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.

Barbara Bradley’s brush was stilled on Friday when she was killed in a car accident at the age of 81.

Bradley, née Barbara Briggs, was a member of the Charles E. Cooper Studio, a highly influential commercial art and illustration studio prominent in the mid 20th Century.

The illustrators that Cooper attracted were among the best of the best; and in an era when the printing of color photographs had become inexpensive enough to be commonplace, used their clear, sharp, modern styles to entertain the the eye in a way photographs can’t.

Bradley was a shining example of this, applying her refined drawing style and keen color sense to delightfully fresh and lively illustrations for a variety of editorial and commercial accounts.

Bradley studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at Art Center before embarking on her career with Cooper in new York. She later returned to California and established herself as a freelancer.

She became an instructor, and eventually Director of illustration, at the Academy of Art University. In that role she became tremendously influential, passing on her extensive knowledge of illustration and technique to a broad cross section of new illustrators.

There is a tribute site, Thank You Barbara Bradley, which has an outline of her career, galleries of her work and a series of comments and tributes form her associates and students.

Leif Peng, who maintains the terrific blog Today’s Inspiration, which focuses on illustration from the period in which Bradley was most active, has written a particularly touching tribute to the influence she had on someone who never even met her in person. Peng also has previous posts on Bradley, Queen of the Perkies and Cutes and The 70’s, the 80’s… and the Academy, in which he posts additional examples of her work.

There was an article on Bradley in issue #21 of Illustration Magazine, part of a continuing series on the artists of the Charles E. Cooper Studio, which showcases some of the best examples I’ve seen of her illustrations.

In addition to her other awards, Bradley received the 2007 Outstanding Educator in the Arts Award from the Society of Illustrators.

A small portion of her teaching legacy was condensed into her book Drawing People: How to Portray the Clothed Figure.

[Thanks to James Gurney for passing on the notice]