling around inside. The banana on the canvas reads as both joke and emblem, a motif as blunt as it is revealing.
As ever with Cuneo, the humor lands first. But it’s the aftertaste that lingers: the uneasy recognition that the line between refinement and impulse is thinner than we’d like to believe, and that making art—like everything else—starts from the same animal place.
This article appears in May 2026.
