John Cuneo’s illustration clients include Esquire, Rolling Stone Mother Jones, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and quite possibly every other high-end glossy magazine on the planet.

His wonderfully lose, sketch-like pen drawings, enlivened with deft applications of watercolor, are a visual treat.

Cuneo is a wonderful caricaturist, capturing the essence of his subject with a few seemingly casual lines an deceptively simple watercolor washes. His ink lines seem to squiggle and jump across the page, almost as if making an image was a byproduct of their travel.

His watercolor tones similarly have a feeling of light, almost incidental additions to the drawings, but if you slow down and examine them, they are applied with a keen sense of form and contrast.

Like many artists, Cuneo likes to sketch and paint amusing subjects that are not part of any project or assignment, simply for his own enjoyment. Also like many artists, some of these images are off-color, sexually frank and sometimes even disturbing. Artists like to let their demons and muses alike come out and dance on the paper.

Unlike most artists, Cuneo allowed some friends, illustrators Tim Bower and Joe Ciardiello, talk him into showing some of these not-for publication drawings to a publisher, and the result is a delightfully naughty and refreshingly politically incorrect collection called nEuROTIC (more details here).

You can see some of these drawings in the Personal section of his web site, which is prefaced with an “inappropriate for children and may be offensive to some” style advisory.

His site also contains some (not enough!) of his professional illustration work, divided into sections for People and Situations, along with a section of abandoned drawings called RIP.

There is an additional portfolio of his work on illoz.

Note: Some of the images on the sites linked here are NSFW and inappropriate for children.